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Sermon – Christmas – 1844

Christmas in Early America

In America’s early years, the celebration of Christmas was a subject of heated debate among Christians, and the lines between the opposing views were drawn largely according to church affiliation. Those from the High Church (e.g., Anglicans, Catholics, Episcopalians, etc., which practiced a more formal tradition of worship), tended to support Christmas celebrations, while those from the Low Church (e.g., Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, etc., which practiced a more informal mode of worship), tended to oppose that celebration.

The views of the two sides had largely been shaped by their own history in Europe. For example, the High Church, which had been the church of Europe for centuries before the first colonists came to America, celebrated Christmas. However, those from the Low Church had been persecuted by the High Church, particularly by the Catholic and Anglican Church, so the Low Church saw no reason that they should copy the festival of those that had so harshly persecuted them.

Interestingly, when European colonists came to America, those affiliated with the High Churches tended to settle in southern colonies such as Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, while colonists from the Low Churches more frequently settled in northern colonies such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the Virginia colony- affiliated with the Anglican Church- began celebrating Christmas from its very beginnings under Governor John Smith, but the Pilgrims and Puritans of Massachusetts- affiliated with the Congregational Church- refused to celebrate that day. In fact, their opposition to Christmas was so strong that for almost two centuries in Massachusetts, Christmas celebrations were not only discouraged but even forbidden by law.

The first state to make Christmas a state holiday was Louisiana (a southern state with a Catholic tradition) in 1837- a time when the resistance to Christmas in the north was just beginning to weaken. By the 1840s and 1850s, many more states began recognizing the holiday, and by 1870, Christmas celebrations had become so accepted that Christmas was even recognized by the federal government as a holiday.

The Christmas Sermon below was delivered in 1844- a time when the celebration was still a subject of hot debate among Christians across the nation. Preached by Robert Hallam, rector of St. James Episcopal Church in Connecticut (an area of the country still very resistant to recognitions of Christmas), the sermon is an apologetic in favor of Christmas celebrations. It addresses the arguments against celebrating Christmas and presents arguments in favor of such celebrations.

CHRISTIAN HOLY-DAYS:

SERMON

Preached In

St. James’ Church, New-
London;

Christmas- Day, 1844,

By Robert A. Hallam, Rector.

“I went with the multitude, and brought them forth into the house of God; in the voice of praise and thanksgiving, among such as keep holy-day.”- Psalm xlii: 4. 5. (Psalter.)

“To them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saint, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours:- Grace be unto you, and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.”- 1 Cor. 1: 1-3.

“He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it.”-Romans, xiv:6

The Apostle speaks here of the Jewish holy-days. By the abrogation of the Law these had fallen from their ancient dignity of things obligatory, into the humbler class of things indifferent. Their observance was no longer binding upon the conscience of any man. Expediency was the highest sanction it could claim. Liberty of opinion produced its usual result of diversity of judgment and intolerance.

Jewish Christians were dealt with indulgently, and allowed without hindrance or molestation to persevere in paying a sacred regard to those annual seasons, which the history of their nation, the example of their forefathers, and the habits of their own former lives had invested with so many venerable and endearing associations.- This was simple permission however. Not even Christian Jews were required to observe Mosaic holy days. And Christian Gentiles were decidedly dissuaded from it. Their adoption of the practice might seem to indicate obligation, represent it as a permanent law and institution of Christianity, and denote a dangerous learning to formality and superstition. Even in the case of the Jews the license was jealously watched and carefully guarded. Every disposition to elevate liberty into obligation, to magnify their privilege into a duty, to enforce conformity among themselves, still more to exact if of the Gentiles, was immediately noticed and repressed.

“Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years,” writes St. Paul to the Galatian Christians in a tone of solemn remonstrance and alarm, “I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain.” Of this freedom variety of opinion and usage was the natural fruit. Most Jews regarded the day; perhaps a few Gentiles. Some Jews disregarded the day; and the great body of the Gentiles. The difference was perfectly allowable and innocent, and ought to have created no disturbance of confidence or interruption of harmony. But the spirit of man is naturally prone to be uncharitable and dictatorial. He is not content with liberty, he aims at dominion. His own judgment is the infallible standard of truth, his own practice the unquestionable rule of rectitude. He would fain be a pope and a despot, who decisions are not to be questioned, whose will is not to be contravened, whose conclusion is a Procrustean test, not only to measure but to coerce.

The Christians of Apostolic times were not satisfied to differ amicable in things intrinsically indifferent. Conscience must needs be enlisted on the side of their respective views; and then the more conscientious they were, the most intolerance they grew. Alienation and distrust, party spirit and proselytism, mutual denunciations, bickerings and criminations were the melancholy consequence.

The Gentile was not a Christian because he did not keep the Passover; the Jew was not a Christian because he did. The Apostle saw and lamented the causeless and injurious strife. This fourteenth chapter of the epistle to the Romans, as well as several chapters in his first epistle to the Corinthians, is devoted to an examination of the dispute about this and kindred topics, with a view to settle the questions that had given rise to it upon their real merits, and allay the unholy heat it had generated. “Let no man,” he writes, “judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath days,”- that is, of the old seventh day Sabbath, which, under the new economy had given place to the Lord’s day of the first,–“which,” says he, “are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.” And again, “One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it.” The diversity is lawful and harmless. Observance or nonobservance is perfectly optional. The celebration of the day, with an enlightened, pious and devout endeavor to make it subservient to the promotion of the honor of God and the welfare of the soul, is a truly Christian service, such as Christians may fitly and profitably render; and such is acceptable to the Lord and redounds to his honor. And the refusal to celebrate the day, if it be grounded upon an honest conviction of its inutility and a holy fear of its perversion to sensual or superstitious purposes, it equally innocent and commendable, a Christian service also, and offering pleasing to God and conducive to his glory. Let not him that regardeth the day, despise him that regardeth it not; and let not him that doth not regard the day, judge him that regardeth it: for God hath received him.

At an early period of the Christian era-how early we cannot precisely determine, certainly very early, in days bordering very closely upon the times of the Apostles, if not retreating into them-a system of fast and festival commemorative of the leading events of the life of Jesus Christ, grew up, which in its relationship to Christianity, and to the duty of Christ’s disciples, is, in many important respects, parallel to the Christian retention and adoption of the Mosaic holy-days. Like it, it can claim no divine authority; for it is enjoined by no precept of the New Testament, and can shew no clear proof of having originated in any suggestion of Christ, or in the example of his Apostles. It can urge nothing beyond probability- a probability of the exact degree of which men, with their existing prepossessions, can hardly judge candidly and impartially- that it had primarily a more honorable beginning than individual fancy; though it soon acquired an ecclesiastical approval and sanction. It was a natural fruit, as it seems to us at least who regard the day, of religious impulses and reverential sentiments, of feelings deeply seated in the constitution of man and ever craving opportunity of outward expression, of the very same sensibilities which have led men of all countries and ages to regard with a peculiar sacredness and veneration places and days signalized by important events, to mark them by permanent monuments and periodical observances. It is the religious memory embodied and made visible; just as the patriotic memory is, in the noble shaft that graves the heights of Charlestown, or in the festivities that mark the anniversary of the day that gave birth to our national independence. It is the symbol of an inward sentiment strong in the texture of humanity, indelible and universal, which vehemently demands utterance and manifestation, and will not be denied it in some form without a violence that injures the fabric. That this system began, at least almost as soon as the Christian Church was established, is manifest from the fact of its universal and consentaneous observance in all parts of that Church, however widely separated and however differing in many respects, from the earliest times of which ecclesiastical historians give us any account, and of its uninterrupted continuance in all its branches till within three centuries past. Even now, it is retained by a vast majority of those who bear the Christian name, as well as Reformed as Romanist, Greek, or Oriental, whether Episcopal or non-Episcopal in their constitution, liturgical or extemporary in their worship. The exception is confined, as the preacher believes, to those bodies of Christians in Great Britain and this country, whose forms of government are nonprelatic, and of worship, unwritten. Certainly then, this system may claim to rank among those antiquities of the Gospel, whereof the memory of man and the testimony of history runneth not to the contrary; and can make good to itself that celebrated canon, the “quod semper, ubique, ab omnibus,” the always, everywhere, by all, of Vincent of Lerins.I said above, this system is a natural growth of the human mind. I believe it would have formed part of the costume of an historical religion, of a religion founded on historic facts, under any circumstances. But it was peculiarly natural under the actual circumstances. Jew and Gentile united in the Church of Christ, had each been educated under an annual series of holy-days; that of the former, accommodated by God to what I have described above as a want of our nature; that of the latter, devised by man to satisfy and appease it. How natural how happy, that the new religion in whose common bosom their ancient feud and distinction were to cease, in its rich store of solemn and interesting histories, should afford materials out of which to frame a new and common series, to occupy the place of the obsolete observances of the once, and of the impure trivial ceremonies of the other.

Among the inconsiderate aspersions thrown by those who do not regard the day upon their Christian brethren who do, is the charge that the practice is pagan, and was adopted in accommodation to the customs of the heathen, as a means of conciliation, and with a view of rendering the transition to Christianity more gentle and palatable. I am not aware that the charge is anything better than a surmise, or can claim in its support one particle of historical evidence. But I am not careful to deny it. I am perfectly willing that it should be true. Let it be, that our Christian holy-days are an imitation of heathen festivals. I see in the fact nothing but a proof of the singular wisdom and candor of the primitive Christians, who could see and acknowledge what was good in a corrupt religion, gracefully adopt it, and use it as a means to facilitate the success of the truth. The alleged coincidence of the principal holy-days of the Church with corresponding festivals of heathenism, whether real or imaginary, designed or accidental, will be no disparagement of them with men of sense and impartiality. It leaved the real question at issue entirely unaffected-are they innocent? Are they salutary?

Equally ungenerous and irrelevant is it to call the holy-day system Romish, a remnant of Popery. True, the Church of Rome holds the Christian holy-days sacred. So does the Sabbath, the Bible and the Sacraments. True wisdom consists in “taking forth the precious from the vile.” Candor will be careful to discriminate, and not to condemn and reject the good and harmless things of an evil system. They who follow in the steps of the English Reformers, suppose, that in a clearer perception of this principle that was enjoyed by most of their fellow laborers in the work of the Reformation, consisted the especial advantage and honor of those venerated men. But the holy-day system is in truth much older than Popery. It is the common possession of Papist and Protestant, inherited from a day older than either. It flourished at a period when the Bishop of Rome, so far from assuming that unlawful title to himself, was reproving his brother of Constantinople, for daring to arrogate the dignity of universal bishop; and before that monstrous fabric of falsehood and corruption, which sprung from and in turn supported the Papal supremacy, had so much as received its foundation. It is not to be disposed of by an appeal to popular odium. It must rest upon its intrinsic expediency and worth. It was neither originated by Rome, nor can it be disparaged by her adoption.

We rest then the claims of this festival, and of the system into which it enters, and of the system into which it enters, simply upon the plea of a presumed utility.

In support of this plea, we allege, first, the nature of man, so constituted, that he instinctively seeks to reveal in outwards expressions of an appropriate and significant description the inward feelings that occupy and engage him, and finds in such manifestation not only a relief, but the aliment and support, of the emotion that prompts them. This propensity discloses itself in the universal fondness for monuments and commemorative rites, which has always and does everywhere characterize mankind. And all experience proves the efficacy of such memory of the facts they represent, preserving a fresh and lively sense of them in men’s minds, giving stability to the principles embodied in the, permanency to the enthusiasm which they tend to inspire, and perpetuity to their practical influence.

We adduce, also, its early adoption by the Church of Christ, as evidence that this very want impulse were actually felt, obeyed, and Christianized by an incorporation into the service of God, before the Bride of the Redeemer had declined from the fervor of her “first love,” or departed from her primal purity and fidelity.

We add the testimony of our own experience and observation. We say with the Psalmist, “As we have heard so have we seen in the city of our God.”We have, as we trust, ourselves been made holier and happier by its operation. We have witnessed, as we think, its influence upon others, in helping to make them holier and happier. Its whole tendency seems to us benign and profitable. It arrays the Church “in a raiment of needle work,” “a clothing of wrought gold,” a fit apparel for her presentation to the Kind, a costume that makes her venerable and lovely in the yes of her children. Whatever tends to render religion beautiful and attractive, to call the attention of men to her, to awaken their interest in her, is deserving of the regard of her friends. An attire of comeliness is not to be despised, if it do but serve to obtain for her that notice, which may lead to the perception and appreciation of her more solid and substantial charms. Rome has bedizened her in the finery of a courtesan; the fear of Rome may sometimes have reduced her too nearly to a state of nudity.

As a means awaking interest, and calling forth a spirit of inquiry in the young, the holy-day system is highly useful. This happy effect Scripture expressly ascribes to the Mosaic festivals:-it is not less true of the Christian:-“and it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, what mean ye by this service? That ye shall say, it is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses.” The simple questions of a child about the evergreen wreaths that now adorn our temples, may afford a particularly happy and favorable opportunity for communicating to it a knowledge of the facts and truths of Christianity. Instruction so communicated, in answer to voluntary inquiry, comes with far greater effect, than that which comes unsought to passive, perhaps reluctant, minds. Answer your children’s questions then. Perhaps the result of some such question and answer may lead you to bless God for Christmas, and for this Christmas.

The holy-day system moreover provides a series of profitable and interesting themes for public instruction. It brings into an annual review the principal incidents in the life of Christ, the leading features of the great work by which he wrought out our redemption. It presents them in their order and connexion, and displays the successive contribution of each to the perfect whole. Such a system is replete with instruction, instinct with doctrine and with duty. It involves all that a Christian ought to believe and to do to his souls health. It is a great safeguard against partial teaching. It secures an annual survey of the whole field of the gospel. It checks the tendency of ministers to have pet topics and doctrines. Even if the pulpit be silent, the desk must make its annual proclamation of the whole counsel of God. A people among whom this system is developed with any tolerable degree of ability and fidelity, may parish; but it cannot be that they shall be “destroyed for lack of knowledge.” I speak warmly, for I feel warmly. I know that no generous mind will be displeased at the spontaneous movements of an honest but not uncharitable enthusiasm.

I trust then, sufficient reason has been shown, why, in the celebration of this festival, and of that round of holy-day which in their orderly succession make up that zodiac of heavenly signs through which she delights to take her yearly circuit, our church is not justly liable to any charge of superstition, of adding to the word of God, of Popery, or of dogmatism. She ranks it no higher than a municipal regulation, recommended to her by the ancient and general practice of the Church Catholic, and by her own experience of pleasure and profit in its use. She rests her observance of it, upon no divine law or intrinsic obligation, but simply upon expediency and ecclesiastical precept. It is but a private way she has of endeavoring to “edify herself in love,” and “build up her children in their most holy faith.” She dictates to none; she reproaches none. Thus have I sought to “give an answer to every man that asketh a reason” of this peculiarity of our practice, “with meekness and fear;” and to make it appear not incredible at least to any, that “he that regardeth the day” may “regard it unto the Lord;” and unseemly in “him that regardeth it not” to judge severely “him that regardeth it.”

But let us not forget that the text has a reverse side. It is also written, “He that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it.” Godliness then, will consist with a disregard of the day. Let us then be careful never to charge those who neglect to observe the day, with a breach of the divine law, or the omission of an essential means of spiritual edification and improvement. They do at the utmost but forego a source of religious improvement and strength which we retain and price, the want of which is compensated to them, it may be, by other arrangements of their own, Certain it is, that without them, they do attain a measure of Christian excellence, activity and usefulness, which should provoke us only to praise and emulation. Let us not conclude, that, because they have not our way, they have no way of keeping in mind the incarnation and other facts in the history of redemption, of meditating upon them, and making them “profitable for doctrine and instruction in righteousness.” Let not “him that regardeth the day” grow arrogant, and despise “him that regardeth it not.” Not even if we are assailed with ignorant misrepresentation and rude invective, let us be driven out of our calmness and charity. Nay, my dear brethren, let us never forget that we are disciple of One, “who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; who, when he suffered, threatened not; but committed himself to Him who judgeth righteously. “Render not evil for evil, nor railing for railing, but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.”

We are assembled this day to celebrate the nativity of the Son of God. The theme is one full of wonder, of instruction, and of comfort.

It commends Christ to us as a perfect Savior. As a Redeemer. We need one who can suffer in our stead; one who can make a satisfaction to divine justice; one who can be a “mediator between God and man, a days-man betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both,” This qualification the Son of God acquired by his assumption of flesh. This enabled him to die, to die a penal death, and by his death, render our pardon practicable, righteous, safe and credible. Hence “it is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation,” that Christ is “able to save.” Are you weary and bowed down with burden of sin? Go to Him: he can, he will “give you rest.”

As an example. By his human life, he became the model of humanity; a display of what our nature should be, a demonstration of what our nature may be. How inspiriting is this exhibition! Who has not felt the force and value of a pure and lovely example? Christ has gone before us in our walks, in our labors, in our trials, in our sufferings. Wheresoever we are, we may carry with us in the mirror of our minds, an image of “the man Christ Jesus;” and fashion and attire our life after the pattern of its perfect simplicity, propriety and beauty.

As a Head and Champion. His assumption of man’s nature at once proved its dignity and augmented it. It teaches us to think highly of ourselves, not morally or spiritually, but as to the constitution and destiny of man, and of ourselves as man. “God hath made us a little lower than the angels, to crown us with glory and honor.” Therefore “the Lord from heaven” stooped to be one of us, and to save us. He became “the second Adam,” the new Head of humanity; and took it into a close and eternal union with himself, and made it sharer of his own dignity. As he died because we die, so he rose that we might rise, and was glorified that we might share his glory. “As our forerunner, he hath for us entered” heaven; and “he ever liveth to make intercession for us”. What a demonstration of the value of our souls! What en encouragement to seek their salvation!

As a Friend and Helper. His human nature has gone up with him on high. His human memories and sympathies survive, and abide forever. He sees us, and with interest, in all our earthly troubles, in all our conflicts with unbelief, in all our struggles after holiness. He come to us, to enliven, refresh, strengthen, and reclaim us. “We have not an High Priest, that cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities;” or that will look idly upon them. Wherefore “lift up the hands that hang down, and the feeble knees.””Come boldly to a throne of grace to find mercy and grace to help in time of need.”

Col II 16:17

The author is aware that some may be disposed to rest the claims of the Church’s holy-day system on higher grounds that those of utility and ecclesiastical appointment; and that by such his citation of Vincent’s rule may be quoted against him. The consent of the Church is of use to elucidate and confirm doctrines and duties of which the New Testament gives intimation; but it cannot clothe with obligation anything that lacks this foundation. The Church can make an observance obligatory on its members, by that “power to decree rites and ceremonies,” (Art. XX) which is inherent in her as a society, and especially as a society divine; but nothing short of Scripture can make any observance binding on the Church. “Whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby,” says Art. VI., “is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” Still the antiquity and universality of the usage are a strong testimony in its favor; and the common judgment and feeling of Christendom, is certainly a proof of its expediency, and of the wisdom of our Church in retaining it, not easily set aside. And this, with the other considerations tending to the same conclusion exhibited in the discourse, forms the ground of deference here taken.

When the author was a student in Yale College, a professor in that institution delivered a lecture in support of this theory; in which he attempted to show that the birth of Jesus Christ did not occur on the 25th of December, and that that day had been selected for its commemoration in conformity to the Roman Saturnalia. He happened to choose Christmas day for its delivery; but the students mindful of the holiday, if not of the holy-day, left him to an empty lecture room, and compelled him to defer it to another week. Hooker disposes of this supposition effectually in a few words. But the discourse maintains that its truth or falsehood if perfectly immaterial. The blow, like multitudes of others aimed at the Episcopal Church, falls harmless, because bestowed upon a shadow. A Churchman’s answer is comprised in two words. Who cares?

Jer. xv: 19

Rev ii:4

Ps. xlviii: 8

Ps. xlv: 13,14

“Well to celebrate these religious and sacred days, is to spend the flower of our time happily. They are the splendor and outward dignity of our religion, forcible witnesses of ancient truth, provocations to the exercise of all piety, shadows or our endless felicity in heaven, on earth everlasting records and memorials, wherein they which cannot be drawn to hearken to what we teach, may only by looking upon what we do, in a measure read whatsoever we believe.” – Hooker, Eccl. Pol. B. V. lxxi. 11.

“She on the hills, which wantonly allureth all, in hope to be by her preferred, hath kissed so long her painted shines, for her reward. She, in the valley, is so shy of dressing, that her hair doth lie about her ears. While she avoids her neighbors pride, she wholly goes on th’ other side and nothing wears. But dearest mother, (what those miss,) the mean, they praise and glory is; and long may be.” – George Herbert

Ex. xii:26,27. See also Ex. xiii: 14,15; Josh. iv:6,7:21-24; Ps. lxxxviii:5-8.

Hos. iv:6

“The way before us lies distinct with signs- through which, in fixed career, as through a zodiac, moves the ritual year of England’s Church.”- Wordsworth

Eph. iv:16

Jude, 20

1 Pet. Iii:15

2 Tim iii:16

1 Pet. ii:23

1 Pet. iii:9

1 Tim. ii:5

Job ix: 33

Ps. viii:5

1 Cor. xv: 45-49

Heb. vi:20

Heb. vii:25

Heb. iv: 15

Heb. xii: 12

Heb. iv:16

* Originally published: Dec. 21, 2016.

Sermon – Christmas – 1843

P. H. Greenleaf preached this sermon on Christmas Day, which was published in 1843.

THE CHRISTMAS FESTIVAL.

SERMON,

DELIVERED ON THE

EVENING OF CHRISTMAS DAY,

SAINT JOHN’S CHURCH,

CHARLESTOWN.

By P. H. GREENLEAF,
RECTOR OF THE CHURCH.

“By festival solemnities and set days, we dedicate and sanctify to God the memory of his benefits, lest unthankful forgetfulness thereof should creep upon us in course of time.”

Augustine De Civit: Dei 16:4.

This sermon, prepared in the ordinary course of parochial duty, was not originally intended for publication. But some strictures upon the Church for her observance of the Christmas Festival having been recently made, it is now published, in accordance with the wishes of some, who judge that its circulation may be useful, and to whose judgment the author feels bound to defer.

Almighty God, who hast given us thy only begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin; grant that we, being regenerate and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit, through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

SERMON.Isaiah, LX. 13.

THE GLORY OF LEBANON SHALL COME UNTO THEE, THE FIR-TREE, THE PINE-TREE, AND THE BOX, TOGETHER, TO BEAUTIFY THE PLACE OF MY SANCTUARY; AND I WILL MAKE THE PLACE OF MY FEET GLORIOUS.

These are the beautiful prophetic emblems of the glory and the eternity of Christ’s kingdom.

It was no new thing thus to shadow forth the coming and the kingdom of the Redeemer. The ancient prophecies, looking onward to his advent, declare, “Behold the man, whose name is the Branch;” ¹ it shall be “beautiful and glorious;” ² “a Rod shall come out of the stem of Jesse,” ³ and “a Branch shall grow out of his roots.” His Church is represented as a “choice vine,” ⁴ and he whose hope the Lord is, as “a tree, whose leaf shall be ever green.” ⁵ It was predicted, that the Messiah should make the “wilderness to blossom as the rose;” ⁶ and that the cedar and the myrtle should spring up “in the solitary place,” ⁷ and the brier and the thorn pass forever away. ⁸ The scenery of the earth gave the prophets of God beautiful imagery, in which to clothe their predictions, and by which the faith of coming generations should be confirmed.

Hence, when the evangelical Prophet is opening to future faith disclosures of the ultimate triumph of the gospel, and the eternity and glory of the Christian Church, he employs, in the language of our text, the illustrative imagery of the material world. As though he had said, “amid those changes in human affairs, represented by the succession of the seasons,–when other institutions and religions have, like summer flowers, faded and gone,–when, amid the desolations of earth, all other vitality shall seem destroyed, the Kingdom and Church of the Redeemer shall still survive; its ministry and sacraments, its faith and gospel, shall have a visible existence; and, like the unchanging verdure of the fir, and the pine, and the box, shall continue to beautify the sanctuary, and make the place of his feet glorious, until his coming again.”

And, still, the same beautiful emblems are employed to shadow forth the same truths. Annually, at the birth-time of Jesus, when we specially commemorate the coming, the glory, and the eternity of his Church and kingdom, we perceive a peculiar propriety in bringing from their wintry abode these wreaths, in their unfading beauty and their unchanging verdure, that they may (as in prophetic days) testify of the Messiah. Fit emblems of eternal life! This day they entwine Christian altars, visible tokens of our undying hopes. Fit representatives of perpetuity! They show forth the eternity of the gospel faith in the gospel-church. And as such, as fitting emblems of truth, dear to Christian faith,–truths, we would consecrate in the memory of ourselves and our children, we bring the cedar, which is “the glory of Lebanon, and the fir-tree, and the pine-tree, and the box, to beautify the sanctuary, and make the place of his feet glorious;” because, on this day was born, “in the city of David, a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.” ⁹

Nor are we solitary in this festival commemoration. To-day, the Christian world presents the sublime spectacle of one vast cloud of incense ascending from earth to heaven. Men of every clime, and every language, and every tongue,–men differing widely in opinion, in interest, in intellect and position, do homage to the Saviour. Wars cease. Not an hostile weapon is raised this day in Christendom. Even enemies suspend their feuds, and, whatever of unholy strife burns and rages in the bosom of wickedness and the depths of sin, the surface, at least, is calm; and to-day, there is “peace on the earth.” What but the power of the gospel, and the energy of its life-giving principles, could bring together so many discordant elements, and send up, at once, toward heaven, the homage of the earth. Nay, think not,

“Though men were none,
That heaven would want spectators, God want praise;
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
All these with ceaseless praise his works behold
Both day and night.” ¹⁰

And these ‘glad voices of the sky,’ which sang in Judea of old, still chant “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men.”

The incarnation of Jesus, and the glory of his kingdom, are still the wonderful themes, into which “angels desire to look,” ¹¹ and are not able. Redeeming love causes ¹² joy in heaven, as well as upon the earth, and no theme more stirs the deep fountains of gladness among all the servants of God. And, therefore it is, that we keep this festival season. We would give one day to its distinct and joyful remembrance. We would connect it with our holiest hopes, our best affections, our most endearing and time-honored associations. And, therefore, our families are gathered,–affectionate greetings interchanged,–in the sanctuary, anthems and glad voices swell the notes of praise,–near and dear ones surround us,–the absent, too, are remembered, and the day is linked with family gathering and kindred love.

Let it not be supposed, that we attach an undue importance to this festival, or are disposed to revive or continue its superstitious observance. Its antiquity might prove the piety of our fathers; but unless we could show its practical utility, unless we had some important truth to commemorate, some salutary influences to be sent forth in its observance, we would not ask it to be preserved, nor could we expect it would retain such hold upon the public mind as to be of any real value in the subserving of truth.

We do not profess to be of those philosophers, who affect to despise “subsidiaries in religion,” [as though men could go where these are not,] and who would live independent of external influences. On the contrary, such is our nature, so are we constituted, as that we are incessantly acted upon by the men and things which surround us. Hence, from the time when the morning stars sang together for joy, ¹³ and angels chanted the glad tidings of salvation, music and voice have been employed to awaken devotional sentiment and enkindle piety. And not only eloquence and song, but painting, and architecture, have lent their aid to awaken pious feelings, and produce, as well as increase, devotional sentiment. Hearts, hard and perverse, insensible to argument and reason, are sometimes softened and swayed by the influence of sensible objects and sounds. And the power of these influences you cannot measure. They are not confined to a single spot, or a single mind. They spread on every side, like the undulations of the smitten water. They reach those who never saw or heard them. They extend their impressions, circle after circle, to distant generations, “as the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake.”

To such influences, we would give a direction; we would address the eye as well as the ear; we would employ these subsidiaries in the preservation of truth, and to promote and cultivate the practice of piety. And, therefore, because we judge that the festival and its attending circumstances present truth, send forth healthy religious influences, produce good affections, and promote godliness, we retain it; and only while it answers the end of its institution, would we observe it.

Our festival commemorates the incarnation of God for the salvation of men. Can you select an event more wonderful than this,–one fraught with richer blessings,–one better deserving our commemoration?

Consider, for a moment, the condition of the world in the day when Christ was born. The remains of that age are the admiration of our own. Its marbles, it paintings, the magnificent fragments of its genius, its learning, its poetry and song, give proof of man’s intellect and skill. And however moderns may vaunt of their improvements in Christian philosophy, and their advance in the science of a God, much of both is older than Christianity, and, too often, is but a revival of pagan wisdom. Yet these monuments of antiquity are also monuments of man’s ruin. Vestiges enough remain of his genius, his wisdom, his intellect, to show the impress of divinity; yet, disjointed and turned from the purposes of their creation, they betoken his fall. The whole world lay in moral ruin. The knowledge of a true God, his law and will, had almost faded from human tradition, and though conscience still lingered in the soul, like a spirit of the departed, “unwilling to leave even the ruins of the palace which it once occupied;” ¹⁴ the mind was debased; the man was lost.

Under these circumstances, God, at this time, became “manifest in the flesh.” ¹⁵ Jesus was born at Bethlehem. The angel, who sang at his birth, called him “a Saviour;” and he proved to be, as the holy Simeon said, “the light to lighten the Gentiles, the glory of Israel.” ¹⁶ He came—the predicted Messiah—the Way of life ¹⁷ –to sanctify the soul, ¹⁸ to forgive the sins, ¹⁹ and to save and bless mankind. God, who, at sundry times, and in divers manners, spake, in time past, unto the fathers, by the prophets, in these last days, spake unto men by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, by whom, also, he made the worlds; who, being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, ²⁰ came to the earth for the redemption of men. The day, therefore, which ushered Jesus to the world, was the birth-day of all those hopes of reconciliation with God, of restoration to purity, of happiness beyond the grave, which to us, sinners, are the chiefest and choicest blessings.

Has it not always been an admitted public duty to acknowledge social blessings, and gratefully to remember those through whose instrumentalities they were obtained? Are not the names of Washington, Adams, Hancock, and Warren, the jewels of our country, familiar as household words? Do we not set apart times and seasons to their memory, and hallow the birth-days of our freedom as political festivals? It is wise, it is expedient to do so. These festivals exert an influence upon the public mind. They are the levers of public sentiment, the channels of healthy feeling, the means and modes whereby good principles and sound morals may be perpetuated. Much more, as the common recipients of blessings from the hand of God, are bound socially to acknowledge and specially to commemorate them. Indeed, the same causes, which bring us together in social worship would also make it right and expedient to consecrate a day to the express commemoration, by suitable signs and symbols, of the greatest of all blessings, the coming of a Saviour to a ruined world.

It cannot, with truth, be denied, that a religion, wholly spiritual, and wholly abstracted from sensible objects, would be unfit for mankind. Hence, our Lord instituted the ‘sign’ of water, and the elements of the Eucharist. Hence, our memorial columns, our festival seasons. Hence, we set up this day, as a tangible and sensible monument of the particular event it commemorates. It stands up, in the year, as a ‘pillar of witness,’ inscribed with, “God, manifest in the flesh.” It is designed and intended to act upon the public mind, to move as a lever of public sentiment. It offers, annually, to man, a sensible memorial of the miraculous birth, and the divine character of Jesus, our Redeemer, and their blessed results. And its effect is to perpetuate that which it commemorates, to deepen the lines of its memory, to interweave gospel-truth with dear and time-honored associations, and transmit that truth, unbroken, from age to age.

And, therefore, we have come hither, to-day; we have kept it as a great festival solemnity; we have set up the fir-tree and the evergreen, to beautify the sanctuary; we have brought hither our children to sing a festival song, ²¹ and join us in our praise, that, by tangible memorial, and sensible object, by all that can reach the eye and the ear, we may impress ourselves and them, with the great theme of the day.

There are some objections made to the observance of this day, as a religious festival, which, because they are current, and, to some, formidable, would seem to require, in this place, particular notice. It is sometimes said, that this institution, not being the subject of a divine command, or express injunction, has no warrant from Scripture, and no place in a religion which has abolished legal ordinances. To this, it may be replied, that the fact commemorated, and its attendant doctrines and influences, sufficiently indicate the Scriptural nature of the festival. There needs no express law to make its subject and theme interesting to the Christian mind. While men live, who trust in a Saviour’s cross, that which called forth angel-song should breathe in sacred harmonies on earth.

Nothing is commanded in the New Testament, which is not of the essentials of Christianity. Belief and obedience, faith and repentance, the word and the sacraments,–these were, at the first, enjoined. All else was left to Apostolic direction; where the Apostles left no direction, then to the decree of Christ’s Church; and where neither the Gospel, nor its Apostles, nor its Church, directed, then to the individual judgment. Now, the keeping of Christmas is not an essential article of Christian doctrine. Like the ritual of the service, and the mode of worship, this institution is left to the discretion of the various branches of Christ’s Church. In the exercise of this discretion, that branch of the Church catholic to which we belong has enacted its observance; and, in that enactment, we have the concurrence of the large majority of Christians, and, as we think, the warrant of primitive usage and common sense. Nevertheless, we prescribe it, not for others, but for ourselves. And though it is painful to know that any blame ²² us for the observance of an institution, which partakes of the nature of a domestic regulation, yet, as we base its observance only upon the expediencies and proprieties of the case, our rule is, here, as elsewhere,–“Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” ²³

Another objection to this festival arises from another and a better source. Apprehensive of the increase of popery in our country, alarmed at every co-incident between us and Rome, some fear to give currency or countenance to the observance of this day, because, from its origin and circumstances, they judge it has become identified with Roman superstition. In their apprehension and alarm, we could well join, at every proof of the growth of this schismatical Church, or the increase of its principles. But if the simple fact of either reception or original at Rome is good cause for the rejection of a Christian institution, many things, far from being objectionable, would share its fate. We admit neither its Roman origin, nor its identity with Roman superstition. It is identified neither with Rome, nor Greece, nor Syria, nor with any national Church. We claim for it that it is catholic, apostolic, scriptural.

But even if it had original at Rome, ²⁴ is it good philosophy and sound argument to reject any thing, because it flows through an imperfect conductor, or an unsightly channel? May not the water be pure, though the pipe be leaden? May not the Scriptures be God’s word, though Jewish bigotry and Roman intolerance have been their keepers?

An objection like this cannot stand a moment’s examination. The real question is, not whence it came? But why is it used? And until its observance be shown to be unscriptural in its original, or mischievous in its tendencies, I claim your judgment in its favor.

It is sometimes further objected to this festival, that the day we observe was not the true birth-day of Jesus, and therefore its observance should cease. I deny both the premises and the conclusion.

Although we have no certain proof, as to the time, when this day was first observed in the Christian church, yet, because it was, at a very early period, kept as the true day ²⁵ by those who, from their position, had ample opportunity for knowledge; because it was at so early a period, generally thus observed, ²⁶ and because the Church, for so many centuries, has agreed in this judgment, we affirm, that it is the true day, and place the burden of proof to the contrary, upon those who deny it. The time of the officiating by Zacharias in his course, ²⁷ and the conduct of Herod, in the murder of the holy innocents, ²⁸ are strong collateral proofs; while the general tradition, and the absence of any other assumed day, strengthen our opinion.

But admit, that we are mistaken, does it therefore follow, that we should cease to observe it? We do not rest its expediency or propriety upon it, as a birthday, but as a conventional period, generally designated for commemorating an important truth. Christians, separated by wide seas, by many circumstances of condition, of language, and of clime, have agreed upon this, as a suitable period for uniting in this commemoration. They, and their fathers, for a thousand years, have so done. The day is endeared to them, by a vast variety of hallowed associations and tender recollections. And, it is more than probable, that there never has been a time, since the birth of Jesus, when so many immortal souls have united in one solemn religious exercise, as upon this festival day. ²⁹

Does it add nothing of interest to the day, that almost a world’s population are sending up their anthems with ours? Does it form no reason for keeping this high festival, that it can, more than any other institution, unite the greatest number of souls in an act of religious homage? Surely, if so many Christians are agreed, in this great act of annual thanksgiving to God for the blessing of a Saviour, it forms good cause for our union with them to consecrate this day to the nativity of Jesus.

But here, again, the force of our argument is evaded by an allegation, that there is not such an agreement of men in an act of religious homage, but only in an act of festivity, often riotous and unhallowed.

He must be a bold man, who should review the thousands of Christian altars in the civilized world, where, to-day, prayer has been made, and gaze upon the kneeling millions who render to-day, their thanksgivings, and say, “there is no homage there.”

The ancient prayers, the hallowed services, the anthems, which peal from so many temples, and the ‘tables of the Lord’ spread in so many lands, sufficiently indicate the intention of the assembly, and the agreement of Christian minds in an act of religious adoration. The truth is, however, that the fountain of human action sends forth, even its purest streams, more or less contaminated, and no tide of human feeling long flows uncorrupt. And, therefore, you can never secure man’s best religious offerings from taint, or his best institutions from perversion and sin. The Christmas festival, like the thanksgiving day of New England, is a human institution; and both are frequently perverted by unhallowed festivities. But would it be fair argument, and good philosophy to say, that there were no grateful hearts, in this Commonwealth, upon a thanksgiving-day, because so many persons desecrate it? Or would such perversion be considered as good cause for its abolition? Clearly not. Rather would we save it from being corrupted, and sanctify it by acts of piety and devotion.

Christians, every where, consecrate this Sabbath, as holy to the Lord. And thus would we ever commemorate the birth-time of our Redeemer. ³⁰ We hallow it annually, by the Eucharistic sacrifice, the highest act of homage known to our religion. We devote it to religious festivities and grateful acknowledgments of the goodness of God. It is, to us, the day of the incarnation of Jesus. His marvelous birth, his holy office, his divine character,–these re the themes of our thought. If he were only a man, we might turn over the remarkable circumstances of his birth, to the page of history. If he were only a man, we should consider his virtue and his obedience, but his bounden duty and reasonable service. If he were only a man, we should never dream it could be true, that his blood could cleanse from sin; ³¹ and truly, if he were only a man, the story of the angel-songs at his birth-time is but an embellishment of antiquity. But when we consider him as divine, as the manifested God, the event we commemorate is at once invested with an august and sublime character. It was an event, fitting to be a world’s wonder, and worthy to be ushered in by “a multitude of the heavenly host singing and praising God.” ³² And, therefore, because we would, on this day, commemorate a manifested divinity, because we would annually trace the distinct outlines of this truth, and keep it in memory forever, we set apart this day, and, by every endeared recollection and hallowed association, would consecrate it as the birth-time of our blessed Redeemer, and therefore as the beginning of that ‘mystery of godliness,’ by which the Word, on this day made flesh, gave us ‘the power to become the sons of God.’ “Come faith, and bend our knees and hearts to Jesus, the manifested God! Come hope, and spread above us thy many colored bow of promise, the token of God’s covenant. And thou, charity, the fairest daughter of heaven, come, gladden the poorest of Christ’s brethren by thy benevolence; and begin here, that work of divine love, which shall be finished where faith shall have faded before vision, and hope be lost in the fruition of the promises.” ³³

Need we further argument for the festival season? Shall we gravely apply ourselves to apologize for our memory of the birth-time of the Saviour of sinners? No: rather let us rejoice, that we have opportunity to discharge a great social duty, by this public acknowledgment of our highest benefactor.

The Christian Sabbath tells of the Christian’s Saviour. It comes to us, teeming with memorials and sacred recollections; yet if it present any one fact in our Lord’s history, or any one truth of his Gospel, more prominent than another, it is the fact and truth of the resurrection.

The Christian “Communion of the body and blood of the Lord’ excites in the pious soul liveliest emotions of gratitude, and brings to ‘remembrance his blessed passion and precious death, his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension,’ and in the memorial we make, and which he has commanded, as often as we eat that bread and drink that cup, we do show the Lord’s death, till he come.

But when we set apart a day, as the memorial of his birth-time, we bring into strong relief the specific event we commemorate. Its distinct remembrance tends to perpetuate the recollection of its supernatural character. It draws close the attention to its remarkable circumstances. The day stands up as a memorial column in the year, inscribed with the fulfilled prophecies. We make it distinct testimony to the divine character of our Redeemer, and it becomes, therefore, a witness to us, and to our children’s children, that the Word which was in the beginning with God, on this day, “was made flesh and dwelt among us.” ³⁴

Every thing in the character of the day, its appropriate services, its ritual, and circumstances strengthen our belief that it had its original in the piety of the primitive Christians. It has stood the test of more than a thousand years of vicissitudes and changes. It has been approved, and owned, and blest among the people of God, in every part of the world; and Christian experience has tested, for many centuries, its utility as a mean of grace, its tendency to promote piety, its efficiency to preserve truth, increase religious affections, and give vigor to Christian hopes.

And now, my friends, as this holy day is passing away, and the shades of its even-tide are gathering thick and fast around us, as you depart from this beautified sanctuary, carry with you, as the lesson of the day, the reflection, how dark would be our world without Christ! No comfort for the living! No hope for the dying! None, for the loved and lost! Where could man look for strength, in the trials of life? Where could he fly for relief and support in its afflictions and sorrows? More than all, what would he have ever before him, but an unknown and dread hereafter,–the more dreadful, because unknown!

You know not, you cannot know, how much of all your earthly happiness,–how much of all that is noble, and intellectual, and refined in civilized life,–how much of all that makes your home comfortable, your life desirable, and your hearts happy,–you owe to the event we commemorate this day. And oh! If any children of Adam can have adequate impression of that deep and dark-swelling tide, which would have swept generation after generation of Christless spirits into eternity,–if any of our fallen race can gain a lively sense of that redeeming love, which to-day manifested a Saviour to the lost, it must be, and it an be only those, who have “looked unto the rock whence they were hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence they were digged,” ³⁶ and have made Jesus the strength of their heart and their portion forever.

They can feel the gladness of gratitude, for they have been rescued by Jesus from the terrors of a broken law, and the apprehensions of a future judgment. They can rejoice at these glad tidings, for Jesus hath delivered them from the slavery of unholy passions, and the dominion of an ungodly world. They can rejoice, for, amid all the trials, and the difficulties, and the distresses, with which they must struggle in this ‘vale of tears,’ Jesus hath engaged, they shall be sustained by divine power, cheered by celestial comforts, guided by infinite wisdom, and saved by infinite love. They feel, that, if God hath so loved them in their transgression, and hath so blessed this scene of rebellion, much more will he bless, ³⁷ with perfect and enduring happiness, those who, through Jesus, have become ‘children of grace and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven.’ And, therefore, to them, the event of this day is indeed ‘glad tidings of great joy.’ And such it may become to you and ‘to all people.’

Take home, then, with you, as the lesson of the day, how dark our world, how sad the fate of man without a Christ! Strive to gain such knowledge of your own heart as shall make you feel the value of a Saviour. Behold him, not only in his humiliation as ‘made flesh,’ but in the glory of his mediatorial throne, as exalted to ‘make intercession.’ And go not to a prayerless bed! Give neither sleep to your eyes nor rest to your mind, until you have surrendered yourself to the Redeemer. And prove your gratitude for the inestimable blessing of salvation, by committing your everlasting interests to him, who was to-day manifested in Bethlehem to be both “a Prince and a Saviour.” ³⁸

Endnotes

1 Zechariah vi. 12.

2 Isaiah iv. 2.

3 Isaiah xi. 1.

4 Isaiah v. 2.

5 Jeremiah xvii. 8.

6 Isaiah xxxv. 1.

7 Isaiah xli. 19.

8 Isaiah lv. 13.

9 Luke ii. 11.

10 Milton’s Paradise Lost, b. 4.

11 I Peter i. 12.

12 Luke xv. 7.

13 Job xxxviii. 7.

14 Wolfe.

15 1 Timothy iii. 16.

16 Luke ii. 32.

17 John xiv. 6.

18 Hebrews xiii. 12.

19 Matthew ix. 6.

20 Hebrews i. 1-3.

21 More than an hundred little children, of St. John’s Sunday School, were gathered before the chancel, in the afternoon of Christmas day. After the usual evening service, the Rector catechized them in the presence of the congregation, and presented each child with a Christmas gift. The children made an offering to God, in token of gratitude for a Saviour, and paid $20 18, (the results, in many cases, of earnings and self-denial,) to the General Board of Missions, to be expended in sending the knowledge of a Saviour to children who have it not.

22 See a little Sunday school book, published by the Massachusetts Sunday School Union, entitled, “Christmas,” and devoted to teaching the children of those who do NOT keep the festival, how unscriptural is the conduct of those who do!

23 Rom. xiv. 5.

24 This we deny, although its observance was enacted by Julian, bishop of Rome, A.D. 345. (Giesel. i. 292.) “It is found marked as such in a Roman calendar supposed to have been compiled in, or before A.D. 354.” Pilk. Evang. Hist. 45. Introd.

25 Giesel. Eccl. Hist. i. 292.

26 St. Chrysostom to. 5, hom. 33 (in 4th century) uses this language: “This day is of great antiquity, and of long continuance, being famous and known in the church from the beginning.”
It cannot be denied, that the fathers of the church, in the days here called “the beginning,” may have had as good ground for fixing upon that day, as men now have for celebrating the landing of the Plymouth colonists, on the twenty-second of December; the direct evidence of which may be as much lost to posterity, as that of the day of the nativity would be to us, had we no other testimony.
St. Augustine, also, mentions the same fact. Sermon 18, de Nat. Ch. De Trinitate, lib. iv. c. 5. Quoted by Dr. Pilkington, Evang. Hist. Chron. Disert. P. 46.

27 Luke i. 5, 26; ii. 6.

28 Matt. ii. 16.

29 Reference is here had to the fact, that the festival occurred, in this year, upon Sunday. It is sometimes said, that Sunday, being the Lord’s day, is a sufficient commemoration of Jesus, for all practical purposes. But the Lord’s day can scarcely be said to commemorate any thing, unless it be the fact of the resurrection. It comes to us, filled with associations and influences. It is not, as this festival, a distinct and specific memorial of the birth of Jesus, of the time when Christianity “was not, and began to be.”

30 “This festival is the most improper season, (if there can be one more than another) for impiety and wickedness, and a most notorious aggravation of it; because contrary to the design of our Saviour’s coming into the world, who ‘was made manifest, that he might destroy the works of the devil.’” Comp. for Festivals (edit. 1715.) p. 72.

31 1 John i. 7.

32 Luke ii. 13.

33 Bishop Dehon.

34 I Cor. ii. 26.

35 John i. 14.

36 Isaiah li. 1.

37 Romans viii. 32.

38 Acts. V. 31.

Sermon – American Institutions & the Bible – 1876

Jeremiah Eames Rankin (1828-1904) was ordained in 1855 and pastored churches in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey. He became president of Howard University in 1889. Rankin preached this sermon in 1876 in Washington, D.C.

The Bible the Security of American Institutions.

A SERMON.

Preached in the First Congregational Church, Washington, D.C., January 16th, 1876, by the Pastor.

J. E. RANKIN, D. D.

I wish to speak, this morning, upon “The Bible and American Institutions,” and I have chosen my text from Deut. Xxxii. 46, 47: “Set your hearts unto all the words which I testify unto you this day; which ye shall command your children to observe to do; all the words of this law. For it is not a vain thing for you; because it is your life; and through this thing ye shall prolong your days in the land, whither ye go over Jordan to possess it.”

Has it ever occurred to us to ask why a volume like the Bible, intended for all the human family, in all its generations, for different individualities, for different types of civilization, for people under different systems of government; should be so largely occupied with the rise, growth and decline of one single nation; and that, one of the narrowest and most exclusive that ever existed upon the face of the earth? To ask what common property and interest all periods of time, all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues can have in the history of a nation occupying so small a territory, so isolated, so short-lived; intellectually, commercially, politically exerting so little influence upon the other nations of the earth?

There is only one answer to this question. There was one respect in which this nation was unlike all that ever went before it, and is unlike all that ever will come after it, to the end of time. It was raised up to be among the other nations, what the model-school is to those who are learning how to teach; to be under the dissecting knife of the student of human history, just what the subject is to the student in anatomy and physiology. In a word, the history of the Hebrew nation, as recorded by the national annalists, prophets, poets; as illustrated in laws and institutions, in subjects and rulers, and especially as it lays bare the secret relations of this nation to the living Jehovah and to His government; the real King of Kings and Lord of Lords; the history of the Hebrew nation in all these respects—being the only truthful history ever written—was intended to teach the founders of other nations what foundations to lay, and the conservators and guardians of other nations what safeguards to insist on, in order that these nations might be successfully established, in order that they might be perpetuated to the latest generation of time.

If by giving us the biography of individuals such as Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; such as Joseph and David and Daniel; such as Peter and John and Paul, God intends to teach us by the example of men of like passions as we are, to give us the benefit of their wisdom and experience in the conduct of our private affairs, in our relations to men, and in our relations to God; so by giving us the biography of this single, this peculiar, this elect nation, He intends to give all future nations the benefit of the wisdom and folly of the successes and disasters, of the rise, the culmination and decline of the Hebrews as a Commonwealth, as an Empire, as the fragments of an Empire; rounding out their history from the captivity of Egypt, until they were scattered as an astonishment, a proverb and a byword, among all the nations of the earth.

The Old Testament, the old Hebrew Scriptures, outgrown are they? Just as much as are the foundations of the earth. They contain the patterns and the prototypes of all human history. They are to human life, to society, to government, to institutions, to laws, to the life and well-being of man, to the life and well-being of nations, just what the earth’s frame-work—the slow product of those countless geologic periods—is to the earth’s herself, the only sure foundation upon which to build, the only grand treasure-house in which to mine, for great principles of truth and justice and honor; as the text has it, they are a nation’s life, and through them shall a nation prolong its days. They teach us that there is a grander figure in human history than great lawgivers like Moses; than great captains like Joshua; than great poets like David; than great prophets like Isaiah; that God is there, though men know it not! In Hebrew history He is discerned there before the history. He calls Abraham from a land of idolators; He leads Israel out of Egypt like a flock; He builds up a great Hebrew dynasty which culminates in the reign of Solomon. His servants, the prophets, minutely predict all the prosperous and adverse events in the perspective of Jewish history. In other history He is recognized only after the event; unless the prototypes of Hebrew history have furnished us with discernment to anticipate the event. And this is precisely what they are for. Emerson says: “The student of history should read it, actively and not passively; should esteem his own life the text, and the books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles.” And so of the history of nations. A man who can read the history of the American people, from the landing of the Pilgrims to the destruction of slavery, when the nation came up out of the Red Sea of civil war, and not see the living God there; who can review the Colonial period; the period of the revolution; the period of national consolidation; the anti-slavery struggle; the Rebellion; without recognizing after the event, if not in the event, the same majestic movement of a Divine purpose as called Abraham and his descendants and gave them the Land of Promise, driving out the heathen before them; as broke the fetters of the bondmen in Egypt, and overwhelmed their pursuers in the Red Sea; the man who can read the past one hundred years of our national history, collating and comparing it with the great events in Jewish history, without seeing the foot prints of the same majestic Being who takes the wise in their own craftiness; who makes the wrath of man to praise Him; who brings good out of evil, and light out of darkness; who made a pathway for His own people, and troubled the chariots of the Egyptians, must be in a kind of moral idiocy!

“History,” says the Greek historian, Thucydides, “is philosophy teaching by examples.” But in Bible history we have the living God as His own interpreter. He tells us why He selects such a man as Saul for the first king of Israel; why He sets aside Saul for David; why He permits the dismemberment of the Hebrew nation; why He sends His people away into their captivities; why He recovers them. He unrolls scroll after scroll of Jewish history, pointing out its signification as the nation lives it. Now, when Robert Walpole says of all uninspired human history, that “it is a lie;” when Napoleon I asks, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” when by confession of all, such history is full of mistakes and prejudices and discolorings; its facts are often manufactured, and its philosophies often false; when frequently great villains are painted like great men, and the world’s real benefactors often unnoticed; and yet uninspired history is put into the hands of our children and youth in our public schools; I would like to know what reason any reasonable or patriotic man can give why Bible history should be excluded; why those who are to be our future citizens and rulers; why those who are to keep pure and to perpetuate our free institutions should not be taught from living examples in Hebrew history, the principles of God’s dealings with nations; why and how He raises them up; how they break with Him, and why He lets them go down to swift destruction.

But, if the Old Testament tells us how to build up and make prosperous a great nation, on what foundations to set it, how to secure the smiles and favor, how to avoid the displeasure of the living Jehovah in public administration; gives us, in the Hebrew nation as a prototype and example, the great principles of national weakness and strength, we have only to turn to the New Testament, to discover man’s duty as a man; as a citizen; to discover the kind of citizens that will perpetuate a nation; the units of which the great aggregate must be made up. The Lord Jesus says that His kingdom is not of this world. And yet, in His kingdom here, and in fitting men for His future kingdom, He trains up men and women and children who make the best citizens of earthly kingdoms. He loans to temporal kingdoms the citizens of eternity. In this discussion I shall hold myself to the boundaries of time and sense. In its effects upon individuals, by teaching men to love the Lord their God, with all their hearts; by teaching them to love their neighbors as themselves; by teaching them to pay tribute to whom tribute is due, and honor to whom honor; by teaching them self-restraint and industry and temperance; by teaching them to provide for their own; parental love, filial love, conjugal love, Christian love, the gospel of the Lord Jesus provides the most conservative influence that ever was planted in earthly kingdoms; puts leaven into every one of them, such as tends to make model citizens, model men.

Where has the decadence of nations usually begun? It has begun in the decline of individual virtue. In their early struggles, when the strong oppress the weak, and the weak are pushed out to shift for themselves; when men are encountering the hardships of frontier life; when they are putting in place foundation-stones, nations, like emigrant families, are comparatively secure from temptation from within. The manhood of such men as founded this Republic never had the temptations which have fallen to the manhood of the public men of our own time. The first one hundred years of a nation’s life are not the most perilous. Then, men are occupied with fundamental things; have a deep sense of public responsibility; seem to themselves to be making history; to be acting in the eyes of the nation and for the life of the nation; to be doing work for posterity. And they are. And the dignity and pressure of the part which they are enacting keep them from ease-taking and frivolity; keep them from flinging themselves away in indolence and luxury and corruption. But when a nation has been thoroughly established; when she becomes preoccupied with manufactures and commerce; when no danger threatens her from without, individual virtue becomes more and more imperiled. And the only method of preventing the decline of the nation, through the decline of the individual citizen, is by bringing that citizen under the influence of the principles of a pure morality. And this is done by the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ; by teaching them to love God with all their hearts, and their neighbors as themselves. Let it be understood that all questions relating to another life are here thrown out of the account; that man actually dies, as the brute dieth; yet, for him to bring his whole nature, his whole life, individual, domestic, social, private, public, under the power of the Gospel, will make him the best possible kind of a citizen. And this is what every State wants.

Who constitute the dangerous classes in a republic? They are men and women and children who are kept from the Bible and the power of the Bible. You may tell me that some of them are very religious. I admit it. And yet many of them do not understand the first principles of a true Christian morality; are ready upon an emergency to break any commandment of the Decalogue, think themselves doing God service; love neither their neighbors nor themselves; fear not God, regard not man.

I do not speak against them. They are the legitimate fruit of a system. I speak against the tree which bears such fruit; against the system that makes them what they are; that must make men like them; a system which effaces and confounds the distinction between right and wrong; which substitutes the traditions of men, human legends, myths and chronicles, for the sublime oracles of God; which shuts up the Word of God; which dares to bring the sanction of God’s authority to enforce the commandments and devices of men; a system which claims not only ecclesiastical, but civil allegiance from all its votaries in whatever land, whose Head does, in the thought of all his loyal subjects, wear all crowns. I know that it is often said, “Well, if no religion, it is a good police system.” And what could we do, with the influx of such material into our population, without the restraints which spring from it, as a system of police? It has made its votaries what they are. It keeps them what they are. If it had given them the Bible, if it had taught them the principles of religious liberty, if it had trained them to think for themselves, as directly accountable to God and not to the representative of the system, it would not be required for the purposes of police. That was a fair retort to a priest who returned a piece of stolen property taken by a servant girl, with the word: “There, if the girl had been a Protestant you would never have regained this property.” “Ah, if she had been a Protestant, she never would have stolen it.” The system creates the necessity.

And who are the conservative classes in our civilization? They are the families which are under the influence of the Bible; the men and women who are under training of the truth as it is in Jesus; who study the Bible for themselves; who reject tyranny in things ecclesiastical just as emphatically as they do in things civil! You cannot make a free man in things temporal, of one who in things spiritual does not think for himself, is a slave. Bind a man’s conscience in the church, and you may soon gag his mouth and bind his hands in the State.

“What constitutes a State?
Men, high-minded men!
Men who their duties know,
But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain.”

And, if it can be made to appear that nothing is so good as the Bible, to bring men into such relations to God and man, as will make them “high-minded men,” safe citizens; safe for a republic; that nothing is so well suited to make our population such that they will keep the peace with the God of nations, and not bring themselves under His judgments; as will make them know their duties and their rights, and knowing, dare maintain; then the highest of all laws, the law of self-preservation, makes it incumbent on the State; makes it not only the right, but the duty of the State, not only not to permit the Bible to be crowded out of the place it has occupied in the fundamental instruction of American children, but even to make it the corner-stone of their education; to begin with it, to end with it; to make it a text-book in all our schools.

The first duty of this Republic is that of self-preservation. We have these free institutions to have and to hold, and to transmit. Here comes a gigantic system, magnificent, seductive, subtle, dying in individual men, but living in the generations and ages; the enemy of civil and religious freedom the world over; chameleon-like in its hues, having an insinuating aspect, even in a free land, but unchanging in its nature and essence; claiming supreme authority over every citizen of every nationality under the sun; every one of whose subjects must swear a modified allegiance to all earthly kingdoms; the fosterer of human ignorance and superstition and crime; in the year of grace, 1875, driving Bible-missionaries out of Spain; mobbing and murdering them—American citizens too—in Mexico; admitting through its own organs that if it ever becomes supreme in this land, there will be an end to all religious freedom: stabbing to the heart in the street a little boy in Oviedo, Spain, because he had joined a Protestant church; in this country, refusing burial rites to children who have attended Bible Sunday schools, and doing similar things to grown-up men in Canada; in short, through the Syllabus of the Pope, its infallible Head, stigmatizing and condemning at one breath all the grand characteristics of American civilization, and openly challenging them before the world as ruinous to the true progress of humanity; here comes this system, in its very nature inimical to individual freedom and advancement , and insists that we modify some of our fundamental things; some of the things that Washington, and Jefferson, and Adams, and Webster, and a hundred years of experience have taught us to be essential to our very life as a nation, to accommodate it; to help it keep its votaries in chains of darkness, under the domination of priestcraft; taking the money of the people to found sectarian institutions of its own, and yet denying the right of a great people to keep the simple, unadulterated Word of God in her Common Schools! Known in all history as giving no recognition to the rights of conscience; having the blood of almost every martyr to religious freedom in its skirts; having invented its thumb-screws and racks, and other instruments of torture, having kindled its flames, and dug deep its dungeons, if it were possible, to exorcise from humanity all sense of individual right as between man and God; to exalt itself into God’s place over man; and yet, urging its plea against the Author of the Bible, and the Author of the conscience, and the time-sanctioned usage of the Republic, upon the ground of conscience! What answer shall we give it?

Our answer is this, that the life of a nation is its supreme law. We must have a free, intelligent, moral population, or our doom is sealed. No man can have rights under the Constitution of the United States—call them by whatever name you may please—to undermine this Government, or to plot its overthrow, or to make its future impossible. It is a contradiction in terms. For nearly a half century this country was engaged in throwing sops to the Cerberus of slavery, to keep his bark quiet. He made way with the sops and kept barking. Here were men who claimed that they owed primal allegiance to their separate States, who took their oaths to the United States Constitution with that reservation; who insisted upon this compromise and that compromise, upon this settlement and that settlement, and when they had secured all they could get in the Union, then they determined to break it up! What did the country do? She rose up and stood for life! Nor did she unsheathe her sword in vain. She nerved herself to cut that cancer of slavery out of her own body, and throw it back to the dark ages, where it came from and where it belonged! It was that or annihilation! What became, then, of all the reserved rights of States; of all the compromises: of all the pacific legislation of the past? They were not worth the paper they were written on. And let it be once understood by the American people—as it is becoming understood—that under the specious plea of rights of conscience, this great Ecclesiasticism, hoary with age and crime, whose adherents owe their first and supreme allegiance to him who sits upon the Seven Hills of Rome, and whose temporal power has been sloughed off by the modern nations just in proportion to their vigor and manhood, proposes to sap the foundations of our free institutions; proposes to make an intelligent, moral population in this country an impossibility; proposes to train up within our borders, and to make a portion of our political system, citizens educated at the feet of Jesuits; citizens whose consciences are held in the right hand of their Father Confessors: then there will be another uprising of a great people. And shall we wait for a half century of compromises, before we make ready for it?

But I am asked, Has not a man a natural right to dictate how his children shall be educated, or whether they shall be educated at all? Every child born in this Republic is destined to become an integral part of it, has upon him responsibilities which he cannot meet, which he cannot bear with safety to the Republic, without an education, without moral education. And if parents will not educate their children, then will the State, just in proportion as it is true to its own life, either see them educated in its own schools, or abridge to them the right of suffrage, the right of citizenship. You do not call in an ignorant quack to treat your child when he is in danger of death. And will the State allow that man to tamper with great questions vital to its existence and perpetuity who in morals knows not his right hand from his left, who cannot read, who cannot write? Compulsory education! Education, whether the parent wills it or nills it, and especially if he nills it; education in morals; the imparting of the sanctions of human and divine law against the common tendencies and crimes of human nature, against all those courses which unfit a man for citizenship; education in American history; education in that which makes American citizenship peculiar as a heritage of the fathers; this has come to be a national necessity, and is one of the questions with which the General Government must have to do.

Let a man insist upon his right to educate his child as a thief, or let him come up a thief, will society, will the State recognize this right? The State will punish both him and his child if he undertake it. The State guarantees “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to its citizens upon this single condition, that they will not use these blessings to undermine its foundations. And I have not the least doubt that if it be the judgment of a Great People that ignorance of the historical records of the Bible; ignorance of the law of God and the precepts of the Lord Jesus, is incompatible with citizenship, it is within its legitimate prerogative, from this time forth, to have the Bible taught in every school, public and private, in the whole land. I speak here of right, not expediency; though it be right and wise, it must be expedient; how can it be otherwise? The Bible is not a denominational work. The Bible is not a sectarian work. It is the centre and source and standard of all religious truth. As against the Bible, and the Author of the Bible, there are no rights of conscience. It is like talking of the rights of the eye against the light, or of the lungs against the air. And if any system is afraid of it, wants to temper its clear light; wants to filter the very water of life as it comes from under the throne of God, so much the worse for that system!

But in this discussion I do not urge the claims of the Bible on religious grounds. In passing I simply call attention to this anomaly: that an institution professing to be founded by the Lord Jesus Christ, who spoke the very words recorded in the New Testament to the common people, and they heard them gladly; who commended the Scriptures to our diligent study; an institution claiming to be the true church of the living God, to which has been given the duty of preaching the Gospel to every creature; that such an institution shall shrink from the light of the Bible, whatever the version! And I say that such an institution cannot expect the confidence of any thinking people. It is too late in the world’s history for this. It is too free a country for it.

It is also too late to pretend that this great ecclesiastic-political system is not hostile to the Word of God. It reckons among its converts from heathenism portions of more than sixty different nationalities. And into the language of not a single one of them has it ever translated the Bible. When was Bible translation or Bible distribution ever undertaken by it? The Psalmist says: “The entrance of thy Word giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple.” But Pope Leopold III warns all people against Bible Societies, and Pope Pius VII quotes his words with approval. Gregory XVI was in sorrow, night and day, because of them. And the present Pope regrets the recent improvements in the art of printing, which so greatly facilitate the free distribution of the Bible and other dangerous books. It is not the Bible in the schools merely, it is the Bible, anywhere and everywhere, against which this system lifts up its voice. It is the light of the Bible which it fears. It is the freedom of the Bible before which it cowers. Shall we not meet it in defence of what it most dreads? Shall we weaken our cause by forsaking the pivotal point on which the issue must be made up: on which the battle must turn?

How to maintain the life of this free nation against ignorance and superstition and crime is come to be the great problem of the hour. For a half century we argued and compromised and debated in a vain endeavor to live at peace with a system with which in a free government there was no peace; which tyrannized over men’s bodies; which put manacles on their limbs, and sold them upon auction blocks; and at last we had to go down to the field of death and cross swords with its defenders before it was exterminated. This work is hardly over, when as though all the great rights of man were to be here tried before the Judge of all the Earth, now rises up this great rights of man were to be here tried before the Judge of all the Earth, now rises up this great ecclesiastical tyranny; this tyranny over men’s consciences and souls; this buyer and seller of men’s souls, and this buyer and seller of men’s souls, and flings itself across the pathway of our progress; brings upon us its entail of ignorance and poverty and crime, imported, created here; seduces our legislators into granting it subsidies and endowments; and then arrays itself against the Bible in our common schools—against the schools themselves; striking a double blow at the very citadel of our freedom; and when we remonstrate, it pleads the rights of conscience! Have we another half century of conflict before us before we open our eyes to the truth, that this is one vast political system, even more than that of slavery; all the more dangerous, all the more insidious, because it bears an ecclesiastical name, and pleads for church rights; that it is a system never to be satisfied until it names for us our law-makers and judges and executives; until it has its foot upon our necks?

We say to the adherents of this system, that in the matter of freedom of worship, of propagating their views, they shall be undisturbed, even though all history has shown the system itself to be hostile to human freedom and human progress; and we know it to be. But when its leaders undertake to brake down the common school system itself, we charge them with being the enemies of our free institutions, and we call upon all the friends of civil liberty to rally against them; to come to some understanding how to check their progress. It is a saying of Edmund Burke that “when bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an un-pitied sacrifice, in a contemptible struggle.” Here is a system that is a permanent, undying combination. It is its very instinct to break down all individual freedom. It moves as an army. It is an army. And its leaders, as history knows them, are so crafty and insidious, that having chosen as their appellation the name of Jesus—the purest and most guileless of Beings who ever lived upon earth—in 335 years they have wrought in its derivative, Jesuit, this etymological change; that while Jesus means “holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners,” Jesuit means just the opposite; just the very contrary qualities; means treachery, craft, intrigue; means the wisdom and subtlety of the serpent, with the serpent’s fangs. Can such a well-drilled combination be resisted without a common understanding and a common movement on the part of the friends of civil and religious liberty?

You may tell me that it is inexpedient to agitate this question. That is just what the Pope thinks. He says: “Act, but do not agitate.” That is his policy. Our policy is to agitate. “For,” as Milton asks, “who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” And if we agitate we shall get a free and open encounter; we shall get a thorough discussion of the subject. It is for the majority of this nation to determine whether, at the dictation of this most tyrannical of all tyrannies, of this bitterest and most unscrupulous enemy of civil and religious freedom, the Book which links men and nations directly to God; which gives man an open horizon toward eternity, is to pass out of our common schools. And let us remember this: that it is not a mere question of political expediency; of present policy. It is a question that strikes down into the very foundations of our civil and religious liberty. For s sure as the Bible is the book of God, He has so constituted society and governments that if it be the chart by which we manage our public affairs, the standard by which we determine the character of our civilization, our future is secure; we shall walk upon the high places of the earth; while if we do otherwise, if we discard it or dishonor it, He will turn us into Hell, with all the other nations that have forgotten Him! For if the salt shall lose its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is henceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men!

Sermon – Thanksgiving – 1853

Charles Wadsworth (1814-1882) graduated from Union College in 1837. He was pastor of congregations in: Troy, NY (1842-1850), Philadelphia (1850-1862, 1869-1882), and San Francisco (1862-1869). The following Thanksgiving sermon was preached by Wadsworth in Philadelphia on November 24, 1853.

RELIGION IN POLITICS:

A SERMON

PREACHED IN THE

ARCH STREET PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,

PHILADELPHIA,

ON THANKSGIVING DAY, NOV. 24, 1853,

CHARLES WADSWORTH,
PASTOR.

RELIGION IN POLITICS.“Render to Cesar the things that are Cesar’s.”—Mark XII. 17.

These words, you will remember, are part of our Lord’s answer to the Herodians, when they sought to entangle him in the political controversies of the times. I have not, of course, selected them as a theme of usual scriptural and Sabbath-day exposition. You have come here expecting to have your meditations turned into channels beseeming the occasion. That occasion, owing to the agreement of so many of our United States, to celebrate it simultaneously, is a great National Thanksgiving. And to turn from its national or political aspects, and confine ourselves to what are called technically, “religious” considerations, were to do evident violence to the proprieties of time and occasion.

And yet, here, at the very outset, are we met with the outcry of the whole howling pack of Infidelity and Irreligion, as they hunt in couples for Christian inconsistencies; claiming meanwhile for themselves, the whole body politic, as a carcass from the shambles, to be cast to their kennel. “Do not bring politics into the pulpit,” say these men. “Do not desecrate God’s sanctuary. A preacher’s business is to minister to the gospel,–God’s pure and peaceable gospel. And beware how you desecrate and pollute it by interfering in State matters.” Verily, these be most wonderful men! Blaspheming, and reviling, and trampling under their foul feet, for the whole three hundred and sixty-five days of each year, this very gospel; and then overwhelmed with a holy awe, lest some preacher, once in a whole annual revolution, should happen, in their apprehension, to forget its high sacredness. Ah! Most astonishing men! Most wonderful zeal for the gospel! Nevertheless, we agree with these men in the assertion that a preacher’s business is with the Gospel of Christ, and its religion only. But, then, what is RELIGION? Religion, as revealed in the gospel! Is it an influence so ethereal and unearthly, as to require to be shut carefully from common life into Sabbath days and sanctuaries, lest its white garments should become soiled by a contact with worldliness?

So, indeed, these men tell us. And here we are at issue with them. Religion is not merely a sentiment, but a life. Not merely affections God-ward, but activity man-ward. It renders a man not merely a singer of psalms, and a partaker of sacraments, but, indeed, renders him mainly a kind friend, an affectionate father, an estimable citizen, and an honest man. And, therefore, a religion that does not pass beyond the region of technical sacredness, and pervade the whole economy of the social and secular—entering as a living power into the commerce, and the literature, and the magistracy, and the politics of a man—is a mutilated and a monstrous religion, make the best of it.

In the text, our Lord sets forth one great part of Christian duty. It is not only “Rendering unto God the things that are God’s,” but, as well, “Rendering unto Cesar the things that are Cesar’s;”—a principle taking as vital an interest in a human, as in the Divine government. And, if you will remember, that in Christ’s time the form of civil governments, and their practical administration, were as imperfect as they ever have been; and that the Cesar’s were, with few exceptions, the veriest of tyrants, you will perceive how emphatically we are taught in the text—that a man’s religious duties are not only unto his God, but as well unto his country; or, more simply stated—that a man should carry his Christianity heartily and wholly into the politics of his country.

And this, then, is the theme of our present meditation. The duty of every Christian man to go forth in the face of all this infidel outcry, and carry his religion into his politics.

But, then, what do we mean by Politics? Do we mean the paltry chicanery of placemen for power? A working out the low artifices of party in pursuit of offices and spoils? Would we have a Christian minister, or a Christian man, go down to the shameless and undisguised corruption which pervades what is called the peculiar moral code of politics? Would we have such a man sit face to face with the brutal ignorance and ruffian vice, which, hidden from the face of honest men, distribute the parts of the great play, and shuffle, and cut, and deal the dirty cards wherewith partisan gamblers are to play a game, whose great stake is our civil and national welfare? Oh no, no. By Politics, as we would have them mingled in by Christian men, we mean—“The science of government; that part of ethics which consists in the regulation and government of a state or nation, for the preservation of its peace and prosperity; comprehending the defence of its existence and rights against foreign control or conquest; the augmentation of its strength and resources; the protection of its citizens in all their rights; and the preservation and improvement of their manners and morals;”—and involving therefore every religious, patriotic, and domestic interest that is near and dear to us. And in such—as the only grand and just idea of Politics—we would have every Christian and good man mingle religiously and wholly. And this, for several reasons, we will now go on to consider.

And this, first of all: Because such political privileges and blessings as we enjoy, deserve at our hands, as God’s great gift, such a public, religious consecration.

This is indeed the very “sacrifice of thanksgiving” we are met in God’s house to offer this morning. In all times have religious offerings been discriminative and appropriate. The “husbandman” has brought of the “fruits of the ground.” The “shepherd” has brought the “firstling of his flocks.” And one appropriate sacrifice of thanksgiving for national and political blessings, is not a mere expression of gratitude in hallelujahs, but a consecration to God of our powers, in a service which shall perpetuate unto children’s children our great social, and political, and national privileges.

And surely such privileges as ours deserve such an offering. Truly, a goodly and glorious gift is our American birthright! I know men tell us it is grandiloquent, and in bad taste, and savors of arrogance and vanity, and is wanting in national courtesy and good breeding, to be everlastingly glorying in our “Eagles” and “Star-Spangled Banners,” and exulting in our national consciousness of political superiority, and our national hope of a sure, and limitless, and magnificent future. But for our very lives we cannot help it. “How can the children of the bride chamber mourn, while the bridegroom is with them?” We look at the nations of the old world—gigantic, if you please, but manifestly in the wrinkle and decay of a hoary age; and we look at our own land, just springing in glorious and gigantic youth, with flashing eye and iron sinews, to run such a race of honor and power as the world never saw. And we cannot—shame on us if we could—repress the thrill of pride from the heart, and the exulting words from the tongue, as we think of our own matchless land as it is now and shall be.

Oh! I see it! I see it! A nation that shall be unto all other nations as blessed old Israel was to the Amorite and the Philistine. A nation stretching from ocean to ocean across this whole continent. A nation of freemen, self governed; governed by simple law, without a police or a soldiery. A nation of five hundred millions of people, covering the sea with their fleets, and the land with great cities. First in learning, and science, and arts, and every great produce of industry and genius. Ay, and better and higher and holier,–a virtuous and godly people; bound together in one tender and beautiful brotherhood; and luxuriant with fruit and flower, in the bloom and aroma of all Christian graces. The refuge of the oppressed. The protector of the downtrodden. The home of the exile. The terror of despotism. The victorious champion of earth’s wronged tribes, against tyranny and outrage. The almoner of God’s great grace to the wounded spirit and bleeding heart of a redeemed humanity. I see this, and more than this, in our safe, and dazzling, and limitless future. And my tongue would cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I thought to check the joyous words that swell up in hallelujahs.

We have—we have a magnificent birthright. And what is it all, but God’s gift—God’s gift through the Gospel? All it is—all it shall be—a RESULT OF CHRISTIANITY—and so all it is, and all it shall be, but an ascension gift of my Lord unto his disciples as Christians. And are we then as Christians—as the very men for whom it was projected and for whom it is conserved—are we, as religious and Christian men, to stand back from this glorious nationality, and let fools and ruffians—the filth, and pollution, and offscouring of moral life,–creatures bought and sold for a price, as cattle for the shambles—the wrecks and the rotten-wood that float with every shifting tide of infidel and irresponsible political opinion,–are we to stand altogether aloof, and let creatures like these mar and mutilate this great national machinery? Shall the insane fanaticism of the North, and Southern sham-chivalry, bluster about the dissolution of the Union, and hew with a fool’s axe at the root of the tree of our Liberty? And must I, as a Christian man and minister, not smite them with all the strength God has given me, lest I should pollute my Christianity by a contract with worldliness?

Away with such shallow and hypocritical reverence for Christianity. I owe it to my Gospel and my God, as all the return I can make for a birthright so glorious, to fling myself as a Christian man, into the defence of that birthright, and bare my bosom, as a religious being, to the infidel and accursed tide, that would sweep all those good and glorious things away, as wrecks upon a deluge. And we have come up this day as a rejoicing people, not merely to praise God, but to consecrate ourselves to this very work in a sacrifice of thanksgiving. And go forth in the performance of our Christian work, “Rendering,” not only “to God the things that are God’s, but as well rendering unto Cesar the things that are Cesar’s.”

Now this leads me to remark, Secondly, That as Christian men, we are bound to this duty; because our nation needs this day for her own preservation, the mingling in her politics of this religious element.

She needs it, indeed, at all times. On all principles of national and governmental policy. There never has existed—and never can exist a nation, without this pervading element of religious influence. Even the heathen and unenlightened rulers of the elder world, all perceived and acted on this common-sense maxim. History has no record of a single legislator, who attempted to enforce obedience to law on the sole ground of its civil sanctions, and its temporal penalties. They universally perceived the insufficiency of all such motives, if unstrengthened by the higher motives drawn from religious principles. And if they were strangers to Divine Revelation, they found a substitute in their Mythology, and applied it as skillfully as might be, to the prejudices of the people. Lycurgus, Solon, Numa Pompilius, Mohammed, and indeed, every legislator at all famed for the wisdom of his institutions; were compelled to have recourse to religion: and in fact, derived therefrom their mightiest motives to enforce obedience. And in all this, they acted on an accurate and extensive knowledge of human nature; and with a wisdom that will remain true, so long as sinful passions and affections have such an influence on mankind. For whenever, as in France, the attempt has been made to loose all religious restraints from the minds of a people; then have the whirlwind and the storm, and the great waves dashing into shipwreck, made eloquent proclamation that for the preservation of every great national and political interest, there is need of a God, to ride upon the whirlwind and direct the storm.

Now, if all this be evidently true, even of nations held in check by the armed power of despotism, how emphatically must it be true of a free and a self-governing people. Our free institutions were created, and are conserved by the Christian religion. The two grand pillars whereon the whole edifice rests, are—The Equality of Human Rights—and—Brotherly Love equal to Self-Love. And these great truths we have learned from the Gospel. Take them away, and our peculiar nationality is destroyed in a moment. We may still exist, indeed, as a power on the earth. We may exist still united under an armed aristocracy, or a great military despotism. Or we may exist a fragmentary and dissevered power, as a hundred petty and belligerent principalities. And this Continent may be parceled out like the old, unto rival conquerors. And our miserable descendants “increase and multiply, and vegetate and rot,” in ignorance and bondage. And go forth in fierce feuds, marshaled under rival banners of the Bear, and the Lion, and the Lilies, over the very fields where their fathers marched united and triumphant, and free, under their one glorious Eagle. But sure I am, that if the religious element be taken from our politics, our Republicanism is gone, at a stroke, and for ever.

I have not the limits here, to enter into the argument of the manifold advantages to a free people of Gospel piety. Time would fail me, to tell you how it increases national wealth, by diminishing the popular tendency to luxury and extravagance, and by inculcating temperance, and industry, and frugality. How it operates as a mighty check on all those corruptions which weaken a free people. How it educates into truth and tenderness the popular conscience, without which, just laws must remain dead letters in the statute book, unenforced, and without influence. How it destroys all those selfish and sectional animosities, whereunto demagogues always appeal when they would break in pieces great governments. How, in short, by restraining in the human heart the vices hat weaken, and regenerating into nobler life the virtues that strengthen, it makes ever manifest the great truth, that free, and prosperous, and united, and “blessed is that people whose God is the Lord.”

This, and all this, we take in our argument for granted. And based upon it, our plea is, that we are called on as religious men to rise up, and cast more of this salt of godliness into our national character. We are this very day, in God’s sight, going backward from our old moral landmarks. We are even now as a nation swarming with drunkards, and Sabbath-breakers, and profane swearers. The emissaries of the old foreign Ecclesiastical despotism—the tool and the mainspring of all European despotism—are among us, foul and frequent as locusts of the Nile on the green things of God’s husbandry. Fanatics at both ends of the Union are toiling might and main at their fiendish work of dismemberment. Our national compact itself, founded on the compromise of local interests, exposes us more and more to sectional jealousies and competition, and to the heartless assaults of ambitious agitators of popular passions. We are entering confessedly on stormy times. New forms of infidelity, and political atheism, and false philanthropy, are rising in strength in the midst of us. While Christian men stand aloof, fools are heaving at the pillars of our great national temple. And the whole tribe of the Philistines are twisting at the cords, while God’s Samson sleeps in the lap of the Enchantress. It is time, high time, then, for Christian championship to awake. By the men of the present generation is the great question to be settled, whether there can be maintained in the midst of us, enough of an enlightened and tender moral sense to keep us a virtuous, and free, and united people, in face of all these assaults of infamy and irreligion. By the Christian men that now worship in God’s temples is the uncertain problem to be solved,–Whether the light of liberty that shines on us this day, is of a sun bounding gloriously from the Orient, or already sinking sadly and slowly to the sepulchral clouds of the west. And, therefore, the call comes to us loud as the voice of prophets in the glorious days of Israel of Judah, to stand forth against the enemies of hearthstone and altar for our God and our country; casting religious salt into the polluted fountains of our national conscience; pouring religious light along the troubled seas of our national politics; “rendering unto Cesar the things that are Cesar’s, as surely as unto God the things that are God’s.”

And by all this are we brought to remark, Thirdly: That we are urged to this duty by our regard for all the great interests of the Race and the World.

Disastrous as would be the destruction of our peculiar nationality in regard of ourselves—more disastrous and appalling still would it prove in regard of the human race everywhere. Speaking only civilly and politically, and there is no sign of hope for a world’s popular liberties, if our republicanism fail us. Unto America are turned this day the regards of all nations, as the last practical experiment of popular self-government. From America goes forth this day the only light of hope to fall on the heart of an oppressed race as a joy and a consolation. For this great work were we raised up, and this great work are we doing. Talk as men will about the sanctity of international law, as preventing on our part with the old world, interference and intervention; yet spite of it all, with the whole power that is given us we are interfering and intervening. As surely and constantly as the blazing sun interferes with the prowling night-beasts, are we interfering with the oppressions and despotisms of the world’s farthest nations. There is not a Cabinet in Europe that does not look upon this great Republic as the real author of all the revolutionary movements on that whole broad continent; that does not plot and pray for our ruin, as the mighty disturber of the peace of their haggard and hoary oppressions, and the only formidable and gigantic obstacle to the perpetuity of their foul despotisms hereafter and for ever. The grand and simple principle that unites us as a free people, is a principle actively and essentially at war with the whole spirit of European nationality. And we are this very morning, by the never-ceasing and omnipresent influences of our free institutions, more powerfully and offensively interfering with the despotic policy of those European Empires, than if a hundred thousand armed men stood marshaled under the American Eagle on the banks of the Danube, and our whole naval power, three times told, were cruising on those European seas, sweeping a despot’s fleets from the waters, or thundering with a thousand guns against the bulwarks of a despot’s capital.

We are interfering, and, what is more, we are bound to be interfered with! We may let European despotisms alone—and, doubtless, we shall let them alone, as to all armed aggression—but then the plain and simple fact is, they will not let us alone. It is a mistake altogether to imagine that the whole popular sympathies of the old world are with popular freedom; or that the masses of those oppressed nations are prepared for, or ambitious of, our free institutions. The political movement of the whole East is backward manifestly to feudalism. Those favored empires; that with a constitution limiting the monarch, we have rejoiced over as already half free; and gloried in as marching in the van of advancing civilization; are already in the wane and wrinkle of dotage and decrepitude. Great Britain is tottering already under the hideous burden of a bloated aristocracy; and the Lion that once roused itself to shake the world its banner, now crouches tamed and spaniel-like at the tread of the great Eastern despotism. France, that looked unto the world so like a winged creature of liberty, by a monstrous recoil has gone back to a chrysalis, and is bound, as God lives, to come forth a worm again. Spain is already a dead thing in the grave; and Austria, that fouler thing than a despotism—the despotic tool of a despot. And if princes seem building for freedom and the race on the banks of the Rhine, and along the blue Italian seas, they build, alas, on a volcano—the crater already ablaze, and the whole mountain shaking.

Yonder continent has indeed this day but one united—one advancing and absorbing power; and that the great Northern, and naked, and unmitigated military despotism. A despotism, too, be it ever remembered, not resting in, and trusting to, popular ignorance, but where industry is stimulated; and the arts encouraged and fostered by all possible appliances; and commerce steadily and strenuously advanced in every possible direction; and where the subjects are not held in an unwilling bondage, but are the rejoicing and enthusiastic abettors of despotism. And thus firm on her foundations, and terrible in her might, is Russia aspiring and advancing to the conquest of the world. And prescient of the far future, she sees in the whole wide world to-day but one mighty obstacle in her path—this young Republic—the everlasting light of our popular freedom in the dark places of tyrants. And so the momentous signs of the times are now proclaiming a coming conflict, when amid such terrors of antagonism as the earth never saw, there shall go on under the rival banners of the Bear and the Eagle, the last great battle for freedom and the world! But if in all this we read not aright the programme of the struggle, sure we are, at least, that the great conflict of this and the coming generation will be of Freedom against Tyranny. And sure we are, therefore, as well, that in the preservation and perpetuity of our free institutions there rest the only hopes of oppressed humanity; and that in the terrible hour that is coming on all people, our own civil and religious liberty must furnish the only championship for man’s heart and soul against the despotisms of the world.

Now, if to this thought of our civil and political influence upon the nations, you add the other thought, of the religious AND EVANGELICAL influence we are manifestly designed to exert upon a lost race, the thought under consideration will appear most impressive. Even if for the civil franchises of mankind there were to rise up other than American championship; yet whence, save from the American Church, can go forth the light of a redeeming gospel to the dark places of the earth? If there be any philosophic reading of a historic Providence, then from God’s past and present dealings with us as a peculiar people, and from the evident signs of the times, as displaying the powerlessness of all other nations for evangelizing a world; from these, I say, is the truth as apparent as an oracle of Revelation, that unto us, as stewards of the grace of God, is awarded the magnificent service of sending forth a full and free gospel over all the benighted continents of our globe—that from our beloved land, glorious in its scenery, and its broad boundaries, and its new growth of civilization, and its loftier type of civil and religious manhood, the Angel that hath the everlasting gospel to preach, is already pluming the wing for flight over the nations; and that the hopes of the race, therefore, not merely for Time, but for Eternity! Not merely for Earthly Freedom, but for Immortal Glory, do, under God, suspend themselves upon the perpetuity of our Union, and the permanent progress and development of our free institutions. So that to give up our national character to the spoiler, were not only to quench every light on the altars of Liberty, but to quench for the world the fires on God’s altars—to shiver the great wheel in the mechanism of a triumphing Evangel—and so to cast the race back, not merely to the iron thraldom of despotism, but to the more monstrous bondage of superstition and infidelity.

And I say you have only to remember all this, and consider it, and you will get an impression of the unspeakable importance to a whole world of mankind, of the perpetuity and progress of our free institutions, which will make you jealous with an immortal jealousy of any stain upon our national character as a wisely-governed, and intellectual, and moral, and religious people; and send every man of us to stand proudly up in his place as an American Christian and patriot; carrying our piety as an inspiration into the duties of our citizenship, and lifting up in great faith Christ’s redeeming Cross as a bulwark more powerful than all else to roll back the tides of iniquity, and corruption, and infidel legislation, and the whole wild deluge of ruffian and irresponsible politics, which would sweep all these glad and glorious things away as wrecks upon the waters. For we shall perceive how God himself has linked all the great interests of our race with these American politics, so that in this whole matter, by “rendering to Cesar the things that are Cesar’s,” we are most surely, as well, “rendering unto God the things that are God’s.”

Now this leads me to remark, Fourthly,–and lest we should weary you,–Finally: That we are urged to this duty by a due regard for our RELIGION itself.

We have already said that it is a false notion of religion which supposes it to be polluted, and thus injured, by every contact and concern with merely worldly interests. And we now go further, and declare, that we should do very much to honor and magnify Christianity, were we to carry it forth as an energizing principle—yea, as a vital and controlling power—into our whole practical life as American citizens.

You are all of you familiar with the infidel clamor of the times—that the Christianity of the Gospel has proved a great failure. That while it did good service as a pioneer of civilization, and a rudimental teacher of the alphabet in the great school of humanity, nevertheless, that now, when the race has progressed from its nomadic life, and the great man-child has flung off its swaddling bands, and mastered the rudiments of knowledge, and entered the higher forms of intellectual culture—that now Christianity must surrender its great charge to the higher teachings of Philosophy, and be flung aside as an effete engine, whose work has been accomplished, and whose day gone by. And we are fain to confess, that this outcry is not without plausible arguments—arguments drawn with irresistible force from the narrowness of the field, and the feebleness of the power, wherein professing Christians have themselves developed their Christianity. For we most frankly admit, that a religion that remains shut away from the common business of life, into the pure regions of spiritualism, as a thing of ecstasies, and sentiment, and psalm-singing: appearing statedly on Sabbath days, and in sanctuaries, and seen no more abroad during the six days of the secular and the social—We confess, I say, that such a religion, be it Christian or Pagan, is altogether out of place, and imbecile amid the restless and earnest tides of an age and a life like our own.

But then quite as confident I am, that if Christianity have not hitherto acquitted herself to the full of all her secular and social duties; the secret lies not in her inadequacy to the work; but in the smallness of the sphere which Christians themselves have assigned her, and the class and kind of labor they have committed to her hands. Sure I am, at least, that as an intellectual and moral system, Christianity was designed for all nations and generations; and is divinely adapted to the exigencies of all nations and generations. Her credentials to our Race, are not merely as a fitting and tender nurse for its unsteady infancy; but more fittingly still, as the earnest tutor of its hot youth; and the glorious guide and guardian of its magnificent manhood.

Embodying, as Christianity does within itself, the mightiest and most practical moral influences to be found in God’s universe. And revealed as the master contrivance of Infinite Wisdom, to restore man from his ruins, and bring back a wandering world to the light and the liberty of God’s own children. It has only to be inaugurated in its place of rightful authority. Only to be brought forth from the cloisters of contemplation, and the chairs of academic speculation. Only to take hold in its strength, on the great practical questions of the race and the age,–and the scoffing world will acknowledge as they see, that an influence so long despised as a thing only busy with creeds, and ceremonies, and sacraments, can yet work gloriously and with a strong arm, as man’s practical benefactor—that its fostering is of every influence which makes up civilization—that its calling is unto the patronage of the arts, and sciences, and literature, and commerce, and trade—that its place is as truly in the cabinet s in the conventicler, in the senate-chamber, as at a sacrament—that it an a quit itself vigorously of all Social and Civil, in a word, of every secular duty; and is gloriously equal to all the exigencies of the times, and every possible emergency of the day and the generation.

And we say, such an inauguration to a high sway over things merely temporal, Christianity deserves to-day, at the hands of its disciples. It deserves to be justified openly from the suspicions of the world, that it is after all, but a low, and paltry, and driveling fanaticism. It deserves to be brought abroad from the closet and cloister, to enter as a living power into the philosophy, and speculation, and the earnest life, and all the high enterprise of an uprising Humanity, “Rendering unto Cesar the things that are Cesar’s,” as steadfastly, “as unto God the things that are God’s.”

Religion has, indeed, its most glorious place in the recesses of the redeemed spirit, and an honored throne in the Sanctuary, with its praises and sacraments. It is the joy and glory of its great prerogative, that it abides in the sanctities of the heart, and the household; and brings heavenly comfort and peace to the secluded hut of the poor child of want; and sits in seraphic love at the hushed bedside of the dying. Nevertheless, it is its other prerogative, and should be its joy and glory as well, to take care of man’s temporal interests as wisely as his spiritual. And, walking abroad as the conserving spirit of the day and the age, to pour its divine light upon the speculations of philosophy; and to bathe with its heavenly dews man’s learning and genius; and to lay its strong hand on the energies of trade, and of commerce; and to lift up its heavenly, yet resistless voice, in the halls of legislation; and to stand in meek, yet mighty glory, in the haughtiest presence of monarch and noble; and to fling from its radiant loveliness a resistless moral power, that shall pervade the world’s arts, and sciences, and literature, and jurisprudence, and economy of politics, and machinery of government. “Rendering as wisely and as well, unto Cesar the assisting tribute that is Cesar’s, as unto God the adoring worship that is God’s.”

Christianity, I say, deserves this honor at our hands. What we are as a nation this day, we owe, under God, to its blessed influences. Our very National existence is a miracle of the Gospel. The Genoese navigator and the German reformer,–the one opening a new world; the other evolving a new Humanity to enter in and occupy,–were rocked in the same cradle, twin-children of Evangelism. The strong sifting of all nations for God’s chosen seed, to scatter in glorious husbandry on this virgin soil, was a Gospel winnowing. That almost heavenly refinement of taste and love; that found earth’s noblest kingdoms but an intolerable wilderness, without a pure altar, and an open Bible; but could make a blessed home with the storm, and the sea-eagle, and a God to worship; was an inspiration of the Gospel. That patriotism and courage, and self-sacrificing toil, which battled fearlessly unto death for hearthstone and altars, were all upshots from the Gospel. The matchless wisdom of a Constitution, whose great central truth of “human equality” was in direct antagonism to all principles of known governments, and startled the old despotisms of the world as the light of a coming judgment; was a direct revelation of the Gospel. Yes, and then all the subsequent beatitudes, which, as if flung from angel wings, have been scattered along all our path to national immortality—our accumulating wealth—our enlarging commerce—our vast increase of population—our progress in arts and manufactures—the magnificence of our practical charities—the increasing harmony and strength of our political machinery—the enticing beauty which our land bears to-day, to far away nations amid the sobbing agonies of their downtrodden children—and the glory, and honor, and power, which the world accords to-day, to the wing of the American Eagle, in its flight through the skies. This, all this, and more than this—all, in short, which makes the American eye flash with pride; and the American heart beat with rapture; and gathers us this very hour in God’s temples with loud hallelujahs of praise, an exulting and thanksgiving people; we owe under God to our glorious Christianity.

And, amid such results of magnificent accomplishment, CHRISTIANITY DESERVES at our hands, a justification from the slander of the infidel, that it is at best an imbecile and worn out and dreamy sentimentalism. It deserves to be lifted up as the conservator of the glories it has created; and since by the breath of its inspiration, life’s great ocean has been roused from the dead calm of ages into billowy and exulting play; it deserves to be sent forth in a divine glory, visibly to ride upon the whirlwind and direct the storm. Christianity claims, AS A DIVINE RIGHT, the acknowledgment in the face of the universe, that “while it renders carefully unto God the things that are God’s, it renders as carefully unto Cesar the things that are Cesar’s.”

Such then, most imperfectly put, are some of the reasons why American Christians should carry their religion with their duties of citizenship. That they hae not done so hitherto is a fact which needs no argument. So manifestly devoid of all Christian principles is the whole moral code of American politics, that to prove a man positively religious or even severely and Puritanically a moral man, were to destroy all his chances of political popularity and preferment. And this, too, at a time when the great balance of power in this matter is confessedly in the hands of the virtuous and religious. But when, strange to tell, these virtuous and godly men; either from unfounded fear of dishonoring their religion by so earthly a contact; or, from an unutterable contempt of the whole business of such desecrated politics; have stood in their dignity aloof from it altogether. Leaving the matter of popular nominations for office, and the arrangement of platforms, and the projection of great national and state policies, and, in short, the whole real working of our great political machinery—(and mark me here—I am not speaking, nor will I be misunderstood as speaking evil of our Rulers, and Magistrates, and Representatives; in regard of whom religion itself enjoins reverence; and who, for aught we know, are models of all that is honest, and pure, and lovely, and of good report. But I am speaking of that ubiquitous class of irresponsible, yet efficient men, whose calling is to pull the wires of partisanship, and mingle the seething elements in the great political cauldron; and who virtually, at least, color if they do not control our whole national politics)—leaving it all, I say, to the oral outcasts of our social system; to men, bankrupt of all virtuous reputation; to wily demagogues, who would flatter the foul fiend for the sake of his influence; to fawning menials, who would crouch at despot’s feet for the smile of his patronage; to blustering ruffians, whose only elements of moral power are blows and blasphemies; to vaporing patriots and brawling philanthropists who would freely barter their country and their race, and their own souls, for the profits of an office or the outfit of an embassy; to the blind fools of fanaticism, who would trample the Union and Constitution under their feet, and deluge this blessed heritage with flames and blood, and bring down upon their own wives and little ones a worse than Ethiopian bondage, for the sake of the phantom of an abstract and selfish principle, whose practical outworking were a cruelty and a curse. Leaving it, in short, I say, to such things as these—to the low, mercenary, Machiavelian herd that gather in the dens of darkness and sin—to project the programme and distribute the parts of that great play, whose sublime issues are; the glories of our country, and the welfare of a world.

This, and worse than this, is the sad truth about the matter. Pardon me, my brethren, that I feel constrained to stir up with so foul a picture your pure minds by way of remembrance. I confess that to a refined taste it is coarse and revolting. But the pitch was on the canvass! I but touched it and am defiled.

Nevertheless, the picture is neither caricature nor exaggeration; but the sorrowful truth colored too faintly. And all this, too, at a time when as sincerely as ever before private virtue and morality are revered and honored throughout the land; when the great mass and majority of our population; north and south; east and west; of every party, and every state; are proverbially honest, and intelligent and law-abiding, and patriotic, and earnestly desiring the application of a pure and religious morality to the whole complex machinery of government. And when it needs only a religious courage and consecration, to take hold on those great interests; and this whole vampire brood, that fatten on the nation’s heart would hide their heads in shame, as serpents from a sun-burst.

It is time, then, we say—high time that religious men roused themselves to a sense of their political responsibilities. Moralists, indeed, tell us—from the pulpit, sometimes—that Christianity claims no power over a State, and no official connexion with it. But what, I pray these men, is a State? An abstraction—an idea! No, indeed! Simply an aggregate of individual and immortal men; and with every one of these men Christianity should have an immortal connexion; and over them it has a claim, pre-eminent and eternal. It is time, then, that the precise bearing of Christian principles upon legislation, and the administration and general policy of our government, were understood and acted on. Not that Christianity may be established by law; but that our laws may be established by Christianity. Not that the Gospel asks alliance with the State, but that the State sorely needs the conserving influences of the Gospel. It is time that Christianity came abroad from its cloistered sanctity, to acquit itself of its great civil and national responsibilities. And spite of the whole howling herd of infidelity and irreligion, (who in this, are only true to their instincts, and do after their kind)—it is time for Christian men, and Christian ministers—now so busy with the minutiae of private and minor immoralities. Uttering fierce denunciations against slight heresies in a man’s creed, and trifling inconsistencies in man’s conduct. Seeing well to it, that a little child does not laugh loud on the Sabbath, and that a man’s face does not graciously smile at any questionable amusement. Loud in the outcry of “heresy” and “hypocrisy” against men, honestly striving to walk in the ways of godliness. I say it is time for such Christian ministers and men, to walk forth to a broader field, and to a loftier standpoint; to cast an indignant glance over our civil and national short-comings; to launch the fiery denunciations of our blessed Redeemer, as “serpents” and “vipers” against irresponsible placemen and their unprincipled tools; and to pour the glorious light of the Gospel of God, into the whole hideous den of political abominations.

And this, then, is our religious business this day, in this temple of Jehovah. We have come up, with one common thank-offering unto God, for our great national beatitudes. Beatitudes so wide and so wonderful, that the eye moistens and the heart bounds, as we contemplate our great birthright. God’s great gift to us, not merely as men, but mainly as Christians. For, whatever we are, or may be, we owe to the Gospel. All our social and national influences—all the canvass of our commerce—all the enterprise of our market-places—all the breadth and wealth of our husbandry—all the machinery of our trade, and the pomp of our great cities. All! All! Have grown up to us under the shadow of this Cross, and owe all their goodness, and glory, and power, to the sprinkled Blood from Mount Calvary. And coming with some sense of the greatness of our blessings—God claims at our hands, as the only fit “sacrifice of thanksgiving,” such a consecration of ourselves to his service, as shall send us abroad in our strongest endeavors to keep the blest fires of liberty bright on these altars;–and transmit, undimmed of one glory, our free institutions to an hundred generations that shall come after us.

Such a religious consecration can, and can alone, save us from the tides of infidelity, and corruption, and moral death, that are rolling in upon us. Let Christian men go bravely forth, carrying their religion as a light, and a power, and a conserving influence, into our political machinery, and nothing out of Heaven an impede or weaken us. Who speaks in fear of foreign aggression? Why, sirs, Gibraltar is not more steadfast and secure against the dash of its sea-surges, than we against the wildest assaults of the banded war-power of the world’s every despot. Who talks about “disunion”—and the severance of this great national confederacy? Why, sirs! The fanatic and the fool who thinks to accomplish it, might better think to sever the mighty bond that unites the Solar system, and blow with his foul breath those glorious stars away that march in God’s great law of gravitation round the blaze of the sun.

Ay! Ay! If borne radiantly abroad as the light and the savor of our earnest lives, along the vales, and by the streams, and athwart the great hills of our blessed land, this heavenly Gospel have free course and be glorified; then, spite of every storm upon the seas, and every cloud upon the firmament, are our foundations as the everlasting mountains, and our blessedness as the immutable love of our Heavenly Father. And so, upon the sincerity of our religious consecration on such festal days as this, depend, under God, these momentous issues.

Oh! We are here to-day, not merely to unite in a great national hallelujah, but to work out a great prophetic problem in the face of the universe. To bring forth the data for the solving the solemn question,–Whether this national hallelujah of thanksgiving hath to God the character of a birthday gratulation over our luxuriant youth—or a funeral wail over our already smitten and departing glories.—Whether these shadows that brood to-day along our national landscapes, are passing away from a rising, or lengthening and deepening with a descending sun.—Whether the giant Babe which God’s hand, amid tempests and storms, has rocked into majestic strength in this great cradle of the West: imbued with the gentle spirit of the Gospel; and filled, as to its great heart, with Divine Love; shall come forth to its earnest manhood, sandalled to walk the round world as a deliverer; and safe, therefore, under God’s own shield, to mount to the loftiest summit of national glory. Or, alas! alas! Whether, with the madness of a fool’s atheism within it, shall leap from that cradle like a roused giant, to rush in mad strength on the bosses of God’s buckler, and perish as a reed in the crashing fire of God’s thunderbolt

Sermon – Memorial Day – 1875

Below is a Memorial Day sermon by Rev. Jewell, preached in San Fransisco on May 29, 1875. See additional sermons on Memorial Day here and here.

THE NATION’S DEAD

CELEBRATION OF

MEMORIAL DAY, SATURDAY, MAY 29, 1875,BY THE

GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC.

THE DECORATION OF SOLDIERS’ GRAVES,
SERVICES AT THE CEMETERIES – PRAYERS AND ORATIONS,
THE EVENING AT PACIFIC HALL,

ORATIONS BY GOV. PACHECO AND REV. DR. JEWELL.

SAN FRANCISCO:
ALTA CALIFORNIA BOOK AND JOB PRINTING HOUSE,
No. 529 California Street.

REV. MR. JEWELL’S ORATION.

Mr. President and Fellow Citizens: Words never seem more meaningless and feeble, than on an occasion like the present, yet are never consecrated to holier uses, than when they embalm such deeds, as we today are seeking to communicate. Yet we find encouragement in that. Historic precedent, declares the value of speech, and its power in reproducing the heroism, in which the nations of the past have gloried. It was thus that Marathon became the mother of Thermopylae. Thermopylae of Salamis, and Salamis of Platea.

It has been said that the tomb of Leonidas as long as an annual oration was delivered from its side, produced a yearly crop of heroes. It was thus that the dead body of Lucretia brought forth the liberators of Rome. Romans begat Romans, not more by raising triumphal arches to her victorious Consuls than by the constant recital of their glorious history.

Egypt not only reared obelisks and monuments to her braves, but on them carved the history of their bravery.

Greece enacted that her heroes slain should have an honored sepulture, amid imposing rites. She encased their ashes in cypress and gold, and after leaving them in state for four days, bore them to their resting place, amid fountains, and walks, and stately columns, amid groves sacred to Minerva, their tutelary Goddess, made doubly beautiful by monuments and statues carved by her illustrious masters. And here standing upon some lofty platform, her most eloquent orators would pronounce their valor in words of thrilling pathos.

Germany embalms the heroism of her sons in grateful sons and story, and makes their children feel, “’Tis sweet to die for Faderland.”

France not only confers her Legions of Honor, but chronicles the act of her heroes in fitting words.

England confers her titles of nobility, and grants her chieftains an honored sepulture in Westminster Abbey.

If these have thus sought to perpetuate the memory of their heroes slain, and thus reproduce their lofty example, what shall Americans not do to honor the resting place and memory of her fallen braves, of more than Roman or Spartan valor? Ours is indeed a nobler tribute, because it springs not from a monarch’s edict, but from millions of grateful, loyal hearts. Less demonstrative and imposing, it is true, but more heartfelt and appreciative – the simple commemorative services by which a nation saved, would tell the story of its gratitude. It sweeps the heart-strings with a touch of tenderness unknown to nations of the past, for it tells of privileges more exalted preserved to us; it tells of a patriotism more lofty and of heroism more sublime than was ever known by any nation of the world.

How thrillingly beautiful and touching the incipient history of this day, and the peculiar nature of the memorial offerings then made!

The ceremony is said to be older than the organization by whom it is chiefly superintended now.

In 1864, thousands of our sons and brothers who had worn the blue were sleeping in soldiers’ graves all through the Southern States, and those who would could not and those who would not visit them or do them honor. Amid the beauties of the vernal bloom, the women of the South went forth to strew flowers on the graves of their slain.

Immediately those whose dusky brows had been baptized with the sparkling dews of Freedom, and knowing to whom they owed their emancipation, anxious to recognize their obligations to the vicarious sufferings, toil and death of those who slept in the unhonored graves, and with a love and devotion as lofty as ever thrilled a human heart went forth to field and wood, and gathered the wild flowers in their beauty. Under the cover of a darkness, only relieved by the twinkling stars, they stole softly and silently to the slighted graves of our fallen heroes; and bedewing them with tears and breathing benedictions over them, reverently and tenderly laid thereon their humble floral offerings.

Beautiful and fitting initiation of a custom which is now fully enshrined in the hearts of us all, and shall be continued by our children’s children to the end of time. As beautiful and touching and well-nigh as religiously sacred as the offerings of the women who came to the sepulcher, very early in the morning, while it was yet dark, for fear of the Jews, bringing spices with which to anoint the body of their Lord. Each recognized in the one whose grave they blessed; a Savior, from degrading chains, to a heritage of manhood. But what is it that we celebrate, and why do we feel called upon to continue this beautiful and touching observance? Like those who originated the custom, we feel that we are debtors to those who, living or dead, became a part of that great holocaust of blood which stained so many fields of our land, and made so many decks slippery with human gore. It is ours equally with them to sing:

“Four hundred thousand men,
The brave and good and true,
In tangled wood, in the mountain glen,
On battle plain, in prison pen,
Lie dead for me and you.Four hundred thousand of the brave
Have made our ransomed soil their grave,
For me and you.In many a fevered swam
By many a black bayou,
In many a cold and frozen camp
The weary sentinel ceased his tramp,
And died for me and you.From Western plain to ocean tide,
Are stretched the graves of those who died
For me and you.In treason’s prison hold
Their martyr spirits ‘grew
To stature like the saints of old,
While mid dark agonies untold
They starved for me and you.The good, the patient and the tried,
Four hundred thousand men have died,
For me and you.
[Edward C. Porter,”The Nation’s Dead,” Round Table, September 9, 1865.]

How unquestioning and unhesitating the patriotism, and how awfully sublime the uprising! The war took the Nation by surprise. The chief conspirators thought they had effected their object fully. In four years of assiduous care, they had stripped the Northern arsenals and conveyed the arms to the South. They had sent the Navy to the ends of the earth, so that at the critical moment it was good as no Navy. They had reduced the Treasury to bankruptcy, and destroyed its credit , as they thought, hopelessly. They had compelled a weak-spined President to say in his annual message, and contrary, we believe, to his convictions, that the Union was going to pieces and he had no authority to interfere.

We stood watching and trembling as one. State after another declared itself out of the Union. One after another of the Southern forts and arsenals were appropriated. One after another of those educated to the arts of war, in our military schools, joined themselves to the Rebels. A deep and ominous silence seemed to settle down upon us, of the North. It was mysterious, and unintelligible. Some thought it meant distrust of our forms of government. Some even interpreted it as a sympathy with the Southern uprising.

It was as the silence of Nature in the torpid Winter. It was as the hush of life in the darkness of night. It was as the stillness of earth and sky, that precedes the breaking of the tempest.

But no seer could divine what that waking would be. The silence was deep and awful. Men began to feel that the sentiment of loyalty was wanting in American hearts that ours was not a style of nationality to inspire that lofty sentiment.

But we soon learned better. The silence was broken and interpreted. The suppressed fire flamed out. In that mysterious silence the fires of a holy patriotism were nursing themselves, and the glow was becoming hotter and whiter. The pent up forces were moving and accumulating, like the meeting and commingling elements of subterranean fires before the mountain’s summit opens, or the earthquake rocks a continent.

Oh how grand was the bursting forth. It was deeper and broader than the “father of waters.” It was more forceful and impetuous than the gushing life of Spring. It was like the rushing mighty wind, in which was the sounding beat of celestial pinions, and which filled Jerusalem on Pentecost, crowning each mute disciple with cloven tongues of fire.[Acts 2:1-3] No sooner did the electric current smite us with the intelligence that on that April morn the old flag had been dishonored and trailed in Southern dust, than up went the Stars and Stripes hillside of the loyal North, and thousands sprang forth as one man to defend that which had made America tremble as a magic word of hope, among all the down-trodden nationalities of the world.

Then it was, as our noble chief began to speak, the long columns began to move. Soon as the voice was heard, thousands of those who seemed wholly absorbed in industrial pursuits, sprang to arms. At the first call seventy-five thousand responded HERE. Again the call was made, and the answer was in fact and in song,

“We are coming, Father Abraham, our nation to restore
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.”
[Robert Morris, “We Are Coming Father Abraam,” New York Evening Post, July 16, 1862.]Our foreign-born sons, God bless them, stood side by side with those born on American soil.The Irishman followed Sheridan, and the Dutchman “fought mit Sigel.”

Partisanship gave way to patriotism. Douglass, the defeated Presidential candidate, all honor to his memory. Dickinson and Dix stood side by side with those who had been their political antagonists, and from every shade of political complexion came declarations of unconditional loyalty to country. When the war broke out, the London Times predicted that the Rebellion could not be subdued without extreme conscription, and in enforcing this, none could be forced into the service who did not vote for the existing administration.

They knew not the intensity of American patriotism. They forgot that each man here is a sovereign; an integral part of the nation, and calls no man lord and master. That each was striking the blow for himself, and felt the greatness and responsibility of American citizenship. That no man regarded the payment of any sacrifice or treasure too great which was required to perpetuate the Republic in the consummation of her missions as the political and civil evangel of the nations.

Men were there as privates in the ranks who were fit to be Presidents and Ministers of State; and men there died whose ashes are worthy of sepulture in Westminster Abbey nay, more, that are worthy of being buried in American soil and have their graves annually showered with the floral offerings of their surviving comrades-in-arms. Oh, how sublime was the scene. Souls took fire with the holiest patriotism.

Mothers, hiding the starting tears, sent their sons to battle, with tender benedictions; wives, and sisters, and maiden lovers, girding themselves with womanly fortitude to meet an hour awful with anguish, bade adieu to the young and brave, who were to return no more.

Fathers forced back the manly tenderness that choked in their words of inspiring counsel, and little children clung with indefinable forebodings to loved papas they should never embrace again.

Our streets echoed to the soldier’s tread, and “God bless you” was breathed in accents tremulous with hope and fear.

Our army was the wonder of the world. Over 2,600,000 soldiers entered the ranks, and the heroism which sent them forth remained with them to the last.

How bright seem today the examples of illustrious daring which then fascinated the gaze of an admiring world.

A Sherman mowing a swath thirty miles wide through the very center of the rebellious territory, and he serried ranks of the protesting chivalry.

A Hooker charging the enemy above the clouds on Lookout Mountain.

A Sheridan streaming through forty miles of foam and dust, and bringing order out of chaos and organizing victory out of defeat.

A Farragut lashed to the mast-head of the Hartford, and amid the storms of shot and shell, winning immortal triumphs.

A Grant holding on like a bulldog to the throat of the Rebellion, even when Lee sent his Generals with an army to the very gates of Washington.

Come with me for a moment and let me lift the curtain, and take a look into the tent of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Potomac. It is past the hour of midnight. Sad hearts are entering there, for it is a gloomy hour in the great campaign of the Wilderness, a night following a day of disaster. The army was fearfully hewn in pieces, and it seemed almost inevitable that the morrow would find our battered, bleeding regiments, reeling and staggering toward Washington. Hard by them on the gory field lay fifteen thousand of our noble braves, wounded, dying, dead.

A file of noble officers, one by one, reach the door of that tent, give a silent salute, and pass in, and as silently take their seats.

Meade, Sedgwick, Hancock, Warren, and others, make up the circle. For thirty minutes not a word is uttered. It is an awful silence, which at length is broken by the most reticent man among them. The question passes from one to another, “General can you tell me what is to be done?” A sad and tremulous “No!” came from the lips of each. The Chieftain seized a pen, hastily passed it over a fragment of paper, and passing it to Meade, and, “Break the seal at four o’clock and march.”

He did the same for each of them, and each retired ignorant of what was ordered, but anticipating a retreat. Anything else seemed madness run mad. Had they known that the orders were to advance a possible mutiny had followed.

The next morning, before 5 o’clock, the army moved and within an hour Lee’s scouts stood before him, disclosing the state of affairs. He read the dispatch; he tore it in fragments – and, stamping vehemently, he exclaimed: “Sir, our enemy have a leader at last, and our cause is lost, sir, lost!”

He supposed us hopelessly hewn in pieces, and had ordered that his men be allowed to take a long rest that morning; but awoke to see the army he thought demoralized, flanking him and cutting off his base. He fought and retreated and acknowledged his doom was sealed. Who but the man of iron nerve could have met the responsibilities of that midnight hour? I confess to a liking of that kind of Caesarism it be.

It is recorded of a French soldier of many battles that although offered promotion, he persisted in remaining in the ranks. His admiring and grateful sovereign sent him a sword inscribed, “First among the Grenadiers of France.” When he fell on the field of glory, the Emperor ordered his heart embalmed and placed in a silver case, and passed into the keeping of his company, with the command that his name be called at each roll-call, and the oldest grenadier respond, “Dead upon the field of honor.” Oh, how many names are left to us, upon the mention of which the response should ever be: “DEAD UPON THE FIELD OF HONOR.” When in reverential love, as this anniversary returns, and floral wreaths shall fall from comrade hands upon the honored graves of many a hero slain, shall not angels, who keep the camp-fires along celestial heights, hear a million throbbing hearts bearing gratefully the answer to the roll-call of our heroes, BAKER – Dead upon the field of honor. LYON – Dead upon the field of honor. MITCHELL – Dead upon the field of honor. RENO, KEARNEY, MANSFIELD, WADSWORTH, SEDGWICK, McPHERSON – all dead upon the field of honor. “Probe a little deeper,” said a wounded soldier to the surgeon feeling for a ball in the region of the heart, “Probe a little deeper, Surgeon, and you will find the Emperor.”

Oh, how many an idolized commander is enshrined in the hearts of comrades her tonight. Well may you lead us to these sacred shrines, and allow our tears to mingle with yours as you pay them you undying homage.

They sleep well, and henceforth their names belong to American history. These mounds will never cease to preach liberty and heroism more eloquently than the living orator. It is well that comrades move in garlanded processions to the shrines of deeds so immortal. It is a pageantry burdened with honors which can find no other adequate expression.

But we are not to forget that it is not alone the personal heroism manifested, that justifies these memorial demonstrations. It was not a mere match of prowess or display of personal courage. It was not a mere exhibition of matchless endurance and patient suffering for championship. It was not a a mere gladiatorial combat for the entertainment and admiration of the on-looking Nations. It was an issue between right and wrong; between political truth and heresy; between preservation and destruction. It was a conflict for the life of our nationality, “the green graves of our sires, God and our native land.” In vain all the struggles of the past; in vain all the sufferings of the heroes of the Mayflower; in vain the struggles of our Revolutionary sires; in vain the blood that crimsoned Bunker Hill and Lexington, Monmouth and Yorktown, had not America’s sons shown themselves worthy custodians of freedom’s lofty heritage.

It was the last great conflict for freedom, the point of history upon which hung the hopes of freedom’s lovers among all nations. It was the culmination of a conflict of a thousand years.

Other lands had struggled for freedom. Greece struggled long and bravely, and come short of the goal. Poland and Hungary in their turn had grappled with the oppressor, and again been ground into the earth. Again and again had our exalted guest, the Goddess of Human Rights, come from dungeons with the dust of ages on her garments – from chains which had eaten into her soul – from scaffolds, with the blood of martyrdoms on her forehead – from attics, where she had drunk her tears in the bitterness of her soul, and looked in among the nations for a place where she might remain as a presiding genius.

I see her in the forests of Germany, away back before the Christian era proper, as is her swathing bands she lay nursed by those liberty-loving tribes.

I see her as she comes to England, and in her childhood asserts herself, as with Magna Charta in her grasp, she resisted Absolutism through so many eventful years. I see her in her youth, standing with Cromwell, and uttering her protest against the Norman-French idea of sovereignty. I see her, finally, as she came across the sea to find in our loved land a broader field and a more congenial clime. I see her, as she stands with our fathers at Yorktown, Monmouth and Bunker Hill.

I see her breathing on that noble assembly in old Independence Hall, as one by one, with trembling hand, they pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

I see her as she smiles and weeps at Valley Forge. I see her as she bends over a Washington as he prays, and says, “We must, we shall prevail.”

I see her, as afterward she presided over a history, which, verified before a wondering world, had all the charms of romance.

But did we not also see her, as on our National Birthday Anniversary we read our “Bill of Rights,” which pronounced all men free and equal, bring a tear from her fair cheek, as she caught the echo of that disrespectful titter which ran around the world, as four millions, bearing the image of their Maker, clanked their chains and groaned for freedom?

Of heroes of the Blue, we say: “Your devotion not only bound the Union, but unbound the slave and buried beyond the hope of resurrection, the shameful relic of a barbarous age.”

For this all nations thank you, and shall continue to thank you to the end of time.

And may we not rejoice that in that fiery ordeal the pestilent heresy of State Rights was burned up? And hereafter we are to be known as an absolute organic unity? Woe, unmingled woe, to the profane hand which shall ever seek to sever us. No North, no South, no East, no West!

A union of lakes, and a union of lands
A union of principles none may sever,
A union of hearts, and a union of hands
The American Union Forever.
[George Pope Morris, Poems (New York: Charles Scribner, 1860), pp. 68-69, “The Flag of Our Union.”]

The war and its attendant history has made us more capable of self-government.

The fundamental principles of our institutions have been made clearer and dearer to us.

The whole people have accepted as never before, the whole democratic theory of nationality. “For weal or for woe,” our future is the future of a consistent and inexorable democracy.

To the comrades of the Grand Army of the Republic here gathered, allow me a parting word. To the life-long enjoyment of the peaceful heritage your valor helped to win – to our sanctuaries, our homes, our hearts, we receive and welcome you. Never was the Angel that records the deeds of true heroes made busier than when your brave hearts and strong hands furnished him employment. Your bravery challenged and received the homage of the world. Great interests confided to your hands were not betrayed, and a grateful nation shall continue to pay you honor. Our children shall be taught to lisp your names with reverence, and our children’s children shall moisten your resting places with their tears. Ye heroes of many a hard and well-fought battle, we will never, never forget the story of your heroism. Our youth shall emulate your virtues. Future generations shall study your record, and transmit to others the story of your sacrifice; and those who, in after years, shall join in the services of the Soldiers’ Memorial Day, inspired by your glorious example as they drop the garland upon your patriot grave, shall lift the hand to Heaven and say, “THIS SHALL BE LIBERTY’S HOME FOREVER.”

At the conclusion of the exercises, one of the Brothers of the Grand Army sang “John Brown.” Being accompanied by the band and a chorus of the entire audience, after which the meeting was adjourned, satisfied with the days’ good done.

Sermon – Artillery Election – 1853

This sermon was preached by Rev. Hubbard Winslow in Massachusetts on June 6, 1853.

SERMON

DELIVERED BEFORE THE

ANCIENT AND HON. ARTILLERY COMPANY,

MONDAY, JUNE 6, 1853.

ON THE 215TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CORPS.

BY REV. HUBBARD WINSLOW,
OF BOSTON.

Boston, June 6, 1853.

My Dear Sir,

By an unanimous vote of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, the Officers of the past year were directed to present their grateful acknowledgments for the very instructive and eloquent Discourse delivered by you this day, on the occasion of their Anniversary, and to ask the favor of a copy for the press. It gives me much pleasure to be the organ of the wishes of the Company, and of the Officers recently associated with me in command.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
FRANCIS BRINLEY

Rev. Hubbard Winslow,
6 Alliston Street.
________

Boston, June 9, 1853.

Hon. Francis Brinley:

Dear Sir,—Be pleased to accept and to present to the other gentlemen of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, my grateful acknowledgment of the indulgence with which you have been pleased to regard the Discourse delivered by me on the occasion of your Anniversary, and to consider the manuscript at your entire service.

With sentiments of highest esteem, I have the honor to remain,
Your obedient servant,
HUBBARD WINSLOW.

SERMON.REVELATION 11:15.

And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord and his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever.

Without a gracious revelation from heaven the race of man is irrecoverably lost in idolatry and sin. Without this, in vain are the combined forces of science, art, arms, commerce, wealth, and all other human means, to elevate man to the knowledge of God and the practice of true virtue.

Such a revelation it has pleased God to grant. Its light began to dawn immediately after the fall in paradise. It is a kingdom of redemption, whose king is the Son of God, who appeared “when the fullness of the time was come,” according to the divine promise, to offer up himself in the cause of human salvation.

Should your present speaker deviate so far from the usual custom on this occasion, as to contemplate the subject of Military Institutions only as included in a more comprehensive theme, his apology is that it has been so ably discussed by his predecessors as to render its particular consideration at present superfluous.

I propose, with your indulgence, to offer reasons for believing that, in response to the utterance of the seventh angel in our text, pure Christianity, the only religion congenial to free civil institutions, is destined to become the permanent religion of the entire human family; and also to indicate the especial relation of our own country to this great event. I place Christianity in the van of the march of liberty, as pioneering rather than following true civilization, and as being at once both the parent and defence of all free institutions. My belief that all nations are to become civilized, elevated, refined, and to enjoy the inestimable blessings of liberty, is founded upon and precisely commensurate with my belief that pure Christianity is to prevail over the whole world.

My argument will be addressed to such as admit the truth and excellence of our religion, but are skeptical in regard to its success. It has been so long struggling with unsubdued foes; such large portions of mankind are sunk in gross idolatry; so much individual and organized hostility “against the Lord and against his anointed” still prevails on all sides; and there is so much deeply-seated infidelity, both secret and avowed, even in Christian lands, that the wisest of men sometimes find their faith put to the test. They are tempted either to doubt that interpretation of the Scriptures which asserts the universal triumph of Christianity, or to question the absolute authority of the Scriptures themselves.

But we are of those who believe that, despite of all obstacles, this divine religion, pure and undefiled, is to obtain complete victory over the world.

I. It is my first object to exhibit the rational grounds for this belief.

1. Christianity will prevail because it is TRUE.

Truth has a natural power over the human mind. Through prejudice and sin men may be induced to reject it, but in so doing they act against their proper nature; in resisting truth they hold their minds in a forced state. Although error may seem for a time triumphant, steadily advancing truth overtakes it at last and lays an omnipotent hand on the intellect. In both the natural and moral world, truth is progressive, and always ultimately sure of its object.

Look for the moment at the resistance encountered by some of the truths of natural science; for instance, those respecting the solar system. Five hundred years before Christ, Phthagoras taught, in part, the true doctrine upon this subject. But it was despised and rejected by men, and for ages seemed to be dead and buried. But truth cannot die; nor can it be always restrained. We may as well attempt to chain the internal fires of the globe. When those fires seem to lie dormant, they are accumulating force for fresh action. So truth, when apparently ineffective, is preparing to shake the intellectual world, and to assume practical dominion over it.

After the lapse of nearly two thousand years, the true doctrine of the solar system found another advocate. Copernicus published to the world that the sun is the centre of the system, that the earth moves round it and also on its own axis. Again was this truth assailed. But was it finally defeated? No. Truth has ample time to vindicate its claims, and it suffers noting from delay. Another hundred years rolled by and Gallileo arose. He invented the telescope, and with the combined aid of mathematical and telescopic evidence, reasserted the truth. But the day of triumph still lingered. Truth’s champion was imprisoned and his books were burned.

Another century passed, and Newton arose. His splendid discoveries in optics and his vast improvement of the reflecting telescope, combined with his towering mathematical genius to bring forth to the world, in bold defiance, this same despised and rejected truth. The conflict was long and severe, but every struggle gave new advantage to truth, and at length it compelled error to yield and prejudice to hide her face, while it marched resistlessly onward to take possession of the whole enlightened world.

Now the doctrines of Christianity being as true to the moral universe as those of Copernicus are to the natural, their final success is equally certain. There is in error a principle of innate destructibility; especially it cannot endure hard usage. It requires a peculiarly favorable adjustment of the elements; it needs the hothouse nursery of the selfish passions. And even patronage herself, with hands full of gold, cannot confer immortality upon it. Truth, on the other hand, survives by its own inherent vitality. Rough handling may for a time retard its progress, but cannot destroy it. It will live and thrive, even on bleak, wintry rocks, and amidst howling blasts.

For several centuries great ingenuity and labor were bestowed upon attempts to change the baser metals into gold; so have human device been employed to make false systems of religion, such as Paganism, Mahommetanism, and various corruptions of Christianity, pass for truth. But these base metals cannot be converted into gold; nor can they always pass for it; for the human mind eventually detects imposition.

In virtue of the same influence by which commanding intellects carry their own generation forward in some truths, they often hold subsequent generations back from embracing others. A single illustration of this fact will suffice. Galen, the illustrious prince of the Greek physicians, flourished in the year of our Lord 130. He taught surgery as well as medicine, and was in advance of all his contemporaries. Truth and error were blended in his teaching, but his greatness gave such currency to his errors, that for centuries it was unpardonable presumption to question any of his positions. This subsequently prevented men from arriving at the truth respecting the circulation of the blood.

At length Harvey arose. But even then mankind had scarcely reached a point of knowledge at which to cope successfully with the great name of Galen. History records, that “the promulgation of the truth by Harvey respecting the circulation of the blood, roused the attention of all Europe. The old professors, accustomed to pay a blind and implicit deference to the authority of Galen, which was now utterly subverted, and ashamed to confess that their whole life had been spent in teaching the grossest errors, took up their pens in opposition to the author of these innovations. One party asserted that the discovery was not new one; that it had been known to several persons, and indeed to all antiquity. Others attempted to disprove his statements by experiment and reasoning.” But over all these obstacles the truth at last prevailed.

Similar to this has been the conflict between Christianity and infidelity. Some infidels, such as Hume and Bollingbroke, have attempted to prove that Christianity is not true to nature. Others, such as Hobbs, Taylor, and Volney, have maintained that it is so very natural that any person could ascertain its principles without a revelation; that they were in fact understood and taught by the Egyptians, long before the Bible was written.

Here then we have two classes directly opposing each other in their attempts to subvert Christianity, just as the two classes opposed each other in their attempts to subvert science. The result in both cases has been the same.

Thus men of great reputation have frequently embalmed and transmitted error with truth, as amber combines and preserves the precious with the vile; but the progress of human knowledge at length forces a separation; only the truth is finally retained, the error is rejected. Hence, whenever an individual has ascertained a truth, whether of science or religion, and has cast it forth upon the human mind, he may set his heart at rest as to its final success. It will assuredly work its way through all obstructions, and will finally command the universal homage of mankind. In this view, we can look for nothing less than a complete and triumphant victory for Him who is, in the highest and most absolute sense, “THE TRUTH.”

2. Christianity will prevail because it is GOOD. It is as good as it is true, as perfectly adapted to our moral as to our intellectual nature. The happiest portions of the world are precisely those which enjoy most of its refining and ennobling influence; and they are the happinest because they enjoy it. Now, there is a tendency in goodness, as well as in truth, to gain upon and eventually to win the convictions of men; hence a religion which eminently elevates and blesses mankind must eventually receive their homage.

Do you say that men oppose Christianity despite of its perceived utility? This is rather true of individuals than of communities.

There is a power in consociated interests to foster whatever is proved to be useful. Hence, so fast as the nations of the earth become fully persuaded that Christianity renders them wiser and happier, they stretch forth their hands to receive it. Selfish individuals may hate it, because it makes war on their lusts, but the commanding voice of the public conspires with that of all wise and good men to declare in its favor.

Precisely the same principle obtains here as in the arts and sciences. The art of printing was at first resisted by thousands of individuals, because it destroyed their business and their gains; but when its general utility became manifest, they were compelled to yield. Individual selfishness must succumb to the public weal. So of steam navigation, rail-roads, manufactories, all abbreviations of labor. They are at first opposed by many because they conflict with private interests, but they at last compel submission to the general good.

The same law holds in the advancement of moral interests. The cause of temperance, for example, even in its truest and most Christian form, at first encountered great opposition. It had to struggle against some of the most depraved appetites and most selfish passions of men. But as its utility became manifest, lust and avarice were compelled to yield. The victory is not fully won, but the result is certain. The good cause is advancing, slowly but surely, and you can no more stop it than you can arrest the sun in his glorious path. The same is true of every vice which Christianity condemns, and of every virtue which she enjoins. By the all-prevailing power of her goodness, she is thus gradually subduing the world to her laws.

The character of Christ and the benefits of his religion are constantly becoming better understood. Hence his moral power over the world is practically increasing.

It is an instructive fact, that all attacks upon Christianity have been aimed at false views of its moral tendencies, as well as of its intellectual claims. The ground on which infidelity stands is, therefore, by the progress of human knowledge, constantly diminishing.

3. Christianity will prevail because it HARMONIZES WITH TRUE SCIENCE. This harmony is unaccountable on any other supposition than that the religion in question is from above and is destined to prevail. For when it was first promulgated most of the modern sciences were unknown. Now as Christianity assumes the truth of the Old Testament, were science subversive of the writings of Moses and the Prophets, it would be equally so of Christ and the Apostles. For although the Bible was given to teach us religion and not science, yet, if it reveals the true religion, it must have come from the Creator of all things, and will therefore assume only that with which science, in her amplest unfolding, fully harmonizes. But as both science and philology require profound study, we should hold judgment in abeyance respecting discrepancies, and patiently await the decision of mature investigation. It is often as true in religion as in science, that a “little learning is a dangerous thing.”

Observe, then, how the modern sciences, in their infancy, have threatened the Bible, but as they have advanced to maturity have become its firm advocates.

When modern Astronomy first scaled the heavens and walked those mighty spaces amidst flaming worlds, she looked askance upon the Bible. Its religion was in her dazzled eye, a small and contemptible affair, unworthy of so vast and splendid a universe. But as science and philology advanced, they unitedly espoused the conclusion that the principles of Christianity and those of Astronomy are strictly analogous, in simplicity, extent, grandeur, and design; that they obviously proceed from the same infinite mind, embrace the moral and physical departments of the same universe, and contemplate the same grand object.

Chemistry supposed, at first, that she could dispense with the living God, by referring all the phenomena of life and thought to certain physical agencies. But subsequent researches have proved that no such agencies exist adequate to the effects in question, and that we must recognize the power of that “Eternal Life” revealed in the Bible, before we can account for the first throb of created life or kindling of created intellect.

Geology, no less presumptuous, had scarcely begun to dig into the rocks when she vainly supposed she had there found testimony against the Mosaic record. But more thorough research has conspired with more accurate philology to demonstrate, beyond a question, that the cosmogonies of Moses and of science are, in their leading facts, essentially the same. Indeed the more thoroughly we study the two, the firmer is our conviction that no human being, in the age of Moses, could have described the order and progress of creation as he did, unless under the guidance of Him who alone foresees the developments of science.

The successive stages or epochs in the work of creation, following each other in the exact order indicated by physical laws, are written with equal distinctness and exact accordance upon the historic rocks and the inspired record. The stage through which the world is now passing, the period of God’s rest “from all his work which he had made,” is rendered no less evident by Geology than by revelation; for, if the one asserts that God ceased from creating, the other demonstrates that there have been no more creations since this period commenced.

The recent discoveries of Layard and of other distinguished Archaeologists, have tended alike to detect more or less of truth and fable in many of the profane histories, but to establish, so far as they go, the entire truth of all that is related in the sacred Scriptures. “The Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris, all seem to be yielding their testimony to the truth of the Bible.”

In fact all the discoveries of science and art are conducting us to the same faith. No other religion can endure their light. Paganism cannot; Mahommetanism cannot; the religion of the Chinese cannot; all false religions vanish before it like night-shades before the rising sun. It is becoming increasingly evident that the Bible, though the oldest of books, and written, much of it, by uneducated men, is yet in advance of all the sciences, arts, governments, and refinements of mankind. We can enter no science which it has not anticipated; we can make no improvements in laws, politics, social and domestic institutions, for which it has not amply provided; and its literary gems are excelled in classic beauty and brilliancy by those of no age or country.

Men have from time to time advanced imposing speculations subversive of its divine authority, but they and their speculations have passed away together. Many a perverted intellect has risen up, like a flaming comet, in its lawless course threatening wide disaster, which has soon disappeared forever from our moral horizon, while the true luminary of the world has been steadily ascending higher and higher towards its zenith in the heavens. And it needs not the eye of prophecy to see that the time must surely come, when all the congregated wisdom of the world will do homage to Him who spoke “as never man spake.”

4. Christianity will prevail, because it HAS PREVAILED. Greater obstacles remain not than it has already surmounted; mightier miracles are uncalled for than it has already wrought; no more signal victories than it has repeatedly won, will unfurl its triumphant banners over the whole earth. Our argument here is to the effect that the almighty power of God is in it. What this religion has done, therefore, it can still do. That living Omnipotence, which made the throne of the Caesars tremble at the name of Jesus; which prostrated the marble domes of heathen temples in the dust; which forced down the boasting science and literature of the Augustine age; which overthrew the time-honored dynasties of Jewish and Pagan prejudice; which, in the scoffer’s own emphatic words, “turned the world upside down,” can erect altars to the true God under the whole heavens. Not to believe here, is to make all history false; to doubt on this point, is to sin against our own senses. Truly, if John, in the dawn of Christianity, could feel assured of its triumph as of a present reality; and if the stubborn incredulity of multitudes of Jews was resolved into unwavering faith, unbelief in us is a shameful marvel. If the early Christians saw in the dawning light of the future, we see the blazing light of the past.

What wonders has this religion wrought! In defiance of all the ignorance, prejudice, lust and sottishness of mankind; despite of the meager facilities, in the early ages, for circulating thought and extending a permanent moral influence; and in resistance to all the canonized authority of idol systems, and the frowning menace of hostile kingdoms, it has steadily made its way; enlightening, elevating, disenthralling our race; revolutionizing states and empires; until it has boldly challenged and has received the willing homage of the most enlightened portions of the whole world.

In the mean time science, commerce, art, all forms of human enterprise, are bringing the distant members of the human family together. A valuable truth elicited by a mind here, speedily finds its way, as on the wings of the wind, to minds in remotest lands; a benevolent affection kindled in an American heart, may soon make itself felt by hearts in India, China, and the distant Islands of the ocean. Indeed, the deep throbbing of Christian liberty and the mighty impulse of Christian enterprise, in America, are at this moment prostrating the temples of pagan idolatry, and are even shaking the Celestial Empire to its centre. Already the eye of hope sees America stretching the hand of paternal embrace to lands of Christian liberty across the Pacific.

The direct instrumentalities of Christianity are also increasing both in number and effectiveness. Bibles, Tracts, Colporteurs, Missionaries, are diffusing light, and many are praying for the coming of God’s kingdom. The Holy Spirit, without whose influence no good is accomplished, is making the gospel effectual to the salvation of those who receive it.

Finally, in connection with these multiform encouragements, are the cheering voices of inspired prophecy, proclaiming the benign purpose of God that all flesh shall see his salvation. The decree of the Almighty has gone forth. “Hath He said it? And shall he not do it?” Sound the glad tidings over land and sea; let them roll upward on waves of silvery light to the highest heavens, and downward on the dark clouds of thundering terror to hell; let angelic worlds believe and rejoice, let “the devils also believe and tremble.”

II. Time forbids to speak as freely of the especial relation of our own country to this cause as I intended.

Let it be remembered, that while Christianity fosters and protects science, art, domestic and social institutions, civil government, all that elevates and adorns humanity, she also makes them subservient to her own welfare. She does not extend her dominions by the Bible and the Church alone, indispensable as these are, but by appropriating to her service the intellect, enterprise, commerce, wealth and power of Christian nations.

In this view no intelligent person can resist the conviction that our nation, in connection with our parent-nation, Great Britain, is destined to exert a controlling religious influence over the destinies of mankind. Its entire history, up to this hour, clearly marks it for some mighty agency.

When we notice signal interpositions of heaven in the early histories of nations, as in the Hebrew and the Roman, we justly conclude that some great design is to be accomplished by them. These nations have formed epochs and made their broad marks upon the world. What countries have not felt their influence?

But how far does our own nation transcend all others in the prophetic grandeur of its history? A land stretching from ocean to ocean, and from the burning tropics to the poles; possessing measureless wealth of soil, of precious and useful metals and minerals, of bays and navigable waters; of all that nature, in her widest reach of benefaction, ever presented to mortals; what was Canaan or Italy compared with it? This land was sacredly concealed from the civilized world until the constellated miracles of the fifteenth century had poured their lights upon mankind, and had thus prepared the way for a great and final demonstration. It then rose to view, as from ocean depths, and invited Christian civilization to its savage but generous bosom.

And what has less than four centuries wrought? Already does the vast wilderness bud and blossom as the rose. Already we behold a territory of more than a thousand miles square overspread with smiling landscapes, teeming with the products of cultivation; adorned with rich and splendid cities, with manufactures and commerce, with schools and churches, all rivaling those of the other hemisphere; and to crown all, an independent, Christian nation, not yet a hundred years old, standing firmly up in the strength of a giant manhood.

The character of the founders and early guardians of our nation should be especially noticed in this connection. They were the rarest men of the rarest race. The settlers of New England generally, and, to a great extent, of the central and southern States, were eminently of this character. They came to America, they braved the hardships and perils of the wilderness, they hewed down the forests, they planted these institutions, that they might serve God as faithful Christians in advancing the cause of human redemption. They were intelligent, high-souled, far-reaching, determined men. They were both lamb-wise and lion-wise;—towards God, gentle, submissive, humble; towards the hostile powers of man, unflinching and resistless.

We have not time to mention the immortal names associated with our colonial history, nor to open the brilliant roll of Franklins, Hamiltons, Jays, Jeffersons, and Adamses, connected with our earliest period as a nation; it will suffice to notice distinctly only one in this connection, the name of Him who was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

Standing in the forefront of the prolonged struggle for liberty, he led our armies against fearful odds, until prolonged jubilant shouts proclaimed us an independent people.

Again, obedient to his country’s call, he ascended the first presidential chair, and by the dignity, impartiality, wisdom and commanding firmness of his administration, set an example for the imitation of his successors and for the admiration of mankind till the end of time. That man was a Christian; and when the millennial anthem shall ascend from the emancipated world, amongst the foremost names enkindling gratitude and praise to heaven will be GEORGE WASHINGTON.

Nor have we time to mention other names only less illustrious, as we trace our history down to the present; but there is ONE, scarcely second even to Washington, which none of us, whatever may be our political views, would consent to pass in silence. When half a century after the Father of his country was laid to rest, a man of gigantic intellect, of invincible honesty, of dauntless courage, of clear and far-reaching vision, of immovable firmness, and of all-embracing patriotism, was demanded, to teach us the nature and design of Republican Institutions; to expound and defend our Constitution; to enforce our obligations to the Federal Compact; to vindicate our commerce; to settle our relations with foreign powers; to save the Union from destruction, and transmit it, with augmented strength and glory, to future generations; that man appeared among us;—and not less manifest is the hand of God in raising him up to complete the work of Washington and establish us in our own goodly inheritance, than it was in raising up Joshua to complete the work of Moses and establish the Israelites in Canaan. That man, too was a Christian; and as in the case of Washington, so in his, “the lying lips, which speak grievous things proudly and contemptuously against the righteous,” will be “put to silence;” the foul breath of slander will eventually waste upon the breeze, and all human lips, the wide world over, will be proud to utter the immortal name, DANIEL WEBSTER.

In raising up men like these to found and guide our nation, what less could heaven have designed than that we should accomplish some signally benign work for our race? We have, it is true, to surmount the evils especially incidental to republics, besides some of those common to other nations, of which the most trying, perhaps, is slavery. But however different our views, all will eventually agree that we ought to “follow the things which make for peace,” and that there is a way to perpetuate the Union, while we elevate and redeem the oppressed, and through them pour into their fatherland the lights of science and religion. Thus “Ethiopia will stretch forth her hands to God.” Benighted Africa, long sunk in abject slavery, will rise up and take her seat among the Christian nations.

In estimating the relative influence which our country is to exert over the destinies of mankind, we should especially notice its prospective greatness. It doubles its population every twenty-five years. At this rate it will contain, in 1953, more than four hundred millions of people; a number equal to half the population of the globe. Boston will cover an area ten miles square, densely settled, and will have two millions of inhabitants. New York will stretch on all sides beyond the rivers bounding Manhattan, and will embrace a population of seven millions. Cincinnati will have three millions of inhabitants; and all the thriving cities of the land will rise, more or less, in like proportions. Railroads and engines, far better than we now have, will connect the ocean at all important points; Oregon and New England, Mexico and Labrador, will be only six days apart. The whole of North America, as to its moral and Christian influence, at least, will be included in this nation, and South America will realize and emulate its example.

Not only will intelligence fly on the magic wires, from sea to sea and from zone to zone, over all parts of this great land, but the lightnings will find a way to bear it from continent, so that antipodes will converse freely with each other. Thus “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”

Under these circumstances, our nation combines the two most important elements for extending its religion, to wit, freedom and strength. Ours is eminently a popular government, calling into activity all orders of mind, and thus investing the entire wealth of the nation’s intellect. It favors virtue, rewards talent, excites enterprise, and thus encourages its enlightened and benevolent subjects to circumnavigate the globe with the blessings of Christianity. There is thus an intimate alliance between true religion and liberty. If this religion lays the foundation and rears the top-stone of civil liberty, the nation blessed with this liberty pours forth the full tide of its influence to extend the religion which has thus blessed it.

While it should not be the specific object of civil governments to propagate Christianity, it still ought to be, and ever has been, a leading aim of our government to favor and protect it. Hence Bible, Tract, Missionary and Colonization Societies, whose direct and avowed object is to Christianize mankind, have always received from it appropriate encouragement. Thus the freedom of our institutions, founded as they are upon Christian principles, renders us virtually a Christianizing nation.

Ours is a strong government, able alike to control its own subjects and to command the respect of all foreign powers. This is by some doubted; and as it is the material point on which our entire argument ultimately depends, I must dwell a moment upon it.

Facts have proved that the strength of government does not lie in a despot, nor in a aristocracy of hereditary claims, defended by standing armies; for those armies, instigated by demagogues or by the popular will, may wheel their faces round and hurl monarch and courtiers from their seats in a single day.

The true strength of a government must lie in the intelligence, wealth, and virtue of its subjects, represented and protected by its three essential departments—the legislative, to enact laws; the judicial, to expound and apply them; and the executive, to enforce them. All these are most happily combined in the American government.

No mention, not even the British, compares with this for the general intelligence of its subjects. The Americans are eminently an educated, reading, knowing people. If knowledge is power, this is the most powerful nation beneath the heavens. Knowledge in this country is not restricted to a few, nor is it of a speculative character; it is the property of all classes and is eminently practical. The poorest man’s son sits at school upon the same seat as the millionaire, learns the same lessons, wins the same prizes, and aspires to the same places of power.

There is also with us a very general distribution of wealth. We have, it is true, the poor among us; but neither poverty nor riches are confined to any particular class. We have no privileged rank. Whilst an aristocracy of wealth, by combining the poor against the rich, weakens a nation, wealth possessed in the various classes, as the reward of industry and frugality, binds the people together in defence of their common interests. Hence, other things equal, the more wealth we possess and the more general its distribution, the greater is our national strength.

If we are destined to fall as a nation, the catastrophe will be more due to the want of virtue than of any other element of strength. Still, even in this respect, we certainly compare not unfavorably with the people of other lands. We may truly say, more in the spirit of gratitude than of boasting, that the principles of true virtue and religion are widely and practically embraced by the American people, and are already gaining upon their confidence and their homage.

With these advantages, our nation is rendered strong and enduring, by the law-loving spirit of the great body of citizens, investing the executive with so much of military force as may suffice to protect and defend them.

Wise legislation and impartial adjudication may greatly reduce the needed force of the executive, but they cannot entirely dispense with it. They who are “past feeling” in their souls, “being seared as with a hot iron,” must be touched in the only remaining vital part, the body. There must be, in every strong government, not only that which says to its subjects, This is your duty, do it if you will, but that which says also, This is your duty, do it if you will not. Even behind the throne of God, all radiant with light and love, are stores of wrath, with “lightnings, and voices, and thundering, and an earthquake,” indicating that the Almighty himself must needs wield these terrible engines against incorrigible rebels.

While, therefore, we strenuously deprecate standing armies, as endangering the safety and debauching the character of a nation, we do not by any means discard Military Institutions. We believe in the Christian authority and absolute necessity for well organized and disciplined military companies, to be at the service of the executive, for both civil and national defence. We cannot conceive how government can be securely maintained without them; nor have we the slightest suspicion that it ever will be, in the present state of humanity, excepting in the wild dreams of a transcendental and impracticable philanthropy. The man who shall devise means of sustaining government, in a world like this, without admitting a resort to force, will evince a wisdom more than divine. We fearlessly walk the streets of our thronged metropolis, and repose safely in our dwellings at night, only because lawless villains know that there is force in reserve, and that men true to law are empowered to use it.

For the same reason that we need the military arm to protect our social and domestic interests, we need it also to protect us as a nation. But it should be a power strictly limited by the necessities of the government and subject to its decisions, as expressed through the executive by the prevailing voice of the people. Hence the importance of military defences, and especially of schools in which pupils are trained in a course of severely scientific discipline for service. A few officers thus well schooled, are prepared, in case of necessity, to lead their fellow citizens in defence of their country, and with them to accomplish immeasurably more in repelling invasion than all the standing armies of the Old World. He who said, “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one,” never designed that his people should be undefended. Neither individuals nor nations can wisely depart from the wisdom of Christ. The citizen soldier, holding the weapon of defence, and even periling his life, if need be, in defence of his fire-side, his altar, his liberty, and his country, is acting no less in obedience to the injunction of Christ than to the noble example of our Puritan fathers.

We firmly maintain, then, that while aggressive wars can be maintained on no Christian grounds, the simple position of personal and national defence, and that by force, when other means fail, is alike the dictate of humanity and religion. Such is the principle assumed by our government; angel-like in deeds of love and mercy to all nations not aggressive, but to the spoiler “terrible as an army with banners.”

Movements of despotic powers at the present time seem to indicate intentions adverse to free institutions. So long as they are strictly defensive, true policy forbids our interference. But should tyranny assay to plant foot on this land sacred to freedom and Christianity, the land that drank the blood of our fathers in defending liberty, ten thousand swords shall leap from their scabbards, our artillery will everywhere awaken its thunder; all true Americans will unite heart and hand to repel the invader. “The battle of that great day of God Almighty” with “the spirits of devils working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth,” may remain to be fought by America, to prepare the way for the naked feet of the gospel through the nations. If so, America will not shrink from the conflict, nor has she any fear for the result. But we anticipate “a more excellent way.” Already, we trust, the awful day of sanguinary battles has gone down; soon may that glorious morning, bringing peace on earth and good will to men, pour its gladdening beams over the world.

The prospect of a vast power to be ultimately wielded over the earth by the American States, is also greatly brightened by our growing attachment to the Union. Events which have hitherto seemed to threaten, have in the end served to strengthen it. Political agitations are incidental to free institutions, but they need not alarm us. They are only the ripples upon the surface. The current of sober common-sense, in the American mind, is too deep and strong to be essentially disturbed by them.

If any thing was wanting to secure the permanence of our national compact, that want was supplied by the unanswerable arguments and imperishable eloquence of our great Statesman. So long as his name is honored by the people of this land, it will be an impregnable bulwark of strength to the Union. “Firmly knit and compacted together in peace,” the United States of America cannot fail to become more than a match for the rest of the world. Holding their commanding position of intelligence, freedom, commerce and wealth, and controlled by Christian principles, they will diffuse, as a beacon light upon the top of a high mountain, the bright and healing radiance of their example over all the nations.

The practical lesson of our subject, brief but weighty, is plainly this: THAT EVERY TRULY GOOD CITIZEN WILL DO ALL IN HIS POWER TO AUGMENT THE INTELLIGENCE, WEALTH, AND VIRTUE OF THE NATION, TO HONOR AND PERPETUATE ITS CONSTITUTION, AND TO SECURE OBEDIENE TO ITS LAWS.

Allow me, in closing, to congratulate you, The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, as a generous and patriotic Band, who have from the first steadfastly defended those Institutions, which are destined thus to bless mankind. It is no mean honor to bear any part in such a cause, but the part which you have borne is a highly distinguished one. You were the first regularly organized association for the defence of American liberty; and there is something sublimely defiant in the tones you are accustomed to utter. By the terrible bolts of his artillery, Napoleon swept the field and shattered the despotic dynasties of the Old World; by the same weapons, you have contributed to defend the liberties of the New. On every succeeding Anniversary like the present, the bold notes of your brazen voices will be gladly heard, as they have been for more than two centuries, by thronging patriots, old and young, upon our glorious Common; and to the latest generation, on the fourth day of every July, in the length and breadth of this great land, the cannon’s sulphurous throat will roll up to heaven, in the ears of exulting millions, the loud anthem of a nation’s liberty.

The day we celebrate brings you to your two hundred and fifteenth anniversary. You have survived six generations, and have ever been a faithful guardian of their lives and interests. You have defended them from the wild savages at home, by training and furnishing men for the sanguinary conflicts with the Narragansetts and Pequots; you have served also, in a similar manner, to rebuke the menace of no less dangerous foes from abroad. A faithful ally of the crown, during the period of colonial subjection, you shrunk from none of the services then imposed; a bold champion of liberty, when heaven’s appointed hour of release came, your well trained and valiant members firmly breasted, as occasions offered, the assaults of the revolution; undisturbed by subsequent strife’s of political parties, the turbulent action of designing demagogues, and the mad dreams of radical reformers, you have moved steadily on, from generation to generation, in the same undeviating path of duty.

O it is good, in these changing times, to see something thus abiding. We call you Ancient and Honorable, and well we may, for you not only have an origin far back in the Honorable Artillery Company of London, but you have lived, on American soil, to witness the rise and fall of states and empires in the Old World. Ancient and Honorable you indeed are; still, with the frosts of more than two hundred New England winters upon you, you have the freshness and vigor of youth; and you promise to enjoy “a green old age” through all coming years, till perfected renovation of humanity.

“Foretold by prophets and by poets sung,”

shall render your official service no longer needful. Until then, MAY YOUR ‘BOW ABIDE IN STRENGTH AND THE ARMS OF YOUR HANDS BE MADE STRONG BY THE HANDS OF THE MIGHTY GOD OF JACOB.’

Sermon – Thanksgiving – 1864 Connecticut

A sermon preached by Reverend Charles Little on the day of a National Thanksgiving. Rev. Little uses Titus 3:1 as the basis for his sermon.

Relation of the Citizen to Government.

Discourse

Delivered on the Day of

National Thanksgiving,

November 24th, 1864.

Rev. Charles Little
Pastor of the Congregational Church,

Cheshire, Conn.

“Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work.” Titus iii, 1.

The subject which I present to you today, is one authorized by the text and demanded by the times. It is the relation of the citizen to the government. Civil government, like the family and the church, is a Divine institution. Ordained of God, whosoever resisteth it, reisteth the ordinance of God.

If any think that an apology is needed for the discussion of this subject in the pulpit, they will find one in its gospel associations. Paul made no mistake when he linked this subject with some of the grandest truths of God’s word. If an inspired Apostle thought it worthy to be classed with such topics—as free grace, the love of God, regeneration, justification, the Saint’s blessed hope, the coming of Christ to judge the world, and the inheritance of life eternal; if he, when commissioning Titus to ordain elders and perfect the churches, commanded him to instruct the converts on their duties to the government, who can claim that pastors are forbidden to speak of these things to their people from the pulpit?

Two preliminary inquiries demand our attention: What is the life of a nation? We hear it said—“The life of the nation is in danger”—“the nation is decaying.” What is meant?

The life of a nation is something more than the aggregate, or united, or concentrated life of its people. It is that which gives it vitality, which secures growth and greatness. It consists, if I mistake not, of three different elements combined and assimilated into that one mysterious principle, which we call life.

The first is found in its civil institutions, its constitution, laws, and the modes of their administration.

The second is in its physical resources, embracing climate, soil, minerals, facilities for manufactures and trade, and perfection of the mechanic arts.

The third is in the industry, intelligence and virtue of its people.

The nation which has the largest share of these in their greatest perfection, will enjoy the most vigorous and the longest life. Its influence will predominate in the counsels of the nations.

What is government? It is that form of fundamental rules and regulations by which a nation is governed, which are embodied in its constitution and laws, written and unwritten. This is the true meaning, though in common language, the right to govern, and the person or persons governing are called the government.

What, for example, is the government of these United States? Is it the President and his cabinet? Is it the congress? Is it the judiciary? Or is it all these combined? Neither. The Constitution of the United States and the laws made in conformity therewith constitute the government of this country. For the administering of this government, legislative power is vested in the congress, judicial power in the courts, and executive power in the President. This government was made by the people and for the people. This is evident from the Preamble to the Constitution:
“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, * * * * and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our children, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States.”

This government is also supreme. In the sixth article you will find these words:
“This Constitution and the laws of the United States, which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land, and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Thus, in imperishable letters engraven on the foundation of our government, are recorded the important truths that—it was framed by the people of the whole country, not by the separate States, and that is supreme over all—a true sovereignty, not a collection of sovereignties.

Do we not see here, standing out in bold relief, the fallacy of the much vaunted doctrine of State rights—the doctrine that each state may secede at pleasure?

Though the people reserved to their respective State governments all rights not specified in the Constitution, did they not explicitly say that that should be supreme? But if the general government is supreme, what are the others but subordinate.

The dogma that each State may secede at pleasure, if true, would destroy our government superstructure and foundation. Our constitution and laws would be as worthless as the waste and sand thrown up by the ocean in a storm.

What now is the relation of the citizen to the government; a citizen of our country to our general government?

This is three-fold. First.—He is an elector, charged with the high duty of giving his suffrage for those who are to make or to execute the laws. The distinguishing feature and crowning glory of a republican government is the right of suffrage, the proper use of which, in this country, will solve the problem whether such a government can be permanent.

If, as we believe, a republican form of government will most effectually secure the good of the people, and will the soonest elevate the nations to the highest civilization; if, as we are assured, the oppressed of the world are now looking to the success of our government as their chief hope, and if the failure of free institutions here will roll back the sun of liberty beneath the horizon, and give to decaying despotisms a new lease of life for centuries to come, is it not evident that the right of suffrage involves momentous responsibilities?

The citizen who violating his solemn oath to vote for those men whose election he believes will be for the best good of the nation, gives his suffrage for men whom he knows to be unworthy, is he not largely guilty of the curse which such rulers bring upon the land? And does the citizen who refuses to vote, escape his responsibility or materially lessen his guilt?

Every elector is bound to study and understand, as far as him lies, the nature of our government, and the principles which will best sub serve its high ends—he is bound, so far as possible, to qualify himself for the selection of suitable men for office. Especially is he under obligation to acquire that virtue which will lift him above bribery, fraud, and every dishonorable motive. And the fact that many unworthy men have received this inestimable privilege, increases the obligation of every true citizen to use his right more intelligently and conscientiously.

Again, the citizen is a subject bound to obey the laws. The laws made according to the collective will of the electors are obligatory upon all alike.

The obligation to obedience is two-fold. It exists in the nature of things. A nation cannot live without government, and government cannot continue without obedience. Without this there will be speedy anarchy and ruin.

This obligation arises also from the will of God. He commands obedience. Government is His institution; rulers are his ministers; obedience to them He regards as to Himself.

Therefore, every citizen is bound to obey the laws. The only exception is when a person believes that compliance with a particular requisition will violate his conscience. He may then disobey, but must submit to the penalty. It has also been held that when the laws become cruelly oppressive, and there is no remedy, if a majority of the people believe that success is probable, they may unite in resisting the laws.

Happily, under our constitution there is a peaceable remedy for all oppressive laws and therefore, a justifiable revolution in this country is hardly within the limits of possibility.

Once more the citizen is eligible to office. Hence, it is the duty of each elector, so far as his opportunities will allow, to qualify himself for office, and when this is tendered to accept, unless other duties prevent. True loyalty and patriotism require some persons to make sacrifices in this service of their country. Whoever accepts an office, high or low, should remember that he is the minister of God, that he is to labor in it with fidelity, seeking, alike, the glory of God, the safety of the government, and the welfare of the people.

Besides the peculiar obligations which spring from these three special relations of the citizen to the government, there are others more general, yet too important to be overlooked.

By a decree of the ancient Roman Senate, the Consuls were commanded to see that the republic received no detriment. This duty is now laid upon every American citizen. Providence, philanthropy and true self-interest, make each elector a conservator and defender of our country. Each one is bound to aid in the enforcement of the laws, for laws unexecuted are a source of weakness and of danger. Personal obedience is not enough, we must do what we can to secure the obedience of others. We are bound therefore, to labor for the extension of right principles, for the creation and sustaining of a public sentiment, which will frown down all violations of law, which will demand and ensure the punishment of criminals of every grade. Each elector is also obliged to give his effective influence against all practices which tend to increase ignorance and vice, and for every institution which will promote knowledge and virtue.

These duties, comprehensive and important, follow necessarily form the text and other scriptures, and are as binding upon us as any Divine precept.

In view of the truths thus set forth, in view of the probable future of our country, the glorious possibilities before it, are we not constrained to acknowledge that, in this land, citizenship with the elective franchise is one of the highest earthly distinctions, and when worthily worn, is more honorable than the monarch’s crown?

A prophet’s vision only could picture that future.

Its possibilities appall us. Seven hundred millions of people might dwell here and not equal in proportion the population of Great Britain and Ireland.

Its probabilities oppress us. We expect that there hundred millions will by and by reap the results of this war, in the enjoyment of earth’s richest treasures.

Its certainties surpass belief. One hundred millions are soon to bless God for a home in this land. And then with every material resource developed, every mental gift employed, a government, free and perfect, and these all sanctified; this nation shall be the power and glory of the world; the white robed angel of peace shall continually hove above and guard this land, while rays of light and life shall spread over the earth, hastening the true millennium of the ages.

My subject furnishes some important practical inferences. It affords a triumphant justification of those who have supported the government in this war. It has been thought strange that good men, and especially the ministers of Christ, should be so strenuously earnest in advocating the putting down of this rebellion by force of arms.

In view of the truths presented above, the answer is obvious. Good citizenship required this, good citizenship made this a religious duty. The nation must attempt to conquer the rebellion or give up its life. If, without a struggle, it had permitted one third of its subjects to revolt, and take with them its ships, forts and arsenals, what prestige or power would have remained? It was, undoubtedly, incumbent on those who administered the government to conquer the rebellion, if possible. What other course was open? Negotiations? Who negotiates with armed traitors? Arbitration? When a burglar opens your safe and takes your valuables, do you leave it to referees to decide what part he shall restore? What trust could we have placed in those who had violated their oaths of allegiance? Would they have abided by any arbitrament, if opposed to their wishes?

Again—could we not have granted the traitors all which they wished, and so have allowed them to remain? There was no desire on the part of the leaders to remain, they sought occasion to rebel. No terms would have kept them in the Union except those which would have made the mass of Northern freeman the subjects of a Southern oligarchy.

But you might have let the seceding States go in peace. Yes! And then, where would have been the oath of the President, who had solemnly sworn to “faithfully execute the office of President of the United States,” and to the best of his ability, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?” Where would have been the oaths of office holders and electors, those oaths by which they all had sworn to be faithful to the Constitution, that Constitution which declares—that it and the laws made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State, to the contrary notwithstanding? These solemn oaths would have been, where? Broken, violated, trodden in the dust. And then the guilty violators, office holders, electors, all, would they not have stood forth before the world, their fair fame blackened and disgraced, their meanness despised of men, and abhorred of God, themselves worthy of the infamy which would have immortalized their names? Would not the very statutes and portraits in our national halls have blushed for shame?

Let the seceding States go in peace, and you destroy the government; for then other States may separate when they shall please. Let Oregon and California request it, the Western Empire rises upon the shores of the mighty Pacific. Let the ingathering crowds of hardy adventures demand it, the Rocky Mountain Empire exists, the Switzerland of America, rich beyond estimate, in mines of gold and silver. Let the dwellers in the great valley wish it, the Mississippi Empire, with its teeming multitudes will claim supremacy over the continent. Let the Middle States agree, the Central Empire is before you bidding for the trade of the world. Where then will be the Union, where the boasted government of our Fathers—the glory of the people and the fear of despots? Where?

New England will indeed remain, the last to abandon, as she was the first to inaugurate the ancient honored Republic. New England will remain intact in her resources of granite and ice, safe in the knowledge and virtue of her people. She will remain with a record honorable above others, marred only by the memory of a few degenerate sons who would not sacrifice themselves to save their country. She will remain with a future, noble, prosperous and worthy of her origin and her history.

Let the seceding States go, and you invite anarchy and despotism to run riot in our hitherto happy land. Think you that these various empires can be established, consolidated and perfected in peace? Will there be no sub-secessions, no counter rebellion, no disputes respecting boundaries, extradition treaties, division of public property, duties on exports and imports? Will these questions be settled peacefully? As well might you expect that the planets, broken loose from their central sun, and whirling uncontrolled through space, would find their way back in safety to their former orbits.

No! Let the general government be destroyed, and in the view of right reason, there will be wars on this continent, of which the present is but a dim shadow. There will be long years red with human blood and gore, before the angel of peace shall again spread her blessed wings over the land. With such facts and probabilities before them, how could religious, thoughtful, loyal men, refrain from giving their influence for the speedy and utter destruction of the rebellion?

Did not their cheeks blanch and their hearts beat wildly while they beheld the vials of Jehovah’s wrath pouring their dread contents upon the guilty land, filling it with these gory battle fields, these groaning hospitals, these shrouded homes and crushed hearts? At such a sight could they remain unmoved? Could they fail to pray for the shortened time, for speedy peace? Having prayed, must they not work?

Moses prayed, but deliverance came not till “he stretched his hand over the sea.” So these true men have prayed and labored till now the nation is walking on dry land, through waters which soon are to whelm the rebel leaders in remediless ruin.

Another inference from my subject, and following necessarily from the last, is this:
It is now the duty of every citizen to use his utmost exertions in sustaining the government and in aiding the administration to subdue the rebellion. Obedience to God requires this, for He commands you to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, and to be ready for every good work.

Fulfillment of oaths requires this: Is that man true to his oath, is he faithful to the Constitution, who, when he sees the Constitution violated, and the beautiful flag, emblem of its power, shot down with rebel bullets, sits in silence, caring not and rebuking not the traitor? Justice to a large portion of the Southern people demand this. They did not vote for secession, they did not wish it. They do not today enjoy that which the General Government is bound to secure to every State, a republican form of government. The safety of your children demands this. Let the Government be destroyed and where is you assurance that they will pass safely through scenes of anarchy and blood?

Once more, the welfare of the world demands this. Without doubt, the existence on this territory of on united, free, powerful Republic, firmly grounded in the knowledge and virtue of the whole people, would be the hope, the joy of the oppressed everywhere. This nation would then become the beacon light of the world, before whose brightness the chains of the oppressed, and the sword of the oppressor would disappear.

Under the pressure of these motives, Divine and human, personal and philanthropic, can we hesitate to labor with our might for the entire subjugation of the rebels, which is the only practicable way for the speedy return of peace. And when peace shall come with healing in her wings, by the blessing of God, no more to depart; when peace shall come, filling the expanding hearts of the people with intensest joy, holding in store blessings, unmeasurable and invaluable for the hundred millions yet to dwell on the mountains, in the valleys, and by the shores of this one blessed land, will it not add infinitely to your satisfaction, if you can then feel that, in the hour of her peril, you were faithful to your country, and to you God?

This subject, my friends, sheds a brilliant light upon the grounds of our Thanksgiving, today.

Where are we? On the road to ultimate victory—past the middle mile-stone—within sight of the enemies’ capital—within hearing of their despairing groans.

What have we escaped? The wreck of our Government, the ruin of our nation, the reproach of the world.

What have we saved? Our country’s honor, our self-respect, our power and place among the nations.

What are our hopes? Bright, beautiful as the rainbow tints. Beyond the dark dread path which now we tread, we discern the open plain. Beyond the tide of blood which yet for a time must flow, beyond the burden of debt which, for a little while, must still increase, we behold the early dawn which heralds the rising sun of peace. Even now we seem to see his beams, gilding with gold and purple, the upper edges of the black sulphureous clouds which obscure our lower vision.

There is confidence in the cabinet, confidence in the army, confidence in the hearts of the people.

What are our hopes? They are strong, they energize, they prolong endurance, they produce strength, they give power.

What are our hopes? They are firm in the wisdom of our officers, civil and military, firm in the strong arms and hearts of our patriotic soldiers and sailors, firm in the unswerving loyalty of the mass of the people. They strengthen, as we listen to the echoes of our booming cannon, from sea and land, and to the resounding triumph of our victorious legions.

Our hopes? They are sure because grounded in the justice of a sacred cause, a cause the tidings of whose success shall vibrate over the world and along the coming centuries, thrilling millions of hearts with purest joy.

Our hopes? They are unfailing because sustained by the marked interpositions of an Almighty God, who judgeth among the nations, and who hath proclaimed liberty unto the people.

A few more heavy blows and the double-monster, slavery and secession, dies; a few more months of labor, and rest will come; the woes of war endured a little longer, and peace shall return, a peace, peace-inspiring and permanent, a peace which shall soothe the weeping mourner, nerve the maimed sufferer, free the last slave, and thrill the souls of all.

Is there not in these things reason for devout thanksgiving to Almighty God? Add to these our other blessings—health and fruitful seasons, domestic joys and social happiness, educational facilities and literary privileges; churches, Sabbaths, communion of saints, the mercy seat and hopes of heaven; is there not cause, is there not motive for thanksgiving, such as were never ours before?

How should this day be kept? With praise and prayer, with joy and gladness, with the gathering of households, and the renewal of friendships, with the enjoyment of Providential bounties and gifts to the destitute, with the remembrance of God’s mercies, and the worship of His holy name.

Once in ancient time a nation delivered kept holy day, with timbrels and dances, and with a memorable, memorial song. In a coming eternity, hosts redeemed shall sing that song, and the song of the Lamb, in Eternal Thanksgiving.

Here today, midway between the two, we, a nation richly blessed by the God who delivered them, we, in memory and hope, offer up the tribute of our rejoicing hearts.

Sermon – Thanksgiving – 1864

Thanksgiving for Victories
Discourse
By: Rev. R. D. Hitchcock, D.D.

“Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”—Psalm 144:1You can not have failed to notice how small a part of the peculiar rhetoric of war has ever come from the great makers and masters of war. The contending heroes of the Iliad simply go out to meet each other under the walls of Troy. It is left for the poet to tell us how they rushed together like thunder-clouds in a summer sky. The nine campaigns of Cæsar in Gaul turned out very much to his mind, but his own account of them in the Commentaries is probably not very much like the reports which would have been sent by the Roman Russell to the Roman Times, had Rome at that time either enjoyed or endured either a Russell or Times. We have a General who threatens nothing more than to “move upon the works” of the enemy. For the “tornado” and “lightning” of the movement we are indebted to the sprightly correspondents, special or regular, who take no part in it only to see it. There is nothing strange in this, and nothing to be sneered at. Battles may be grand when looked at from afar, and grander still in their results; but to those who are in them they are hideous, and those who know the most about them are inclined to say the least. Louis Napoleon is said to have had his stomach turned, and his dreams badly haunted ever since, by the slaughter he witnessed at Solferino.

The author of the sentence chosen for our text today was at once a great poet and a great conqueror. When he received his kingdom, it was only a small fraction even of Palestine. And at last, after seven years, with all the Hebrews under him, it reached only to the roots of Lebanon on the north, touched the Arabian desert on the south, and went but little beyond the Jordan on the east. But before he died, the Red Sea and the Euphrates were his boundaries, and there was no potentate anywhere in Western Asia who did not tremble at the name of the shepherd’s son of Bethlehem.

Now what had this man to say of war? Many things in many places, as he who runs may read, but in our text two things: First virtually, that war is sometimes a good thing; and, secondly, that success in it is of God. “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”

Today at the suggestion of the President–the President of these nearly forty United States of North America–we have thanked and are thanking God, thanking him in speech and in feeling deeper than speech, for two most signal and present victories: the one at Mobile on our Southern Gulf, where Army and Navy, planting the feet of our national power, the one upon the land, the other upon the sea, have had a united triumph; the other at Atlanta in Georgia, where after four months of incessant marching and fighting, a shell has been lodged at last in the very bowels of this monstrous Confederacy. These are great victories, there can be no doubt of it; as great as any in history. They do not end the rebellion, to be sure; but they begin the ending of it. A few more such blows, and the work is substantially accomplished. And so we bless God today, in this temple of peace, for these achievements of war, gratefully remembering the dead, tenderly mindful of the wounded and the bereaved, and, above all, humbly supplicating the Power above us for what further victories are needed to bring this great and sore struggle to a righteous consummation, disband our brave and patient but wearied armies, and set in motion again the arrested currents of our ordinary life.

You can not regret more deeply than I that our own spiritual teacher is not here now to lead your devotions, and expound the lessons of the hour. And yet I will not distrust you charity, nor permit myself to be troubled by the fear that you may be yearning for something better than you will get. I am sure you will not be impatient with me for not doing better than I can, snatching time as I do for this discourse from the grasp of other duties and other cares.

I. Let me first speak to you about war in general.

The Bible speaks of it in many, many places as one of the direst of calamities. Those who employ of the Litany of the English Church pray every Sunday: “From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord deliver us.” And such is the common feeling of civilized and cultured, to say nothing of regenerated and Christian, men. War, as I have said already, is a hideous thing. Our instincts are against it. As rational beings we resent this appeal from reason to the sword, from brain to muscle, as an atrocious indignity to reason itself. It makes us ashamed of men to see them hunting each other, as the sportsman hunts a tiger in the jungle; to see them tear each other to pieces as tiger tears tiger when both are famished, and are both unwilling to divide their spoil. Swords, and pistols, and muskets, and cannon, and bullets, and balls, and forts, and iron-plated ships, with all the other inventions which mean death to man, are more hateful than any human abhorrence has ever painted them. War, in and of itself in its last analysis, is simply butchery; the butchery, not of soulless animals like sheep and oxen, but of reasoning and immortal men. Shame on it all. And the greater the war, the greater the shame. In great, long wars, the waste of life is frightful. Five millions of me, it is estimated, perished in the Crusades. An equal number of French men fell victims to the military genius of the First Napoleon. Farmers, mechanics, merchants, scholars, are torn away from their beneficent pursuits to fatten corn-fields, as at Waterloo; perhaps to be of less use even than that. And the gaps thus made in society are not filled for a generation. And then there are multitudes on crutches, or maimed and limping, till nature has had time to put them all under the sod. And then there are delicate women, dressed in black, in our sight for years, pensioned, it may be, meagerly, or it may be painfully living by the needle, making shirts at five cents apiece for men who had made fortunes out of the war which cost them their husbands. And then there are little children to grow up, weeping every night when they are put to bed as they are told of their fathers, who had their lives shot or stabbed out of them on some far off battle-field, and whose bodies are not asleep at home in the village graveyard. And then there is the absolute annihilation of property; charcoal, niter, sulfur in the powder that is burnt; lead and iron in the bullets and balls; and a hundred other things, which get planted in every battle, not to grow, but to rot. Harvest fields are trampled to mud, houses and barns are consumed, railways torn up, engines and cars demolished, ships sunk or set fire to with their cargos, light-houses blown up, and harbors obstructed or destroyed. And then, too, there is great peril of serious damage to the moral character. There is the life in camp, away from all domestic endearments and restraints; and raids through hostile territory, sweeping property like whirlwinds; and the fury of battle, so liable to kindle a thirst for blood, or at least to cheapen the value of human life. Such are some of the fruits and tokens of war. War means death and destruction: death, violent and sudden; destruction, utter and irreparable. In this aspect of it, it is hard to imagine any worse thing which could possibly happen. Satanic and hellish some men have called it. But Milton thinks otherwise, and worse, of it:

“O shame to men! Devil with devil damned
Firm concord holds, men only disagree
Of creatures rational.”But bad as war is, some other things are worse, immeasurably worse. And when war and any one of these other worse things is the only and enforced alternative, then is war a right and good thing; with all its abominations it is right, with all it horrors it is good. War, we have said, is death and destruction; but the death only of the body, the destruction only of property. Even at this, however, the loss is not so great as may at first appear. Death will come sooner or later to us all. The man who falls in battle only dies a little sooner than he expected. Property likewise is perishable. War only sweeps it away more swiftly. But rated at their highest value, neither life nor property should be thought inalienable. Life is sweet and property is good, but life and property may be too dearly ransomed. “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” And souls may be lost without being sent to perdition beyond the grave; reaching that perdition doubtless at last, but lost some time before.

With respect to the Christian martyrdoms, I believe there is nowhere any debate. No man dares to say, if any man is mean enough to think, that those uncompromising saints who preferred death to apostasy, died foolishly. That one early martyr at the stake in Smyrna, the aged Polycarp, states the case for them all. On his way to the flames, Herod, an official with his father Nicetes, met him in their chariot. Lifting the venerable Bishop into the chariot, they say: “What harm is there in it to say, Lord Caesar, and sacrifice, and so be safe?” Afterward the proconsul urged him: “Swear, and I will set thee at liberty; reproach Christ.” But his answer was: “Eighty and six years have I now served Christ, and he has never done me the least wrong; how, then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?” And so he lost a life which a single sentence would have saved. But so he won everlasting bliss in heaven, and on earth everlasting renown; here the laurel and there the palm.

But it may be said that the difference is wide between yielding up one’s own life and taking the life of another; between martyrdom and war. The commandment is, “Thou shalt not kill;” and war, we are told, is murder. But if mere killing be murder, my reply is, then it is murder to hang a murderer; as some, indeed are quite ready to affirm, denouncing scaffold and battle-field as alike unchristian. This is logical, but false; a right conclusion from a wrong premise. “Thou shalt not kill” does not mean, “Thou shalt not take away life.” But, as expounded by our Lord himself, its meaning is “Thou shalt do no murder.” Murder is more than killing. Killing is sometimes not merely a right, but a duty, even for individuals, as when one anticipates by a quick of his own, the blow of an assassin. And if an individual may take life in self-defense, much more may it be done by the body politic, with its formalities of arrest and trial. In the face of murder, treason, or any other capital offence, the commandment is, “Thou shalt kill.” Magistracy is nothing without its sword. That sword may not always be reddened justly; but justly reddened, it does the will of God, who complacently permits no magistrate to bear the sword in vain. Occasions arise when organized society must either kill or be killed itself; and organized society must not consent to die.

Now war is nothing more nor less than capital punishment on a large scale: sometimes outside, between nation and nation, when we call it foreign war; sometimes inside, when we call it civil. The chief difference is, that on the scaffold there is but one executioner, while on the battle-field the executioners are many. In either case, it is the organized society that strikes, on the scaffold with its single band of civil justice, on the field with its many mailed hands of war. But sheriff or soldier, it matters not, they are equally legitimate. War, then with all its evils, is not itself wrong. In particular instances it may be wrong, or it may be right; but each instance must be judged of by itself. Our proper rule of judgment would appear to be, that war, to be righteous must be always defensive war. Defensive, I mean, in spirit; for it is
obvious that a war may be offensive in form, which is strictly defensive in spirit, as in the case of Charlemagne, who repeatedly attacked and crippled the Barbarians, who were preparing to attack, and might have crippled him. The alternative before him was not that of peace or war, but of war today or war tomorrow; and the choice he made was of war today. Offences have not yet ceased between nation and nation, any more than they have ceased between man and man; nor will they cease for some time to come. Nation still insults and injures nation. The insulted and injured nation may exercise a long forbearance, protesting against its wrongs; but there is a limit beyond which forbearance is not a virtue, but a crime. That limit overstepped, of which the Christian conscience of the nation must calmly judge, then the blade must leave its scabbard, and the God of battles must be invoked to arbitrate the conflict. International offenses, no longer endurable, must be punished. For some offenses, the lighter punishment of commercial non-intercourse may suffice. But other offenses of graver character cry aloud for the crowning punishment of war. And war for a nation’s rights, when those rights are at once vital and jeopardized, is always a war of self-defense; in its essence that, whatever may be its form. Such war, we declare, is right. It is more than right; it is a duty. And the nation which shirks this duty deserves its inevitable doom; I say, its inevitable doom, for whatever nation is afraid to fight, and is known to be afraid to fight, forfeits the respect of other nations and is near its end. The vultures will soon be screaming over it.

But if a nation may defend itself on the outside against foreign assailants, much more may a nation defend itself on the inside against domestic traitors and rebels. Civil war, as all the world knows, is worse than foreign war; as much worse as a wolf in the fold is worse than a wolf at the door. It is more ferocious and bitter in its spirit, more desolating in its effects. It furrows the land with a hotter plowshare, and plants it with larger armies of the slain. Its havoc, as in the last days of the Roman Republic, as in the last days of the French Republic, is often arrested only by the iron hand of a despot, enforcing order at the expense of ancient liberties and rights. There are great miseries, and great risks. But when a wanton rebellion, long brooded over, is at length hatched, when constitutional and peaceful methods of redress for alleged grievances are haughtily spurned, when the national flag is insulted, and the national authority defied, then civil war must come; has, indeed, already come. It is the national life that is threatened: and if that life is worth having, it is worth defending. If there be fire in the nation’s heart, that fire must burst and burn. If there be nerve in the nation’s arm, that arm must strike. It is no longer a question of parties, which shall rule, whether this or that, but the supreme and final question of life or death to the State itself. Unresisted assassination is virtual suicide. A great nation has no right to die; and the greater the nation, the greater the wrong of allowing itself be made to die. Lost wealth me be shortly recovered, slaughtered millions of men may by and by be replaced; but the splendid living organism of a high-hearted, prosperous, puissant nationality, with all its array of arts and industries, of laws and institutions, of grand historic memories and of still grander aspirations, which challenge the coming centuries, the dust of heroes in its soil, accomplished work of man, but a slow growth of reluctant time, a wondrous miracle of Providence, which may not be witnessed again on the same spot for ages. It must not be suffered to perish. By all that is sacred in heaven, by all that is brave, sweet, and precious on earth, by the sleeping ashes of the fathers, by the cradles of the children, by all the examples of the past, by all the prowess of the present, by all the prophetic visions of the future, it must not be suffered to perish.

But war, in such emergencies as we have now considered, has also another aspect than this of tragic and terrible necessity. It has its compensations, greatest always in the greatest and grandest conflicts, which go far to make us bless even the bitterness of the bud for the sweetness of the flower. If war, by withdrawing largely the muscle of a country from productive pursuits to a pursuit whose very genius is destruction, deranges business, choking up the old channels of trade, it, on the other hand, opens new channels of its own. Armies must be clothed, and sheltered, and nourished; navies must be launched; and iron throats on the land and on the sea must be fed with powder, and lead, and iron. And, above all, if men are mowed down by regiments, and sorrow carried to innumerable homes, yet heroes are made for history, and the life of the nation is enriched by the lives of its champions. If some weak statesmen are broken down by the burden, others are found to bear it. If frogs croak, and wise owls hoot, in the night of disaster, birds of promise come singing in the morning. If some moral interests are imperiled, others and greater ones are promoted. What would England have been today without her righteous wars, domestic and foreign? England, or any other of the first nations of Europe? What but “a nation of shopkeepers;” a swarm of bees, hiving their honey; a herd of cattle, chewing their cuds? That is a great day for a man, when he puts his life in peril for a principle. That is a great day for a people, when they stand up for their rights. As men now are, and as the world now goes with them, a long peace, such as the merchant prays for, is more dangerous to the soul than battles are to the body. Peace is a hot summer, teeming with life, and hurrying its crops to ripeness, but drying up the brooks, wrapping the land in smoke, and robbing the air of its tonics. War is lightning. And lightning is good. It may kill a horse or two in the pasture, or burn a barn, or prostrate a man standing in his doorway, or, striking a church, may turn, for some months, a Christian congregation quite out of doors; but its clears the air, and without it we should none of us have long to live.

War, then, with all the losses and horrors that attend it, with all the sorrows that follow it, is not always to be denounced, is not always to be shunned. King David was no stranger to war, making verses about it from afar. The nations round about him would not let him alone in Palestine. His own sons stirred up rebellions against him. And so he became a warrior, fighting for his kingdom and his crown; warrior, as well as lyrist, singing as he returned from victory: “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”

II. Let me next speak to you about the secret success in war.

Napoleon is commonly reported to have said that Providence is always on the side of the heaviest battalions. I am slow to believe he ever said it. He must have known better, for he was not ignorant of history. The fact is, rather, that the heaviest battalions are always on the side of Providence; not, I admit, in all the preliminary or incidental skirmishes, not in all the smaller battles eve, but certainly in all the greater, decisive battles which have settled anything worth settling. Many a time have little armies beaten large armies; as at Marathon and Plataea, the Greeks the Persians, who outnumbered them as ten to one. Who knows, or can know, which are the heaviest battalions, till it be found out which did the crushing, and which were crushed? David, though a stripling, was taller than Saul, and weighed more than Goliath. But his stature was not in inches by the rule, nor his weight in ounces by the scales. The Kearsarge and Alabama were more nearly matched than is often the case in naval engagements of that sort. As they steamed towards each other, with sanded decks and shotted guns, it would have been difficult to determine which it would have been difficult to determine which was the better ship, or which was the better equipped, officered, and manned. As hour later it was all plain enough. No intelligent man in Christendom now needs to be told which ship went down, nor why. Patriotism commanded and worked the one; piracy commanded and worked the other.

One of the finest sayings of modern literature is that of Schiller: “The world’s history is the world’s judgment.” It condenses into a proverb the whole philosophy of history and yet nearly three thousand years before, another poet had written: “I said unto the fools, deal not foolishly: and to the wicked, Lift not up the horn: lift not up your horn on high: speak not with a stiff neck. For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another.” For us, as individuals there is a great day of judgment to come, with trumpet or archangel, and banner of flame, and book of God’s memory and ours. But for races and nations, the day of judgment, like Elias to the Hebrews hundreds of years ago, is come already. It has come, and stays. It is now, and always. From the moment a nation is born, from that moment it begins to be judged. Nations indeed are free, liking what they will, and doing what they like. Hence, as human nature is always doing the same, human events are always repeating themselves. There is nothing new under the sun; but ever the same old circuit of growth and decay, of conquest and defeat. So at first it seems, and so in part, but only in part, it is. Besides the movement round, there is another movement onward, making the circuits spiral. And that spiral movement is of God, impelling the nations onward, while they go spinning round and round. The goal we know: it is the final triumph here on earth of truth and right over lies and wrong. Towards that goal the revolving nations have always pointed their fingers, and have always moved. I am not addressing atheists, and therefore I shall not now undertake to prove the law of history is not revolution only, but also progress. Suffice it here to say, that the vindication of our Christian philosophy of history is the whole substance of history itself, its woof and its warp. Since the fall of man, which had its organic culmination in the godless civilization of Adam’s eldest son, as far back as we can see through the eyes of Herodotus, as far back as we can see through the eyes of Moses, the world has not revolved only, but also advanced. Not always from age to age, from great epoch to great epoch, has there been one steady march. Any school-boy will recite you the names and the dates. Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Macedon, and Rome, those names of the old empires, all witnesses to progress, all witnesses for God, that he has led amongst the nations, and compelled them, in the working out of their own ambitious purposes, also to work out his purposes of justice and grace Amidst those older empires Palestine stood central. For hundreds of years five millions of Hebrews determined the course of history. It was to train, to try, and finally to punish them, that those empires came and went. And now it is the son o a Hebrew mother, who is also the Son of God, around whom the nations revolve, and whose purposes they execute, whether they will or no. His kingdom, set up eighteen hundred years ago, has been steadily growing ever since. It is stronger today than ever it was before. It will be stronger tomorrow than it is today. Greece helped it in her decrepitude, and died only when she could help it no longer. And so of all the nations since: the empire of Charlemagne, the medieval kingdoms of Europe, the empires of the two Napoleons, and all the rest. Each has had its own inspiration, each its own aims, but of God all have had only one and the same errand, and all have either bowed or been broken, will bow or will be broken, beneath the weight of Christ’s arm. By the eternal covenant of redemption, this world is Christ’s. He died for it, and he will have it. The past guarantees the future. Since those tongues of flame at Pentecost till now, not a single important event has happened which has not done something towards bringing in the promised millennium. Every national birth and every national death, every revolution and every reform, every discovery and every conquest, every invention and every battle, every science and every art, has had its Christian errand, and has done it. The Roman Empire built roads for the feet of the apostles and early evangelists, and kept order in their assemblies. Charlemagne repeated in northern Europe the southern empire of the Caesars. Priests and schoolmen redeemed the Middle Ages from utter barbarism. Then out of the feudal chaos sprang the modern centuries, have been elaborating the Christian civilization that now rules the world. Study closely this chart of history, tracing the career of every nation and of every great ruler of every problem of their fortunes. The race has not been to the swift nor the battle to the strong. But the blood of Christ has been beating in the arteries of the world. Truth, right, law, liberty–these have been the light and the life of men, making the foolish wise and the weak strong, so that one has been able to chase a thousand, and two have put ten thousand to flight.

And of all the methods employed to bring the world right, there is none, perhaps, more effective, surely none so imposing, as this war. It is, indeed, a rough method, the delight of the savage, the dread of the civilized, and yet the appointment of Providence as the indispensable condition of human progress. The onward movement of the race has been always, not a journey, but a march. The new territories have had to be conquered. Wiser laws, humane institutions, liberties enlarged and chartered, order assured–these all have been the crimsoned trophies of war. Even peace itself has had to be purchased with blood and tears. And so it is that the great military campaigns of history are its great way marks. The great battles are but synonyms of great ideas realized. It is no new thing for bayonets to think; they have always thought, thinking better and better from age to age. It is the brains behind the bayonets that are thinking now. The devil rages, but God reigns; and what is best for man is sure to win in the long run. “He always wins who sides with God.” In the great crises of history, when the clock of the universe is about to strike a new hour, it matters now what splendor or genius in leadership, what weight of massed columns, what prodigality of preparation, what prestige of previous achievement, may be set in array against the right; unseen squadrons are in the air above, unseen chariots in the mountains round about, and the battle is the Lord’s–both the battle and the victory. Napoleon could never understand why his army was routed at Waterloo. By all military precedent, the rout should have been upon the other side. Napoleon was never surer of victory than then. But besides the army against him on the ground, there was the army against him on the ground, there was another army against him in the air. The stars in their courses fought against him, and he was vanquished. A bad cause may be successful at the start. Inspired from beneath, and not from above, its fire is fierce and withering; but it fights too fast and wildly. The good cause is stunned and staggered by the first onset; but by and by it rallies, warming as it works, and striking harder and harder till the field is won.

How it comes to pass that the good cause at last carries the day, every good man knows, or ought to know. This secret of the Lord is with them that fear him. Every soldier in the field has an ally in every Christian closet; and he knows it. Every tent-fire blazes with the light of remembered hearth-stones. Every peal of the bugle is tremulous with the voices of wives and children. Every battle has its benediction from every altar of worship. And ever triumph shall have its anthems from generation to generation. Good men thus armed are invincible. We need not await the bulletins; the end is sure.

III. And now let me say a few words about our own war.

We are tired of hearing it called gigantic, that word has been used so much. And yet the fact remains of a great war; the greatest perhaps, in history. I need not tell you how great it is: great in the length and breadth of its theater; great in its host of armed men upon the land, great in its fleets upon the sea, great in its cost of treasure, great in its cost of blood. So great is it, that had its dimension been foreseen, the heart of the nation would have failed it. So great is it, that the hearts of many men have failed them as it is. So great is it, that only the most vivid sense of the still greater issues at stake in it will suffice to bear us through.

Cries of peace are on the wind. We heard them at the start. We have heard them all along. We hear them now louder than ever. But cries of peace from whom, and to whom? Some are the prayers of all the saints ascending since the war began, that God will be pleased, in his own good time, to send us peace by righteousness, that so it may be a lasting peace. But no cry is heard as yet from the rebels in arms, who might have peace tomorrow, by simply throwing down their weapons and striking their flag. No cry as yet from our own brave boys, their blue jackets fragrant with the smell of victories. No cry from the bloody graves of fallen heroes, who would as gladly fight and die again for the old flag. No cry even from widows and orphans, who have lost all they had to lose, and now only pray it may not have been in vain. Nowhere any cry do we hear, but from the lips of rebels not in arms, or who, if not rebels, are the dupes and the tools of rebels, doing the work of rebels, and doing it better now and here than though they had followed their hearts down over the lines these are the men who now cry for peace at any price, peace on the instant by the grounding of our arms, when they know, some of them better even than we–for they have learned it from Richmond–that the rebellion is on the verge of grounding its arms. Peace, they cry, as over a drawn battle, when they know the battle is nearly finished in victory. Peace, they cry, when they know that peace now, without another blow, would be substantially the triumph of our foes. Some of these men who cry for peace are bold, bad man; as bold and bad as Catiline. Others are only the rank and file of old political organizations, who know no other voice than that of their old shepherds. Taking them all together, their name is legion. They are found in all portions of the loyal states, and in numbers are probably about as strong, relatively, as the Tories of the Revolution; perhaps a little stronger. They are now, by the confession of the rebels themselves, the forlorn hope of their Confederacy. Foreign intervention was abandoned long ago as an idle dream. The rebellion is standing literally on its last legs; it ahs conscripted everything it could lay its hands on that could be of any use to it between the cradle and the grave. The recruiting drumbeat would not be more out of place in the churchyards than in the streets of most of the Southern towns. A few thousands of men more on our side, and the thing is ended. Peace would then come, not by an armistice, which would lead to no peace that could last, but by victories so overwhelming and conclusive that no man anywhere would dare to challenge the result. So says the Lieutenant-general of our armies, God bless him for his sublime tenacity of purpose, for his steadfast faith, for his man victories. So say all our best generals. So say all our best soldiers. And the rebels know it to be true. Only one hope now sustains them, and that is their hope of seeing yet, at the eleventh hour, a divided and palsied North.

Shall they see it? Tell me, Christian friends and neighbors, tell me, my fellow-countrymen, shall they see it? This is now the grand question before us. And it is the only question. The question of slavery, in its relations to our politics, our industry, our religion even, is just now supremely impertinent: impertinent, I say, not because slavery can be cleared of the guilt of this rebellion, or can be thought compatible with the revived prosperity and permanent peace of the republic, or can be looked upon with moral indifference by moral men; but simply because, by its own act, it now lies at the mercy of events which must have their course. Of the four millions of southern bondmen at the beginning of this rebellion, more than one million–Mr. Davis has said nearly two millions–have been freed already. Others yet will snatch their freedom as our armies advance. And they would have snatched it all the same had there been no Proclamation of 1863. That military edict is, therefore, but a poor apology for turning against the Government now. Beyond all controversy, it has weakened the rebellion, and strengthened the Government; weakened the rebellion by making emancipation, not merely a military incident, but a well advised and avowed purpose, in order to the quicker an surer triumph of our arms; strengthened the Government by all the thousands of colored troops now in its service, by arraying on our side the sympathies of the best men in Europe, and securing for ourselves the inspiration, not of patriotism alone, but also of philanthropy and the fear of God. To re-enslave these freedmen would be not merely infamous, it would be insane. These, then, are wholly out of the problem. The eagles are uncaged, and gone. What shall be done with such as may not have been actually liberated along the paths of our armies, what shall be done with the institution of slavery itself–these are questions of the future, questions to be taken up and disposed of after the war is ended, and the Union, which, according to the loyal theory of the war, has never been dissolved, shall have been in fact restored. For the future, the immediate future, to which they belong, they are questions of the gravest moment. Perhaps we shall all soon feel them to be the crucial questions of our destiny. Perhaps the hour is nearer than some of us suppose, when the whole nations shall be standing in awe of Him whose office it is to say, Inasmuch as ye have done it, or have not done it, , unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it, or have not done it, unto me. But just at this most critical conjuncture of our affairs–just emerging, as we are, from the lowest depths of our despondency, the national brain oppressed, the natural pulse feverish, and these questions are not in time. The only question now, if we are wise, is the question of war or armistice. This is the question offered us. Let us accept it, and hold its apostles to it and hold ourselves to it, and hold ourselves to it, and hold each other to it, and hold the nation to it. If Ajax fails of victory for want of light, be it no fault of ours.

Armistice is the watch-word. But what is armistice? Not peace; only hostility suspended. But hostility suspended in order to peace, they tell us. Be not deceived, my countrymen. Peace will never come this way. The rebellion is still, engineered and dominated by able and desperate men, who have sworn with an oath as stern as that of the famous Delenda est Carthago, that the old Union shall never be reestablished. This explains the remark of Mr. Davis, that they “are not fighting for slavery, and care very little about it.” He did not mean that they are sick of the institution, and ready to give it up. He only meant, although of course too shrewd to own up to it, that, with their independence established, and an open sea between themselves and the dusky continent, they will know how to make good the losses of the war. They are inflexibly resolved upon an independent Confederacy; and if, with their armies so well in hand, they can hold the Southern masses to that program today, with those armies refreshed and resupplied, they will be able to hold these same masses to that same program tomorrow. The armistice will end, as it began, in an unqualified and stubborn demand for independence. They say they want nothing else and will think of nothing else. If their demand be refused–as refused it must be, for I have read in a recent document that “ the Union must be preserved at all hazards”–then it will be war again, only worse, and less likely by a thousand fold to end propitiously than now. If the demand be conceded, there may, indeed, be peace for a time, but war again after a season, and war for ever, till either our descendants learn the wisdom now offered to us, or the continent is black with ruins. What man in his senses can imagine for a moment the possibility of permanent amity, or anything like it, between two such governments as would take the place of the one government now battling for its life? What man that wishes to plant, or spin, or trade, or study, would be willing to stay amidst such uncertainties as would then be chronic?

Sermon – Thanksgiving – 1863

A Willing Reunion Not Impossible
Thanksgiving Sermon Preached at
St. Paul’s, Brookline, November 26, 1863,
By
Rev. Francis Wharton“In the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.” —Ps. lxiii. 7.It is the usage of the divine Word to speak of God’s mystery as the believer’s peace. Concealment, we are told, is a part of the glory of God; and the very darkness, therefore, in which our path may be enfolded, leads us to trust in God, who is in the cloud. “Thou canst not see my face,” said God to Moses, “for there shall no man see me and live.” “And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand as I pass by,”—hiding thus from the creature the movement of the Creator, even when the Creator is most near. So the apostle cries,—“Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things; to whom be glory forever. Amen.” And in the same strain of praise for this, the hiddenness of the providence of God, the Psalmist exclaims, in the words of the text,—“In the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.”

I think, dear friends, in the first place that this must be the believer’s cry in reference to the shadows that hung over him during former parts of his pilgrimage, but which are now passed. Few of us but must recall moments when we seemed placed in the cleft of the rock; and, like one pent in between the rugged walls and the beetling roof of some dark sea-side cave whose mouth the waves wash, could then see no path of escape. Yet, as we now view these moments of depression or affliction, what is our present cry? Do we not feel that even for these we can praise God? Do we not see that he whose paths are on the sea, and whose footsteps are not known, led us forth by a way of which we knew nothing? “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now have I kept thy word.” We now see that our plans, which we so much cherished, were very different from God’s plans, which we did not understand; and that our plans would have led to ruin, but God’s have led to peace. We see that, whenever, in our own presumptuous wisdom, we chose our own path, against his obvious leadings, it led to sorrow, if not to sin; and that God’s discipline, which tore us, bleeding as it were, from ties in which we had thus wrapped ourselves, was the way of right and of love. We see that even God’s providence of affliction, in removing from us beloved and believing friends, was a providence of mercy,—completing the number of the elect, adding to the glory of heaven, weaning us from earth. We see how even our own sicknesses and disappointments have been blessings, warning us, as we grew older, not to attach ourselves to the transitory things of earth, but to place our affections on heaven. In the shadows of the past we can, therefore, rejoice in the light of experience; and so Faith teaches us to rejoice in the shadow of the present, grievous as may be the affliction or sore the trial. For the shadow is the covering of God’s wing.

But if such be the case with personal troubles, how much more strongly must it be so in reference to those which strike, not merely individuals, but nations,— nations whose destiny involves, not only that of multitudes of individual souls, but, in a large measure, those of Christ’s militant church. It is true, that, in our own case, as our country stands on this Thanksgiving Day, the shadow over us is not unbroken. We look back, as we close this beautiful autumn, upon a harvest of singular fullness. In no time has wealth poured itself so abundantly upon our great marts; at no former period has the giant growth of our giant country been so marked in this, the favored region in which we live. And we see this growth and this flush not only in our business, but in our educational and ecclesiastical interests. Our schools were never so full, our religious contributions never so large, the mental activity of the country never so great, as now. And yet, as we view all this, we turn with a sigh to the one great and overwhelming grief that overshadows us: a country divided into two hostile camps, and divided by a chasm into which not merely wealth, but life, is swallowed up in the costliest libations; a people, only a few years since united in affection and peace, now apparently separated by an enmity even unto death. In this, the shadow of God’s wing on our land, what reason have we to rejoice? By these, the waters of Babylon,—in this, the strange land of discord in which we now find ourselves,—how can we, as a nation raise the voice of praise? This question let me now attempt to consider.

And first, in these, our national trials, we are led to contemplate heaven as the sole country which cannot be disturbed, and God as the sole ruler whose supremacy cannot be touched. Each form of human government has been successively shaken to its centre. The military despot, the constitutional king, the little community in which each man has an equal share of power, the vast centralization, where the aristocrat acts and speaks for;—each, in turn, has yielded to that law which stamps imperfection on all the institutions of man. And now, our own system, of all others the most perfect,—of all others, that which best unites individual liberty with governmental power,—speaks the same lesson. The genius of constitutional liberty stands by the camp, and tells us that not even the best of human governments is able, without force, to control human passion; that there is but one government that cannot be shocked,—that of heaven; but one power in whose protection we can find peaceful refuge,—the power of God. In God, then, let our supreme dependence be placed.

But, secondly, these national trials cannot be studied without seeing in them important political as well as religious compensations. I have never, from the beginning of this melancholy struggle, been able to conceive of the great country included between the lakes and the Gulf, and the Atlantic and Pacific, otherwise than as one. All the analogies of other countries forbid its division, unless division be followed by war which would last until the one part or the other is politically cancelled. In no case in Europe do we meet with two contiguous powers, unseparated by natural boundaries, maintaining their independence and their integrity untouched. Between France and Spain the Pyrenees erect an almost impassable natural barrier, and, in addition to this, there is that moral severance arising from difference of tongue; yet France has, more than once, overrun Spain, and Spain has now sunk to a second-class power, virtually the dependent of France. In a still more active process of absorption, the principalities of Burgundy, of Navarre, of Normandy, were gradually so worked up into the body of the kingdom of France, by the mere energy of homogeneousness of language and contiguity of soil, that now even the old boundaries are lost. Through the same process Wales and Scotland were united to England, Norway to Sweden, Bohemia to Austria, Silesia to Prussia, and, in the very few last years, Naples, Parma, Modena, and Tuscany, to the new kingdom of Italy. If, in some of these cases, the fusion was produced immediately by war, the principle is the same; for the only alternative to a peaceable union, when nature or art has erected no positive boundary, is, war to be continued unto one party or the other gives way; and it is only by such boundaries, or by the joint guaranties of Europe’s leading powers, that the smaller states of the continent are kept from immediate absorption in their more powerful neighbors. I do not say that this is right; but I do say that it is in obedience to one of those instincts of human society which it is as impossible to control as it would be to overrule that law by which the smaller particle gravitates to the greater, or the stronger force attains a supremacy over the weak. And peculiarly does this law seem to apply to this country, where there is not only no natural boundary, where there is not only no natural boundary dividing North and South; not only no dissimilarity in language, in religion, in historical antecedents, in general policy of government,—but where the two sections are united by reciprocity of staples, where the Mississippi couples the lakes and the Gulf by one main commercial avenue, and where the Alleghany and Rocky hills divide the country into valleys running north and south. There could be no permanent peace, were an artificial boundary cut through interests which would thus have such interminable causes of conflict; there could be no peace, without political death, when peace involved a severing of the great arteries of national life: there can be no alternative, as I conceive, between a federal union of some sort, and a series of exhausting wars, which must continue until the one side or the other obtain an ascendency which is final and complete.

Nor do I see any answer to this, in the fact that such is now the antagonism between North and South, that a willing reunion under the same general government is impossible. Antagonisms no less bitter,—antagonisms often strengthened by difference of language, and of political antecedents, as well as by natural boundaries, which do not obtain among us, existed in all the cases of absorption I have mentioned; and yet, the great law of populations prevailed, and the contiguous lands were united. No execration of our own time could be more bitter than that with which the Welsh bards, as the prophets of Welsh patriotism, visited the English Invaders:

“Ruin seize thee, ruthless king,
Confusion on thy banner wait,”—
So they have been paraphrased by the poet Gray; yet Wales soon began to exchange institutions with England, and, under a common government, to be fed by, and to feed, its wealth. No wail could be sadder than that of the Scotch minstrel, singing, as it seemed to him, the dirge of Scotch glory:—

“Old times are passed, old manners gone,
A stranger fills the Stuart’s throne;
And I, neglected and oppressed,
Long to be with them, and at rest.”
Yet soon, not only Highland hate and Lowland suspicion died out, but the poet’s melancholy at the loss of Scotch royalty, gave way to as proud a loyalty to the new empire as ever was felt to the old.

If, five hundred years back, we should stand with Wycliffe in one of the cloisters of Baliol, we might hear him lamenting, as the chief obstacle to British union against papal usurpation, not merely the feuds between York and Lancaster, but the territorial division of the land among distinct powers. “Here,” he might say, “to the west, protected by dense forests, and shut off by a barbarous language, lift up the Welsh princes a defiant brow. Between us and Scotland rise the Teviot hills; but more impassable than there are the barriers of tongue, of habit, of bitter, relentless hate. It seems impossible,” so he may reason, “that these barriers, so fatal to the true independence of this isle should be removed; and yet, while they stand, how can the great cause of truth prosper?” So argued the wisest and most hopeful of Wycliffe’s day, and of many a day following; yet the time came when these barriers sank away, and these warring populations fused, under that invisible process of assimilation which territorial contiguity involves.

Or let us, as illustrating the fugitiveness of the passions of civil, as distinguished from international, war, go to the battle-field of Newbury, at the beginning of the great military contest between Charles I. and his parliament. Let us there listen to Lord Falkland, the purest and most unprejudiced patriot of the day; the one who most faithfully sought to preserve harmony by reconciling the two contending factions, and who now, in utter despair of that country he so much loved, and of that peace for which he so much longed, is about to throw away his life on the spot where the carnage is threatened. “He lives too long who has survived his country,” so we can hear him cry. “I see England finally and definitely divided into two hostile clans. I see the torch of civil war handed down from generation to generation; hatred has dug a pit between brother and brother which they cannot cross; hatred is to be the perpetual boundary-line which is to divide this people into two hostile camps; each element has in it much that is true; each is essential to England’s prosperity: yet now, as it stands, I see only war until one or the other is extinguished, and unchecked despotism, or unchecked anarchy, rules supreme.” Yet Lord Falkland’s own sons might well have lived to see peace restored without either of these essential elements being extinguished; to see Puritanism and Anglicanism, Royalism, and Parliamentism, each surviving the contest, to continue, by their own alternations and interchanges, to build up English prosperity; and to witness a final settlement, in which each element, divested of the fiercer passions with which it was once mixed, would vie with the other in loyalty to a constitutional king.

Nor, should we transport ourselves back to one of our New York or New England towns, at a period but a few years later, do we find political or social antagonisms less marked. New York acknowledged the supremacy of the Dutch crown, New England acknowledged that of England; and England and Holland were then at war. New York held to aristocratic, New England to democratic, institutions; and besides these political and social differences, the two countries were inflamed by the fiercest commercial jealousy. Perhaps nowhere, even in that hard age of dissension, could be found two contiguous populations more utterly unlike, and more heartily disliking each other, as well as politically more thoroughly antagonistic, than those then existing in New England and New York. They were separated by far greater dissimilarities than now are North and South; and by equally bitter antipathies; but the Revolution gave New York and New England one government and almost one heart.

I see nothing, therefore in the immediate animosities of any two contiguous populations to prevent the operation of the great law of which I speak; and least of all, can I assign this effect to an animosity so sudden and recent as that now dividing North and South. We cannot forget that we are substantially one stock. There is scarcely a family which can go back three generations without coming to a common parent whose descendants are scattered north, south, and west; and, underneath this surface antagonism, which is none the less bitter from the very nearness of those whom it now inflames, I do believe that there is in the American people a base of mutual affection and respect which will remain long after this strife is forgotten. In union were formed the impressions of our country’s youth. The old man, whom you watch, retains his childhood’s memories the most vividly; the old friendships, the old scenes, the old sacrifices, are what gave his character its final mould–And the old country will retain, I believe, its old memories, when the transient fever of the present is long past. It will look back to that infancy when its two sections interchanged their sons; when Southern soldiers rallied under a New England captain, to reclaim their soil form the invader, and when Washington’s majestic presence first made a New England army feel the grandeur and the strength of a united land. This consciousness of community of blood, of community of history, of community of religion, of community, it must needs be, of destiny, lies at the foundation of the American life; and, fearful as is the present struggle, and resolute as should be our determination to maintain to the last the cause of authority and law, I see nothing in these, the divisions of the moment, that shows that, as to us, the great laws of population are reversed, and that it is God’s will that we should dwell apart. Once, it is true, in the world’s history, God stretched a sea between two nations whom it was his will to separate; and at his command the path he had opened through the waters was closed, and the waves lifted themselves up to execute his omnipotent decree. But he has laid down no boundary line between the North and South of this American race, but, on the contrary, in the councils of omnipotence, has knit together its rivers, its mountains, its history, its lineage, its religion, in one. When, therefore, we read this decree of reunion on nature’s face, and in the country’s real heart, and the page of the divine economy for the Christian future, we may even now, in these shadows of war, see God’s wing, and rejoice in the hope that we will soon again, though with temper chastened, and energies refined, and institutions ameliorated, possess a united land.

One or two practical points I will mention in conclusion. And the first is, that, as long as reconciliation is scorned, and a war for separation insisted on by those at arms against our government; and as long, therefore, as war is necessary for our own defense, and for that of our country and homes, we are advised, by every principle of humanity and policy, that the war, on our part, should receive our united and unreserved support. “A great country,” it was said by a master of statesmanship, “cannot wage a little war.” Our own imperial attitude; the desire to spare unnecessary bloodshed and cost; the determination to avoid that border vindictiveness which marks a protracted and feeble contest, and the determination, also, if we must have war, to have war disconnected with personal hate,—to have, in other words, battle, not assassination; the determination to close, as soon as possible, the terrible suspense by which we are now overhung;—all these motives combine to urge us to collect our whole strength, and, in perfect union, so far as this immediate object is concerned, to stake everything on the result.

And this brings me to a second point,—the wrong of giving way to feelings or expressions of personal bitterness towards those against whom we are thus arrayed. In the last publication I have seen one of whom I shall never cease to love and venerate, but who believing, as I think wrongly, at the beginning of the war, that the union was finally divided, took his stand on the soil to which he belonged,—in the last publication of the late Bishop Meade, of Virginia, he quoted an old proverb, that we should treat our friends as if they might someday become enemies; and our enemies, as if someday the might become our friends; and he added, that while all our Christian life required us to reject the first part of this maxim, the same Christianity required us to accept the second. And I would add to this, that not only Christian feeling, but national magnanimity; not only national magnanimity, but public policy;—all these motives combine in teaching us to treat as those soon to become friends, those now marshaled against us as enemies. We should avoid, I think, not merely the language, but the temper, of recrimination, as prejudicial to our own success,—as forbidden by the first principles of the gospel we believe.

One other topic I cannot persuade myself to overlook. In addition to that care over our sick, wounded, and imprisoned soldiers to which the associations of this day so impressively call us, there is a special work of cardinal importance to be performed to that large body of the African race now thrown upon us for support. The question is not one of theory, but of fact. By the necessities of war, if not by our own voluntary political choice, vast numbers of this docile and amiable but unhappy people have been detached from their old homes and are now dependent on us, not merely for their daily bread, but for that practical education which will enable them to sustain themselves in their new condition. It well becomes us, on this Thanksgiving Day, to consider what is due from us to this people, thus so solemnly consecrated to our care. And I do not hesitate to say, that this most delicate trust is one which we must make up our minds faithfully and religiously to discharge. We have now accepted the tutelage of this people,—a people whose capacities, great as the far past shows them to be, are to be recalled from the sluggishness into which they have fallen in the bondage of centuries; and we have accepted this tutelage, as one of the elements of restoration of our own political power. We have invited them to aid us: their men have fought for us on the battlefield, leaving their women and children to our care: both men and women are ignorant of the art of self-support, as well as destitute of its means; and may God help us to do to them the right! And, among the elements of this right, let me mention, not merely temporary aid, but the determination to remove that prejudice which in the North, and particularly at the North-West, refuses to receive the negro as part of the industrial energies of the land. If, in the present state of the country,—if, in view of the liberty we are giving to so large a part of the negro race, and the military debt we are accumulating to them, we do not remove this prejudice; if we do not receive the Africans to a free home, and to the full rights of labor in this our land, or, if that be impracticable, give them adequate homesteads elsewhere,—we shall, I think, be eternally branded as a nation dead to generous impulses, and unfaithful to the most sacred trusts. The question is not the political one of emancipating these particular slaves, for that is already done; but of saving those whom, for our own purposes, we have already emancipated from moral and physical ruin. To this work the intelligence and humanity of the country are most solemnly pledged.

And now, as we separate, I recur once more to the comforting thought which the text brings. As our difficulties multiply; as problems, apparently insoluble,—such as that which concerns the destiny of this unhappy people, to whom I have just directed your thoughts,—as problems, apparently insoluble, start up in our path, we fall back on this great truth: that God, who interposes the cloud, will, if we trust in him, open the way. The future will bring its solutions, if the present only bring its faith. The very incomprehensible about us is a proof that it is God who is near, and who leads. It was a cloud that went, in the day, before Israel, as he marched from the land of bondage; but this very cloud, in the night, when Israel would otherwise have died, became lit with flame, and led him in the path of right. On Sinai, God spoke his law from a thick cloud, in the midst of thunders and lightning, and to the voice of a trumpet exceeding loud: just as in the darkness and tumult of war by which we are now beset, he speaks to us. And even divine redemption is hid in the same shadow; and, in the moment when the Lord is transfigured before his disciples, “a bright cloud overshadows them,” and from this cloud the Father speaks, “This is my beloved Son.” Be this comfort, then, ours,—the comfort that God rules, and God redeems; and let this comfort give us a tranquil faith in God, and a resolute determination to perform those practical duties which in this emergency he prescribes. If so, it will be with no mere flutter of languid dependence, but in the courage of a determined and active heart, that, even in the clouds of this Thanksgiving day,—clouds which though sunlit by yesterday’s victory are still dark,—we lift up our voice in triumph, and cry, “In the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.”

Sermon – George Washington’s Birthday – 1863

This is a transcript of a sermon commemorating George Washington’s Birthday. It was preached on February 22, 1863 in Connecticut by the pastor of the First Congregational Church, George Richards (1816-1869).

THE MEMORY OF WASHINGTON.

A SERMON

Preached in the

First Congregational Church, Litchfield, Conn.,

February 22, 1863.

By
George Richards.

“In very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to show in thee My power and that My name may be declared throughout all the earth.” Exodus ix. 16.

Thus spake Jehovah to the King of Egypt. God attains His own ends by His own instruments. When He has great and important results to bring to pass, He provides means adapted and adequate to their accomplishment.

Very bad men, actuated by very bad motives, may be used to promote the very best designs: Pharaoh was an instance. Very good men, actuated by very good motives, may be made instrumental of benefits far transcending their most sanguine expectations: Washington was an instance.

A hundred and thirty-one years ago today, in an ancient homestead in Virginia near the banks of the Potomac, was born the child destined to be looked up to by all parties and sections with singular unanimity as the father and founder of his country- the one man whose preeminent worth and unexampled services are deemed beyond dispute- the most discordant opinions claiming his sanction and seeking the shelter of his authority- war itself sheathing its sword and keeping truce about his sepulcher.

Do we not well at a time like this, when dissension and division are the order of the day, to recall (though [now] on the Sabbath and in the sanctuary) what manner of man he was, how Providence had endowed and disciplined him for his diversified trusts, and with what signal success he acquitted himself of so overwhelming responsibilities?

I. Look first at the original constitution of the man. He Who had so much for him to do, framed him accordingly. He was cast, body and mind, in a capacious mould. Great qualities rarely found single were grouped in him. Traits generally thought conflicting were harmonized in him.

Though it would hardly have been suspected from his accustomed equanimity, he was a man of strong passions and impetuous impulses. In rare instances, the pent up elements found vent and terrible was the explosion. Had he possessed the mild and placid temper commonly ascribed to him, he would have lacked the force essential to the difficult task assigned him. The surface was usually cold and still (and needed to be) but the volcanic fires slumbered within.

United to these passions and impulses was a will competent to restrain them. He governed others by first governing himself. Only those admitted to his privacy, who saw him when under the least restraint, were aware with how tight a rein he held himself in check. He had made up his mind to be his own master, and seldom was his vigilance off its guard or his authority successfully disputed.

Conjoined to those antagonist forces was a judgment as sound, as fair, as even-balanced as often falls to the lot of man. Glad of light from any quarter, patient to hear and weigh contradictory opinions, slow to arrive at a decision, watchful against the bias of pride, prejudice, self-interest, his conclusions, perhaps, were as nearly infallible as can be expected of mere human reason.

He was a man, too, of minute detail keeping his own accounts, private and public, in the neatest of handwritings, and with a sort of microscopic accuracy; amid his busiest campaigns superintending his estates, instructing his stewards, regulating the routine of crops, caring for the stock, the dairy, the fences, the tools, as if nothing were small enough to escape him; and yet, withal, how broad and comprehensive were his views, embracing the entire country in all its departments- the army to be recruited, fed, clothed, equipped, drilled; its movements skillfully and deliberately planned- Congress to be respectfully addressed and begged and importuned to vote the requisite supplies- the States to be kept in harmony and urged each to its proportionate exertions- foreign nations to be conciliated and bound by treaty stipulations! What had he not upon his hands? Yet the less never seemed to encroach upon the greater, nor the greater upon the less. The compass and variety of his faculties rendered him competent to all. In such large dimensions and symmetrical proportions had his Creator constituted him.

II. Again, the early training of Washington singularly fitted him for the two diverse spheres he was ordained to occupy. As he was to be alike conspicuous and important as a soldier and civilian, the Providence which designed him for both and educated him for both.

His ancestry, which can be traced back to the century succeeding the Norman conquest, boasted its mail-clad warriors and gallant knights. His great-grandfather who removed to this country was a Colonel of the Virginia forces which he led against the Indians that ravaged the Potomac settlements. The elder brother of George, his guardian and instructor, was a captain in his majesty’s service and distinguished for his valor.

Mount Vernon was a resort of British officers, both of the army and navy, where feats of arms were discussed and famous victories exulted over. The little lad, all ears, lost nothing and went out among the boys to tell and show how fields were won. When the French war was imminent, and the youth of nineteen was commissioned an Adjutant-General, one of these veteran campaigners lent him treatises on military tactics, put him through the manual exercise, and gave him an idea of field evolutions, while another was his instructor in the sword exercise. His arduous and honorable service against the French and their savage allies (first in subordinate positions then as Commander-in-Chief of the Virginia forces) was the best preparation possible for the still more harassing and eventful trust in due time to be devolved on him.

It would seem as if the most intricate problems of the Revolutionary struggle had been worked out on a smaller scale in this preliminary contest. The mother country was unwittingly training under her own flag the master spirit who was to emancipate his countrymen from her iron thrall. She “meant not so, neither did her heart think so” [Isaiah 10:7] but so had a Higher Will ordained.

In like manner was the same youth “under tutors and governor” [Galatians 4:2] who educated him for his civil functions.

His first ancestor in this country was not only a military leader but a member of the House of Burgesses.

So, too, the elder brother already spoken of. At the age of twenty-six, Washington himself was elected by a large majority against formidable competitors to a seat in that dignified and influential body where his calm and wise but resolute and independent spirit helped to direct and develop the growing opposition to the tyranny of king and parliament.

When the first Continental Congress met at Philadelphia- an assembly which for weight of character and consummate sagacity has rarely been equaled- Washington was one of the delegates appointed from Virginia. How well he acted his part in that grave conclave let his colleague, Patrick Henry, testify. Asked on his return whom he considered the greatest man in Congress, he said: “If you speak of eloquence, Mr. Rutledge, of South Carolina, is by far the greatest orator;” (he might have excepted himself); “but if you speak of solid information and sound judgment, Colonel Washington is, unquestioningly, the greatest man on the floor.” As when he was elevated to the command of our armies, he was found no novice but marvelously disciplined and equipped for the arduous post assigned him; so when he was summoned to the chair of Chief Magistrate with no usages nor precedents to guide, his extraordinary fitness for the position was no sudden inspiration, but the ripe result of this preparatory training to which the same far-seeing Providence had been subjecting him.

III. Another rare combination characterized this man.

By birth and social position he belonged to the aristocracy. Even in the mother country his family ranked with the privileged class. Transplanted to the “Old Dominion,” they at once became extensive landholders and were elevated to prominent positions under the Crown. Among his earlier associates were the Fairfaxes, of noble blood who, initiated into the mysterious of high life in England, brought with them its refined graces and courtly manners to their new homes between the Potomac and Rappahannock.

Bred in so favorable a school, an apt and ready pupil, the young Virginian soon became the model of a gentleman.

He inherited a competent property from his father to which he added largely by his marriage and by his judicious management of his affairs; and thus, to a noble person and dignified address, joined the wealth which in that day and neighborhood peculiarly greatly enhanced his personal and social consequence. Few men, probably, of his time enjoyed as unrestricted access to the stateliest mansions and selectest society of the most aristocratic of the Colonies. But where was there one more thoroughly superior to the narrow and selfish pride so apt to attend high social position? If he felt it, he fought against it and manfully subdued it. He was preeminently a man of the people, entered into their wants, divided their burdens, made their interests his interests, and in every way identified himself with their prosperity and adversity.

Naturally and by habit reserved and distant – never stooping to flatter and fawn around the multitude – to buy their suffrages by palliating their faults and conniving at and participating in their vices – he stood up for their rights against whoever would encroach upon them, took part in their toils and trials, as if their lot had been his, told them the honest truth about themselves (reluctant as they might be to hear it), animated them to duty by bearing the lion’s share of it –was, in a word, the direct opposite of the timid, groveling, time-serving, self-seeking demagogue of which there were not wanting examples then, as there have not been since. When the French and Indians were prowling round the defenseless settlements and all eyes were turned to him who was without men, arms, supplies, how touchingly does he appeal to the royal Governor: “The supplicating tears of the women and moving petitions of the men melt me into such deadly sorrow that I solemnly declare (if I know my own mind), I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy provided that would contribute to the people’s ease!” His deeds confirmed his words! So, after this barbarous struggle was ended and the subordinate officers and soldiers failed to obtain the bounty lands promised them, he became their champion – started off on horseback into the wilderness not yet secure, confronted the warriors he had lately fought (one aged sachem telling them that he and his young braves had singled him out at Braddock’s defeat, and fired at him over and over but that the Great Spirit must have protected him), and at length, at the mouth of the Great Kanawha, turning to account his skill as a surveyor, he affixed his mark to the lands which he succeeded in securing to his valiant comrades.

Still later, when the Stamp Act was passed and foreign luxuries must be dispensed with or an odious impost paid to an oppressive government, he appealed to his rich neighbors to unite with him in discarding such indulgencies and thus befriend their country. The articles proscribed he would not admit into his house and enjoined his agent in London to ship nothing while subject to taxation.

“Our all,” said he, “is at stake; and the little conveniences and comforts of life, when set in competition with our liberty, ought to be rejected- not with reluctance, but with pleasure.”

And afterward when he left his noble mansion on the Potomac, replete with every reasonable indulgence that affluence would furnish to encounter the hardships and exposures of camp life- though great pecuniary interests needed his personal supervision, and languished for the lack of them – though the humblest common soldier underwent not a tithe of the anxiety and mental agony which the long-doubtful contest imposed on him- still, he expressly stipulated that only his expenses should be paid, which he exactly recorded, unwilling to accept a farthing of recompense from his bleeding and impoverished country.

How in contrast with the greedy speculator in office and out of it who have prowled like famished wolves round our field of carnage – stealing everything they could lay their hands on – robbing the national treasury – purloining from the camp chest – pilfering from the wounded in the hospitals – appropriating to themselves the little comforts meant for the dying, if not stripping the very dead!

Yes! Washington, though an accomplished gentleman, was more; he was a man. He respected humanity under whatever guise or garb. He went for his country – his whole country – without distinction; not for the elect few among whom the accident of his birth of fortune had cast his lot, but for the entire people to whose destiny, for weal or woe, an all-disposing Providence had linked his own.

IV. Another union of opposites in this man was Southern birth and training with Northern sentiments and preferences.

Northern men with Southern principles abound: Washington was the reverse, rather.

His sterling common sense, his patient industry, his thorough system, his close personal application to business, his economy amid affluence and temperance amid abundance, his habitual gravity and self control- qualities and habits not too frequent anywhere- are not held to be peculiarly indigenous to the Sunny South.

They are more usually the product of a colder clime, a harder soil, and very different institutions.

And who proposed Washington as the commander of our armies? John Adams- more than one of the Virginia delegates being cool on the subject, and one, clear and full against it. Repairing to headquarters, the new chief found himself at the head of a host, nearly every man at that time from East of Hudson. How well he served and how thoroughly he won their respectful confidence need not be told. The general from one section of the country- the subordinate officers and rank and file from another- how creditable to both was their hearty cooperation! There were not wanting among so many jealousies, suspicions, animosities; but an unrivaled prudence joined to a lofty magnanimity managed to surmount them. The army for awhile was little better than a rabble, hurried together from every quarter to maintain the common cause, and at times their leader must have been utterly out of patience with them; yet for the most part, he smothered his dissatisfaction and made the best of it. “This unhappy and devoted province,” he kindly said, “has been so long in a state of anarchy, and the yoke has been laid so heavily upon it, that great allowances are to be made for troops raised under such circumstances. The deficiency of numbers, discipline, and stores can only lead to this conclusion; that their spirit has exceeded their strength.” After this rude militia- profiting by his stern but friendly discipline- had driven the British veterans, ships, and men out of the Port of Boston, never more to reestablish themselves on the soil or in the harbors of New England, to whom still did the commander-in-chief look for troops and supplies with a more unwavering assurance than to Governor Trumbull of Connecticut? In whose military skill and genius did he repose higher confidence than in those of General Green of Rhode Island?

So when later he filled the Presidential chair, who were his most confidential advisers? On whom did he more implicitly rely to give shape and direction to his policy than on Adams, Jay, and Hamilton?

Could he discern no good beyond his immediate section? Did he take it upon him to berate the bigoted, narrow-minded, puritanical spirit?

No! He left it to men born on this Eastern soil to traduce their own fathers’ memories and spit on their own mothers’ graves!

In yet another respect was he less a Southern man than a Northern: he was profoundly averse to slavery. How could he fail to be? He fought through the Revolutionary War under the declaration that “all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which is liberty.” That declaration- penned by another Virginian statesman, adopted by the Congress from which he received his commission, formally endorsed by every state- he had ordered to be read at the head of every brigade that all might know what he and they were fighting for.

Was he the man lightly to retract his words, or to say one thing, meaning another? Three years after the war he wrote: “I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel me to it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.” Eleven years later he writes; “I wish from my soul, that the legislature of this state could see the policy of a gradual abolition of slavery. It might prevent much future mischief.” Resolved to do his part, at any rate, whoever neglected theirs, the third item in his will reads: “Upon the decease of my wife, it is my will and desire that all the slaves which I hold in my own right shall receive their freedom. To emancipate them during her life, though earnestly desired by me, would be attended with insuperable difficulties.” After providing for the aged and infirm and children, and for the instruction in reading and writing of the apprentices, he continues; “I do hereby expressly forbid the sale or transportation out of the said commonwealth of any slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. And I do moreover most pointedly and most solemnly enjoin it upon my executors hereafter named, or the survivors of them, to see that this clause respecting slaves, and every part thereof, be religiously fulfilled at the epoch at which it is directed to take place, without evasion, neglect, or delay after the crops which may then be on the ground are harvested.”

Suppose every other Virginia planter had refused to traffic in human beings! Suppose every other Southern master, when going up to appear before God, had struck the shackles from every bondman in his charge; how changed would have been the aspect of things today!

“The future mischief” which this seer so anxiously anticipated and so emphatically predicted has befallen us.

V. One other rare combination distinguished Washington. He was a man of the world, and a man of God.

A man of the world- not in the sense of a worldly man, but of a man familiarly versed in human affairs, liberally endowed with what men at large admire; talents, wealth, social position, power, fame- who excelled in nearly everything which most men value and aspire after.

United with this (if we may judge from the testimony of his associates, the tenor of his writings, his public policy, his private conduct) he was a religious man. “Tradition asserts that his widowed mother gathered daily her young household about her and read to them lessons of religion and morality out of some standard word, her favorite volume being Sir Matthew Hale’s Contemplations, Moral and Divine. This mother’s manual- her name inscribed in it by her own pen- was preserved by her son with filial care, and may yet be seen in the library at Mount Vernon.”

While yet a lad he drew up a code of morals and manners, extremely minute and circumstantial, still shown in his handwriting, to which he studied to conform himself. “In his camp on the Great Meadows, he was wont to assemble his half-equipped soldiers, the leather-clad hunters and woodsmen, the painted savages with their wives and children to public prayers, uniting them in solemn devotion by his own example and demeanor.”

A stated communicant in the Episcopal Church (though not cramped by denominational restriction), he entered on and went through the war constantly acknowledging his dependence upon God and looking and pointing others to the one Source of light and strength.

In reply to the acclamations which greeted his arrival at Cambridge, he observed: “That his country had called him to active and dangerous duty but he trusted that Divine Providence, which wisely orders the affairs of men, would enable him to discharge it with fidelity and success.”

In his parting address to his comrades in arms he says: “May the choicest of Heaven’s favors, both here and hereafter, attend those who, under the Divine auspices, have secured innumerable blessings for others.”

Amid the festivities that celebrated his accession to the Presidency, his language was: “When I contemplate the interposition of Providence as it was visibly manifested in guiding us through the Revolution, in preparing us for the reception of the general government, and in conciliating the good will of the people of America toward one another after its adoption, I feel oppressed and almost overwhelmed with Divine munificence.”

And his Farewell words to his countrymen deserve to be embalmed in every heart: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, – these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

He met death in his chamber with the same unruffled serenity with which he had often braved it in the forefront of battle. “I die hard,” said he, “but I am not afraid to go.”

A few questions will conclude.

1. May we not hope that a land thus signally favored of Providence will yet be spared?

Did God raise up, qualify, commission, so august a character as Washington – enable him to conduct us though the fire and blood of an eight years’ war, to preside over the organization of a government on the whole so wise and equal, to be himself its first Chief Magistrate, exemplifying every civic virtue in his policy and person – and all that within the space of fourscore years (the ripe life time of a man) the whole experiment should come to naught?

It is not probable. We are warranted to believe otherwise.

2. Should not our public men copy after this pattern of true patriotism?

Washington aimed to unite his countrymen, not to divide them- to promote deference to duly constituted authority not to undermine and overturn it. He was often dissatisfied with the course pursued by Congress – felt that they were slow – that they did not fully realize the danger of their country – that sinister and selfish ends actuated too many of them; but he did not for that reason counsel anarchy – he would be no fomenter of civil strife; it was enough to be at war with a foreign foe without cutting one another’s throats.

When the popular discontent broke out in open insurrection he was for prompt and decisive measures to suppress it. “You talk,” writes he, “of employing influence to appease the present tumults. Influence is not government. Let us have a government by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured; or let us know the worst at once.”

While one man’s vote counts equal to another’s, not so with opinions. There are leaders in all communities. They who bear such sway over their fellows should use it for good. First to deceive the masses, then to rouse their evil passions- goading them on to acts of violence- is to stir up a tempest much easier raised than regulated; it may be another man’s house burned over him today, and yours over you tomorrow.

The guillotine- to which Robespierre had condemned so many- spouted with his own blood at length. God forbid that the Jacobinism that transformed Paris into a slaughterhouse should redden our streets with gore, or that the fatal experiment of South Carolina should be repeated in Connecticut!

3. Ought the cost of this war, in treasure or life, to dishearten us?

There were times in the Revolution when the stoutest hearts seemed failing them for fear. The heroic leader himself was openly denounced as unfit for his position. Cabals were organized- plots fomented to oust him from his place. Such a waste of men and means, and so meager a return; so many defeats; so few, if any, victories, must no longer be tolerated, said these agitators. Schemers, like Belial,

“All false and hollow, through his tongue Dropp’d manna, and could make the worse appear the better reason, to perplex and dash maturest counsels,”

drew round them the restive malcontents – aggravated their uneasiness – intensified their hate – then used them as the poor tools of their own ambition. “The spirit of freedom,” wrote Washington, “which, at the commencement of this contest, would have gladly sacrificed anything to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided and every selfish passion has taken its place. It is not the public but private interest which influences the majority of mankind nor can the Americans any longer boast an exception.” How stinging yet how just a commentary on human nature! But by and by, brilliant triumphs restored heart and hope; the timorous grew brave; the temporizing and vacillating decided.

Why may it not be so again? When, in the good Providence of God, the starry flag shall wave again over Fort Sumter- when the commerce of the Mississippi shall flow, unimpeded, into the Gulf- when the sway of an oligarchy, more reckless and unprincipled than ever ruled in Venice, shall be forever broken- men will wonder they could have been so impatient- wonder that any suffering and sacrifice could have seemed excessive that were necessary to drive from this soil a tyranny hateful to God and man, and which would inevitably have sunk us to political perdition had we not had the firm and unflinching determination to get rid of it at every hazard.

4. Finally, should not our trust be where Washington’s was- in God? Could that handful of colonies, feeble and few- each jealous of the other, and all of each- hope to shake off the yoke, intolerable though it was, of the foremost power of the world? Yes! If God favored it- if it fell within the scope of His beneficent designs. What are weak and strong to Him, “Who weigheth the mountains in scales, and taketh up the isles as a very little thing?” [Isaiah 40:12, 15] If a powerful and independent nation in place of tributary provinces would better subserve His purposes- would more rapidly diffuse light and knowledge- would widen the sway of just and equal laws, the enjoyment of rational liberty, the spread of a pure Christianity- how was the veto of the British king to hinder it? He might darken our coast with fleets, empty upon our shores his Hessian hordes, “He would blow upon them, and they should whither, and the whirlwind take them away as stubble.” [Isaiah 40:24]

Even so in our day, if this land reconstructed will become Immanuel’s land- if its Constitution and laws shall be conformed to the Divine precepts- if the rights acknowledged to belong to all shall be secured to all- if “a republican form of government” guaranteed by the Constitution [Article IV, Section 4] to every portion of this country shall be extended to every portion of it- if the iron heel shall be lifted, which for half a century had trodden down freedom of speech and of the press over half our national area till at length exile or death is the doom of every man who dares to differ from the lords of the lash on the subject of human servitude – in a word, if this semi-slave country is to become a free country- this half-barbarous country a wholly civilized country- if the Gospel which we sent to the Pagan is first to Christianize ourselves then assuredly are nature, Providence, God on our side; and how puerile and impotent will be the efforts of all the myrmidons of despotism, South and North combined, to thwart so sublime a consummation! Methinks the hour foretold by Jefferson has arrived. “We must await,” said he, “with patience, the workings of an overruling Providence, and hope that that is preparing the deliverance of these our suffering brethren. When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved Heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a God of Justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors or at length by His exterminating thunder manifest His attention to the things of the world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality.”

“God be merciful unto us, and bless us, and cause his face to shine upon us. That Thy way may be known upon earth; Thy saving health among all nations.” [Psalms 67:1-2]

“In the shadow of Thy wings will we make our refuge until these calamities be over past.” [Psalms 57:1]

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Categories: Historical Documents

Sermon – Christmas – 1844

Christmas in Early America

Sermon – Christmas – 1843

Sermon – American Institutions & the Bible – 1876

Sermon – Thanksgiving – 1853

Sermon – Memorial Day – 1875

THE NATION’S DEAD

Sermon – Artillery Election – 1853

Sermon – Thanksgiving – 1864 Connecticut

Sermon – Thanksgiving – 1864

Sermon – Thanksgiving – 1863

Sermon – George Washington’s Birthday – 1863

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Christmas in Early America

THE NATION’S DEAD

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