Categories: Historical Documents

THE TRIUMPHS OF WAR. 

A

SERMON

PREACHED

ON THE DAY OF THE ANNUAL FAST,

APRIL 15, 1847.

BY ANDREW P. PEABODY,

PASTOR OF THE SOUTH CHURCH, PORTSMOUTH, N. H.

SECOND EDITION.

PORTSMOUTH:  JOHN W. FOSTER.

C. W. BREWSTER, PRINTER.

1847.

SERMON.

ACTS X. 36.

Preaching peace by Jesus Christ.

            The day before yesterday, a peal of rejoicing for the taking of Vera Cruz was rung forth from most of the church steeples in town.  In employing for the expression of their gladness the furniture and property of our churches, the friends of the war now in progress have themselves violated the neutrality, which they have endeavored to impose on the voices of the sanctuary.  They have forced into their service tones hallowed by the most sacred associations with the worship of the living, and the last rites of loving piety over the departed.  They have thus taken their injunction of silence from the house of worship, and in making its inanimate, though most eloquent music echo their peculiar sentiments, they have, I trust, (if in any instance that work remained to be done,) unsealed, for Christian utterances on the great questions at issue, the living voices of all that minister at the altar.  I am sincerely thankful that our bell bore no part in that concert.  But, as the conduct of our Wardens in refusing to have it used for such a purpose may be called in question, I propose now to vindicate it, and to offer some of the reasons which justify the expressive silence of our belfry while the surrounding steeples rang with joy.

            In the first place, in our professed regard, our most precious article of church furniture is a volume here at my side, which bears the same relation to our rites of worship, which the image or oracle did to the temple service of the ancient heathen, and the ark with the overshadowing cherubim to that of the Jews.  This book is literally our oracle.  We come hither on the day which it pronounces sacred; we offer our prayers and praises to the Father whom it reveals, through the Mediator whom it presents to our faith; and all else that we profess to do here is to study its lessons of truth and duty.  This book has various contents, that have come down to us through a long series of ages, and it purports to give us a compend of God’s special revelations of his will and law for the guidance of successive generations of men.  Its history carries us through centuries of violence, wrong and blood; but we find them all spanned by the promise of a heaven-born King, under whose scepter wars should cease, the sword be broken into the ploughshare, and the spear into the pruning hook.  We have the record of the coming of that King, and of the song of angels on his birthnight, proclaiming, “on earth peace, and good will among men.”  We find abundant reason to believe that it was his prime aim and end in living and dying, to interweave all kindreds of men by the most sacred bonds of brotherhood, and to quench forever those lusts and passions, which alone lift the arm of violence, and light the flame of war.  That his aim has not been reached,—that his end is far from its fulfillment,—the recent victory gives us only too signal a token.  And that this is the case many rejoice, and have a perfect right to seek out all lawful modes of expressing their joy.  But it is certainly in utter violation of decorum and consistency that voices from our church-towers should bear part in this joy, and ring in gladness that the Gospel is not yet supreme,—that Christ does not yet reign,—that the earth is still reddened by he passions which he came to subdue,—that our oracle falls so far short of the fulfillment of its predictions.  In self-consistency we must put our Bible out of our church doors, and establish some other rule and form of worship than the Christian, before we lend any of the agencies of our sacred edifice to express joy on occasions on which the Bible would bid us mourn.

            Again, the Mexicans are called our enemies.  They probably are so.  We have done enough to make them so; and for them to be otherwise, they must have a double share of the spirit of Christ.  Now the religion, to which our church is consecrated, prescribes certain modes of dealing with enemies.  Its precepts are:  “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink”—“Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you,”—“Overcome evil with good.”  Had the Mexicans done us wrong, and had a Christian army crossed their frontiers to minister to their necessities, to proffer them on our behalf fraternal relations and offices, and to diffuse among them the benefits of that higher civilization and purer moral culture to which we lay claim, the progress of that army would have been conquering and to conquer, and we, with bell and organ, shout and anthem, would have made these walls shake and ring for the victory.  Heaven grant that they may stand long enough to echo with such bloodless triumphs, which are yet in reserve for coming years.  But which of these Christian laws for the treatment of enemies has not been atrociously violated in the recent siege?  Far other voices than those of love rent the walls and ran through the streets of the beleaguered city.  The most appalling necessities, the most deadly sufferings on the part of the besieged, were made the point of support and ground of confidence for the assailants.  Not one note of mercy, not one breathing of compassion, tempers the official narrative of that bloody transaction, or relieves the unmingled sadness, and the unqualified reprobation, with which it must be regarded by every Christian heart.  We have made that nation our bitter enemies; and the most rancorous hatred of men or fiends can invent no more fearful agony than that in which, within the last few months, we have consigned thousands upon thousands to a speedier or more lingering death, and steeped thousands of bereaved and desolate families.  If then there be anywhere a temple dedicated to the creed “of them of old time,” by whom it was said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy,” there is a bell which may fittingly swing in response to the boom of the rejoicing cannon.  But when the express laws of Christ have been in letter and in spirit utterly set at nought, a mournful silence becomes the Christian sanctuary.

            Again, the Bible establishes a law of impartial justice,–of sacred respect for the rights and property of all men.  Even in its early and imperfect revelations, it was said, “Thou shalt not steal,” and “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s landmark”; and none can doubt that the Gospel prescribes the most rigid and conscientious equity in every relation and transaction.  Now what shadow of right have we even to the peaceful occupancy of the coil which we have deluged with the blood of its owners?  Does any pretended landmark of ours reach to the lines of our army, or approach within gunshot of the walls of Vera Cruz?  Have our citizens any more rights of property there, than Santa Ana and his army within our fields or walls?  It is said, indeed, that war suspends all common maxims of right and justice.  I know that it does.  But I look in vain to the New Testament for the charter of such a suspension.  The code of war is independent of that of Christ.  The broadest construction of his teachings leaves no provision open for a state of voluntary hostility, and those who aid in bringing about such a state are morally responsible for every violation of private rights, and every outrage on private property, to which it may lead.  So far as the written word of God goes, the midnight burglar or assassin within my doors, and the invading army battering down the walls of the Mexican city, occupy the same moral position, and incur the same fearful accountability.  The victory which we refused to help celebrate, was won in a conflict which no one has yet been daring enough to defend on moral grounds.  It was a victory of force over right,—of human passion over the law of Christ; and it would have been high treason against our holy faith, to have lent any portion of the apparatus of our Christian worship to proclaim the triumph of anti Christian principles.

            Yet once more, our church is consecrated to a humane and merciful religion.  Its Founder lifted off men’s burdens, and helped their infirmities.  Beneath his touch, bread grew in the desert for the famished multitude, and living pulses beat in the palsied frame.  Wherever he went, health and gladness flowed from his lips, and sprang upon his footsteps.  He bade his followers show mercy as they would receive mercy; taught them in the parable of the Samaritan that humanity was independent of national distinctions; and, in his sketch of the final judgment, made works of love for the relief of the needy, the stranger and the prisoner, the test of discipleship requisite for a place at his right hand.  In the same spirit, one of his three most intimate associates assigns to the visiting of the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, the first place among the marks of pure and undefiled religion.  Now it was for works of a character diametrically opposed to the tender and loving spirit of Christ and his Gospel, that we heard those notes of rejoicing.  I pity, from the bottom of my heart, the man who can have so much as a momentary feeling of exultation at such horrors.  What! Rejoice at the explosion of those infernal missiles in those late peaceful homes,—at the scattering of the dissevered limbs and mangled corpses of those hundreds of women and children?  Imagine the scene enacted among us.  Suppose our whole population surrounded by the enginery of war,—our wives and children forbidden all egress,—witnessing day after day spectacles of the intensest agony, at the very thought of which the blood runs cold,—burrowing in our cellars, while the shell bursts through roof, ceiling and floor, explodes on the ground, and wraps the torn and bleeding form of matron and maiden, boy and babe, in the winding-sheet of smoke and flame.  The groan of the wounded, the wild shriek of the  dying, rises from house to house above the roar of the artillery.  Dwelling after dwelling buries in its shattered ruins the dismembered and the dead, while survivors suffer a thousand times the pangs of death in the lacerating of every fibre of their being.  Were this measure meted to us, could we conceive of its giving joy anywhere this side of pandemonium?  Those Mexicans have human hearts.  There are there as here fond parents and loving children.  They have the same susceptibilities of suffering and anguish with ourselves.  Sudden calamity is no less appalling, the cup of bereavement no less bitter, the sense of desolation in the widow’s or the orphan’s heart no less keen, to them, than to us.  The frightful realities, through which the dead have passed into eternity, and surviving friends have seen them go, exceed the power of language, and leave imagination far behind experience.  And for works and scenes like these, shall there be rejoicing and that, too, echoed from the temples of the meek, compassionate, loving Redeemer?  These are the very works which Jesus came to destroy; and, had any sound of sympathy with them gone forth from our house of prayer, we should have reason to feel that it had utterly lost its consecration, and was no longer a fit place for the gathering of a Christian assembly.

            But it is said, perhaps, that the rejoicing was not for the horrible havoc of the siege, but for the display of the noblest traits of character on the part of our troops and their leaders.  Be it so.  In order to render it meet that our churches should participate in the outward demonstrations of joy, the characters manifested in the siege and illustrated in the victory must belong to the Christian school,—the virtues brought into exercise in the conflict must be such as have received our Divine Master’s approval.  Now, though I believe war under all circumstances inconsistent with the precepts, and opposed to the spirit of the Gospel, I by no means deny that there may be many noble Christian traits beneath the “garments rolled in blood.”  Where one repels assault from his own home, or helps roll back the tide of invasion from his own shores, even though his conscience be not fully enlightened as to the extent to which a Christian is bound to suffer wrong without doing wrong, he may still manifest some of the loftiest attributes of character,—he may have a keen sense of justice, may love mercy, and may be filled with that spirit of generous, disinterested self-sacrifice, which, with greater light, would have made him an unresisting martyr for truth and righteousness.  There was much of this martyr spirit among the leaders in the American Revolution; and I honor them for it, and believe that they were true to their highest convictions of duty.  But virtues of this class have no foothold in an assailing army, in an openly aggressive war.  We are told that the leaders in this war believe it unjust and wrong.  If this be the case, they must regard the successive outrages to which they have lent their services, as unmitigated robbery and murder; and to do this work they have sold themselves, body and soul.

            I know that the prevalent theory is,—“The soldier has no right to look behind his country’s orders,—it is no concern of his whether his country’s wars be right or wrong,” that is, he is not a moral agent,—he has ceased to be personally accountable.  This might be a safe theory, were human authority competent to establish it.  But unfortunately the very idea of accountability implies a higher party.  When the individual soul stands before the divine tribunal, stained with the wanton butchery of those women and babes, think you that the plea, “I knew that it was wrong and vile, but my country bade me do it,” will be accepted in Heaven’s chancery in mitigation of the crime?  We praise the man in high executive or legislative trust, who resigns his office, rather than violate his own conviction of duty at the bidding of the Chief Magistrate or of his constituents.  Why should not the conscientious soldier do the same, so that a government, intent on some scheme of lawless aggression, might know beforehand, that it could employ for such work only the refuse of its forces?  It is said that such a doctrine would undermine the military profession?  I answer, that, if the tenure of the military profession requires a man to perform acts of the most decisive and momentous moral significance, yet forbids him to consult his own conscience as to their moral bearing, and at the same time provides him with no release under the divine signature from the responsibility for individual acts which rests upon other men, it is a profession which cannot bear the light of Christianity.  I say not that the profession can rest on no other tenure, but would commend this as a subject of serious inquiry for the friends and advocates of war.  And I would still urge the question,—Is there, in the precepts or the spirit of Christ, any warrant or pretence for obeying man rather than God,—for trampling on every divine law and every human charity, and wading through seas of guilt at the bidding of corrupt rulers?  This at any rate is not Christian virtue,—not a style of moral excellence to be praised in or from the sanctuary.  This sacrifice of individual conscience is no offering for the altar of Christian faith.  Those who first bore the Saviour’s name, while they offered up everything else for Christ’s sake, proclaimed, “We must obey God rather than man,” in the very ears of those who occupied high places of power, and at the peril of their lives.

            We cannot then regard the blind, unquestioning obedience to Government at the sacrifice of individual conscience, without which our fleet and army would never have laid siege to Vera Cruz, as entitled to a place among the Christian virtues.  And for which among the shining sisterhood did that transaction afford scope?  Under which of the beatitudes shall we canonize the heroes of that massacre?  Surely meekness, humility, forbearance, long-suffering, can have had no home in the hearts of the assailants; and these are the cardinal virtues of the gospel.  The moral system of Christ beautifully verified the prediction:  “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low.”  He deranged the entire moral scale, and transposed its very extremes.  He found the military virtues, aggressive courage, quick resentment, bigoted patriotism, unyielding obstinacy, at the summit of the scale.  He cast them down, and cast them out; and for courage he put fortitude,—for resentment, forgiveness,—for exclusive patriotism, an all embracing philanthropy,—for harsh, unfeeling rigidness of purpose, a love incapable of weariness or exhaustion.  For any signal victory, in which these virtues of the gospel and the cross bear the most prominent part, let every voice that the sanctuary can lend join in the triumph; but not for a victory over those virtues,—not for the disowning and overturning of the Christian scale,—not for transactions, which carry us back to the days of heathenism, and make us feel as if the sun of righteousness were setting in blood.

            Such were some of the reasons why no merry peal rang from our church-tower on the news of the victory.  That bell has deep notes of grief, which it might most fittingly have sent forth.  On that same afternoon, for the death of a single child, we heard the slow, sad knell from a neighboring steeple.  Had our bells all been tolled for the dead at Vera Cruz, they would have chimed with many hearts that were filled with sadness at the tidings, and would have been a not unapt expression of the contrite sorrow with which, under so heavy a load of guilt, the great heart of the nation should humble itself before its forsaken God.  Were we to embody right Christian feeling in our outward forms of worship, our churches would be clothed in mourning, the funeral toll would summon us to the sanctuary, our anthems would all be dirges, our praise would lose itself in penitential sorrow, until this atrocious war shall cease, and its memory shall be bathed throughout the land in floods of devout contrition.

            I have thus far spoken of the proprieties of the temple made with hands.  The order of the sanctuary, the outward beauty of holiness, is, however, but the type of that temple, whose builder and maker is God.  “The temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.”  If it be sacrilege to testify unholy joy for deeds of blood and rapine by soulless sounds from the house of prayer, how much more so is it to harbor thoughts of such joy in our hearts!  Of the warning this there is more need than a few weeks ago I was willing to believe.  While the fortune of the war hung in doubt, there were indeed many ready to denounce it; and one of the great political parties, though lacking courage, (with a few illustrious exceptions,) to maintain a firm and decided stand against it, still proffered many strong expressions of disapproval and abhorrence.  But now that success has crowned our arms, we find many members and some distinguished leaders of that party joining in the congratulations and festivities that hail the recent victories; thus showing how flexible the conscience of a political partisan is made by the current maxims of expediency and availability.  There are strong indications that this war in its triumphant progress is going to become generally popular, and that, through its shout and din, one of its laurelled heroes is to be elevated to the chief chair of state.  I can hardly imagine an event more fatal than this would be to the peace, and ultimately to the liberties, of a nation.  Should it once be established by so signal a precedent that military rnown, achieved in warfare however atrocious, affords the surest and quickest passage to the first places at the nation’s disposal, we have nothing in prospect but wars and rumors of wars for generations to come; and every new swarm of aspirants for public favor will work their way to power and office by fomenting discord and stirring up the waters of strife.  All this you and I may be unable to prevent, though none can tell how fast or far any earnest expression of dissent from the multitude on moral and religious grounds might spread.  There certainly exists, in our country, with all the prevalent apathy and time-serving, enough of Christian principle and sentiment to make itself strongly felt, would it only in some one quarter take to itself resolute, determined utterance.  The pulpit, the press where uncorrupted, the individual voice and influence of men who love the right better than their party, might yet achieve the salvation of our country from a destiny, which, after tossing her on seas of blood, will inevitably merge the last vestige of republican freedom in anarchy or military despotism.  But, whether we can effect much or little, we can at least be true to our own consciences.  We can keep ourselves innocent from the great transgression, and deliver our own souls from blood-guiltiness.  We can help our children, our neighbors, our friends, in the formation of right principles and sentiments.  We can prepare ourselves to pass, with clean hands and pure hearts, from a land filled with violence to the welcome tribunal of Jesus, and the peaceful seats of the redeemed.

            I know that such sentiments as I have now uttered are deemed unpatriotic.  I see it currently said in our most respectable public journals, that, whatever may be thought of the justice of this war, every citizen of the United States must needs rejoice in the brilliant success and honor that have attended our arms.  I for one feel no such joy, but only deep sorrow, shame and humiliation, the deeper for every victory.  Yet I believe that I love my country none the less for this.  In my view, success in crime, adroitness in wrong-doing, whether in an individual or a nation, confers no honor, and affords no just cause for joy.  I love my children; and, because I love them, if they entered on any wrong course of conduct, I should hope that they would fail of their evil ends, and be humbled and made better by the failure.  And I have all along hoped, till it is now too late for the hope, that our country might fail of every end sought by this conflict, and might, though the mortification of those lusts and passions whence it sprang, be made wiser and better.  I cannot but believe that Providence, in permitting this guilty success for a season, is preparing for us sorer judgments and a heavier doom.  The justice of an outraged Heaven makes me tremble for my country.  I can take no hopeful view of the nearer future; nor do I believe that we shall any of us live long enough to see the time, when we can again congratulate ourselves, as we have been wont to do, that we were born citizens of these United States.  By the threatened triumph of the war spirit, and the political profligacy which must follow in its train, our goodly heritage is to my eye hopelessly laid waste, and the sanctuary of our true peace and well-eing made utterly desolate.

            Think not, because I have thus freely expressed by abhorrence of this war, that I have no sympathy with those, who have been made its agents.  As to the members of our naval and military establishments, while, (as I have said,) I believe that they will find it hard to make good their plea before a higher tribunal, “let him that is without sin cast the first stone.”  I leave all harsh and reproachful censure for those, (if any there be,) who have never failed in the moral courage requisite for the surrender of all personal considerations at the call of duty.  Were these officers to make the sacrifice, which high Christian principle undoubtedly demands of them, it would be an illustrious sacrifice, worthy of the best days of the primitive church.  Their profession should not be made a mark for peculiar attack or condemnation.  It is but the exponent and representative of a still imperfectly Christianized condition of the body politic.  It will exist and be honored, so long as nations calling themselves Christian elevate other moral standards above that of the gospel,—it will decline and vanish with the revival and establishment of primitive Christianity.  In the present war, while I would not for worlds place myself in the moral position of those actively employed in its prosecution, I regard the greatest load of guilt as resting on the government, which has taken advantage of their maxims of unconditional obedience, to send them on a mission of rapine and blood, which most of them loathe and hate.  I sincerely lament the havoc that has been made in their ranks, and for their sake, as well as for the country’s, I long to see the plague staid.

            As for those, who, unforced by what they deemed prior obligations, have thrown themselves into this conflict, I feel unutterable pity for their recklessness and inhumanity.

            But, most of all, I confess, my sympathies are with the bereaved, suffering, homeless Mexicans,—with the multitudes, that, without fault of their own, have been made to feel the direst of earthly calamities, and have been given over to the wasting of the war-fiend, whose tender mercies are cruelty.  They are our brethren, commended to our charity and our intercessions by the blessed gospel, borne equally with ourselves on the heart of Jesus, loved no less than we are by the eternal Father.  Heaven grant them speedy release from fear, surprise and agony,—space to rear again their shattered dwellings, and to gather in quietness the remnants of their divided households.  Haven  grant that they may learn better lessons than we are teaching them, and that their experience of the bitterness of strife may commend to them the arts of peace and the spirit of gentleness and mercy.

            But all is not dark.  We have faith in the sure word of prophecy.  We doubt not that we may hasten, and our posterity behold the day, which the old Hebrew seers descried from afar through ages of guilt and woe, when men shall learn war no more.  Nor are we without signs of its approach.  The gospel is now, more than ever before, preached in its primitive spirit.  Christians are fast learning what they had forgotten for fifteen centuries, that meekness and mercy are the disciple’s only armor.  Let us labor in faith and hope, by example and influence, by word and deed, to diffuse the spirit of irrespective love and universal brotherhood, and, though God call us home before the work be done, we may join the second host of herald angels, who will wake the echoes of the regenerated earth with the song, “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”

END.

PRAYER FOR THE SICK.

A 

S E R M O N

PREACHED AT KING’S CHAPEL, BOSTON,

ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 9, 1832, 

BEING

THE FAST DAY

APPOINTED BY

THE GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS,

ON ACCOUNT OF THE

APPEARANCE OF CHOLERA IN THE UNITED STATES.

BY F. W. P. GREENWOOD,

JUNIOR MINISTER OF KING’S CHAPEL.

PUBLISHED BY REQUEST.

B O S T O N:

LEONARD C. BOWLES

362 Washington Street.

1832.

S E R M O N.

JAMES V. 16.

CONFESS YOUR FAULTS ONE TO ANOTHER, AND PRAY ONE FOR ANOTHER, THAT YE MAY BE HEALED.  THE EFFECTUAL FERVENT PRAYER OF A RIGHTEOUS MAN AVAILETH MUCH.

            The apostle is urging the duty of intercession with God for the sick, and of mutual confession and forgiveness in the time of sickness.  He thus joins moral duty with prayer, and signifies that an humble, repentant, charitable state of mind, is one condition on which the restoration of bodily health, and the answer of prayer depend.  And who will object to the condition?  Who will harden his heart against his neighbor, and refuse him his full forgiveness, when he sees the hand of the Lord lying heavily upon him, and hears the groans of his anguish, and thinks, whatever he may have been, or whatever he may have done, what a poor, feeble, suffering creature he is now?  And who, on his own sick-bed, feeling the same hand on himself, and made sensible, by the near approach of another world, how vain and how wrong are the competitions and discords of this, and by he pressing thoughts of judgment and God’s holiness, of his own manifold imperfections, and repeated transgressions, can hesitate to acknowledge his errors, and forgive all who have sinned against him, as he himself hopes to be forgiven.

            After thus recommending the holy dispositions which should accompany prayer for the wick, the apostle James asserts the efficacy of prayer in obtaining the implored blessing.  ‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man,’ he continues, ‘availeth much.’  He then mentions as an instance in proof, the case of Elias or Elijah, at whose earnest entreaty the Lord withheld rain from heaven, and afterwards caused it to be given again.

            The translation, in our common Bible, of the latter clause of the test, is not a happy one.  It is clearly tautology to say, at least according to the present meaning of words, that an effectual prayer will avail much.  The single Greek word which is here rendered by the two English words ‘effectual fervent,’ is rendered by some commentators inwrought, or inspired; and these commentators consequently suppose that the whole passage applies only to the prayers of such persons as are inspired, or strongly and supernaturally moved to pray for particular blessings, which are granted at their request.  And they say that the very instance given of Elijah, an inspired prophet, who prayed, as he was moved by divine impulse, for extraordinary and almost miraculous events, is a proof of the correctness of their interpretation.  This rendering, though not to be overlooked, is not required, and in all probability is not the correct one.  The original word (eveqyouuevn) is one from which our own word energetic is immediately derived.  It means internally and strongly working.  Wakefield translates the sentence thus; ‘The effect of the prayer of a righteous man is very powerful.’  And if the translators of the received version had omitted the word effectual, and rendered ‘The fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much,’ they would have given us a more intelligible translation, and one, too, not far from the true meaning of the writer.

            I have offered this brief criticism on the passage, because it is one which is constantly quoted, whenever the efficacy of prayer is the subject of discussion, and is not often clearly apprehended, on account of the dim and neutral character of the translation.

            As to the doctrine of the text, the prevalence of the sincerely fervent prayer of a righteous man, I have no doubt of its soundness.  Even if it could be conclusively shown that in this particular place, reference is had solely to the prayers of inspired saints in the first age of Christianity, and previously under the Jewish dispensation, yet there are so many general exhortations to prayer in the Scriptures, on the ground of its efficacy with One who hears and answers it, that I could not permit myself to deny that sincere, fervent, and righteous prayer is of much avail, not only with the petitioner, but with God.  And this doctrine, which I believe to be a Scriptural, appears to me to be also a comforting and a rational doctrine.  It is comforting to all who love God, to perceive him brought so near to them; to be confident, from the assurances of his own word, that he hears all they say to him; that he not only hears, but attentively and graciously listens, with the purpose of granting those requests which can be granted, consistently with his own wisdom, the real good of the petitioner, and the happiness of the great whole.  Why should prayer be made, if God does not hear?  Why should God hear if not to listen: and why should he listen, if not with a purpose connected with the prayer?  We are not justified in expecting any miraculous answer to prayer, but a direct answer to prayer, through ordinary means, we are justified in expecting, if the gift is expedient for us; and if it is not granted we should rest satisfied that it is not expedient.

“If what I ask my God denies,

It is because he’s good and wise.’

            Beyond a very few steps, and a very short distance in the path of God’s operations, our eyes are too weak to see.  It is highly unbecoming in us o say, or to presume, that there is nothing, because we see nothing beyond, or that we know exactly how those events which we do see re brought about by a ruing Deity.  There is a regularity and order in that which we discern, which we call natural, and which none but a fanatic would look to see interrupted.  But without this regularity and order being interrupted, blessings may come to us, or evils may be averted from us, through the steps of this very order, this natural regularity and order, at the voice of our prayer, and a bidding from on high.  There is nothing irrational in this, for there is nothing irrational in believing that we are ignorant, and that God, who orders all things, may grant us special blessings by common means; and that he will grant them, because, in a revelation which we agree is from him, he has promised so to do.

            To occupy no longer time in introduction—though I easily might on so wide, so fruitful and so interesting a subject—and to come at once to the occasion of our present assembling together, let me ask who knows anything of the origin and mode of progress of the disease which we have prayed God to avert from us?  Who knows what place or what person it will next attack?  Who knows how it journeys from place to place, and from person to person?  Who knows how near it may be to ourselves, or whether it will enter our gates at all?  Who knows how many it will visit if it should come, or how many of those whom it visits it will spare, and how many it will not spare from the consummation of death?  Who knows how soon it will leave a town or city, after it has once entered?  Who knows at what time it will leave the world, or whether it will ever leave the world?  Who knows whether sin may not be the cause of this disorder, and whether prayer, righteous prayer, may not be among the most effectual means of averting it?  At any rate, the servant of God who has prayed in sincerity that the calamity may not fall on himself, his household and his neighbors, has performed his duty in seeking the throne of Grace.  He knows that he has been heard kindly by Him who sitteth on the throne, and that whether he is to be spared or not, whether his household and neighbors are to be spared or not, the event will be wisely and mercifully ordered.  He feels, moreover, that his own affections have been raised and his own charities been warmed and extended by his devotion; and that he is consequently better prepared for sickness and for health, to be taken or to be left.

            This last is a highly important consideration, and is ground on which all sober and pious persons can stand together, whatever may be their differences of opinion with regard to the direct efficacy of prayer on the mind of the Deity, or rather the literal correspondence of its efficacy with the promises of scripture.  All such will agree that the effect of prayer on the devout heart is great and beneficial; that it softens and sanctifies; that it places the petitioner, by the influence thus exerted on his dispositions and life, in the best position for receiving and enjoying the blessings, and bearing and improving the chastisements of Heaven.  All will agree, too, that if prayer has not this effect on the hearts and lives of those who pray, it can have no effect on Him who hears; and that whatever may be the precise way in which the fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth, one thing is undeniable, if a prayer be not one of sincerity and righteousness it will avail nothing.

            What, then, should be some of the moral influences and effects of prayer on the present occasion?  What must be some of the moral influences and effects of fervent and righteous prayer?

            In order to answer these questions let us consider, first, what it is which we pray God to avert from us.  Some call it the blighting curse of God.  I will not call it so.  Some call it a fierce demon let loose upon poor mortals, and some a horrid monster glutting itself with prey.  I give my assent to no such epithets.  It is a wasting disorder, melancholy in its character, but commissioned with the intentions of God’s omniscience.  It is a judgment on the earth.  It is a warning to the people against sin and uncleanness.  It is a trying but also a just providence.  These are the names by which I prefer to describe it; and in painting it to the imagination, I would draw it not with eyes angry and bloodshot, and a mouth breathing out fumes from the bottomless pit, but as an angel, a mourning as well as a retributive angel, bearing the sword of the Almighty not in vain, but hiding its sad countenance with one hand, while with the other it deals the speedy blow.

            1.  I have called it a judgment on the earth, and a warning against sin and uncleanness.  And is it not reasonable and justifiable to call it so, when we are told that it seizes first and principally on the intemperate and the unclean?  How can the voice of God speak more plainly against these forms of unrighteousness, than in this mandate to his destroying angel?  In praying that the disorder may not be sent among us, we should call to mind this purpose of its mission, and remember the vices against which it appears so evidently to be sent, and thus strengthen our conviction of their fatal nature and exceeding sinfulness, and redouble our efforts to root them out.  How can we expect that the disease will keep away, when that which invites the disease is permitted to remain?  It is a solemn truth that every intemperate and corrupt person, that every keeper and every supporter of the haunts of profligacy and riot is laboring to bring the so much dreaded pestilence to the place in which he dwells.  Should the punishment come, it will be called a demon and curse—when behold the demon and the curse are even now among us and upon us.  Do we expect to sin on and sin on forever, without any notice taken, and without a retribution?  While we pray, we would meditate on these things, with the purpose of acting accordingly, and then we may hope that our prayer will be availing.

            2.  But the disease does not entirely confine itself to the above described victims.  Though it principally selects these, yet it falls occasionally on the sober and pious and on innocent children.  And ought we not to be taught by this, not to boast of our virtue, nor to be sure of exemption, not to elevate ourselves in fancied security above the poor creatures whose vices are their exposure?  Humility will always accompany sincere prayer.  We are all exposed in some degree; and therefore it should be a primary consideration with us how we shall be prepared; and surely no better preparation will present itself to the Christian than that of mercy and charity.  While we are roused to act against sin, it will be in a temper of great pity for the sinner, and with especial care that we do not fall into sin, particularly the sin of the Pharisee, ourselves.  ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’  Let us be careful that we interfere not with the Supreme prerogative.  It is the Lord’s to send abroad his terrible and righteous judgments; it is ours to be kind and charitable, humble and watchful.

            3.  We are to be prepared, but not afraid.  ‘The Lord is the strength of my life,’ exclaims the Psalmist, ‘of whom shall I be afraid?’  It is the tendency of true prayer to lift up the heart above fear, because it lifts it up into the presence of God.  Can we run to an Almighty Guardian, and acknowledge his power to save, and then feel and talk and act as if we had no guardian?  Shall we come into the temple of the Most High, and address him as our ever present God and watchful Father, and after we have gone from the door, tremble at the first rumor of disease, as if we had no God and no Father?  I say that he who prays sincerely, not only prays to be delivered from pestilence, but prays to a being who sends, limits and rules the pestilence, who is the Lord of life and death, who is the Judge of all the earth, who will do what is right, and who is the refuge and defense of all those who trust in him.  Such a suppliant cannot be overcome by unworthy dread.  He has gone and placed his life in the hands of its Author, and his blessings and comforts in the hands of their Giver.  They are locked up—he is sure of them—and therefore he is not afraid.  My friends, if we come here and pray, and if other congregations of our brethren assemble to pray, merely because we are afraid; and if the effect of our praying will be only to make us more afraid, we have not prayed aright—we could not have been doing a more ineffectual thing—our prayers have been vainer than vanity.  He who has been fervently and righteously praying that this pestilence may be averted from him and his, will rise up from his knees, a fearless man.  He will feel himself piously and rationally superior to the exaggerated alarms which have operated on some.  Rather than permit a sufferer from the disease to be shamefully deserted and neglected, he will go and minister to him himself.  Rather than permit the lifeless frame of a fellow creature to lie on the bare earth, he will dig a grave with his own hands, and then fall again on his knees, and commit that body to the earth, and the spirit to God who gave it.  And when he has done this, he will feel that his prayer has availed much.

            4.  But while fervent and righteous prayer will make us fearless, it will have no tendency to make us neglect other proper means of prevention or of cure.  It will, on the contrary, lead us to view those means with increased respect and gratitude, as the merciful provision of God, and use them diligently and advisedly, as by his ordination and appointment.  Whence are all these means?  What are all exciting, soothing and healing medicines; what are all purifying and disinfecting agents; what are all sanative applications, but treasures drawn from his storehouse?  So far from despising them, therefore, the religious man will regard them as things divine; he will regard medical skill, as an art and gift divine; and he will make use of them when necessary, as by divine commandment.  The health which God bestows, he will endeavor to preserve or restore by means which the finger of God points out, not relying on his own strength or merits and leaving the event to Him.  He loves to pray to his gracious Father, but he will not tempt him.  He is no fatalist.  He believes it to be disobedience to God, not to employ the aids which God furnishes for his use; he therefore employs, but does not finally trust in them.  He trusts in nothing but the divine wisdom, mercy and promises, and in these he trusts to the end.

            Let us then confess our faults one to another, and let us pray one for another.  Let us confess our faults to God, and pray for ourselves.  If our prayers are fervent and righteous; if they awaken us to the evil and danger of sin; if they make us humble and unassuming; if they inspire us with a cheerful courage, united with a rational prudence, we may be confident that they will avail much.  They have availed much.  They have prepared us in the best possible manner against the hovering pestilence; they have saved us from sin, which is more dreadful than pestilence.  God has heard them; and he will answer them, if not by temporal immunity, yet y the answer of eternal salvation.

END.

Born to farming parents, Sprague attended Colchester Academy and then attended Yale, where he graduated in 1815. He was invited to be the tutor for the children of Virginian Major Lawrence Lewis, nephew of George Washington. (Lewis’ wife was the granddaughter of Martha Washington.) He accepted, and traveled from Connecticut to Virginia. The Lewis’ home, Woodlawn, was part of the original Mount Vernon (George Washington’s home), and over the year Sprague stayed with the family, he received permission from Bushrod Washington (George Washington’s nephew who served on the US Supreme Court) to go through many of George Washington’s letters and papers. Sprague was allowed to take as many of those letters as he wanted, so long as he left copies of all letters he took, which was about 1,500. From these letters, Sprague was able to compile the very first complete set of autographs of all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In 1816, Sprague returned to school at the Theological Seminary at Princeton, where he studied for three years. In 1819, he became an associate pastor at First Congregational Church in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and remained there a decade before becoming pastor of Second Presbyterian in Albany, New York, where he remained until 1869. Sprague was a prolific writer, and penned sixteen major works, including biographies of important American Christian leaders as well as religious works such as Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1832), Contrast Between True and False Religion (1837), and Words to a Young Man’s Conscience (1848). He also wrote over 100 religious pamphlets and smaller works. Elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society, much of his writing and preaching was of a historical and biographical nature. In fact, one of his greatest accomplishments was his nine-volume Annals of the American Pulpit, which was particularly rich with biographies of those pastors who played important roles in the American War for Independence. By the time of Sprague’s death in 1876, he had collected over 100,000 historical autographs, including three complete sets of signatures of all the signers of the Declaration; one set of all the members of the Convention that framed the US Constitution; a complete set of the autographs of the first six Presidents of the United States and the officers of their administrations (including signatures of the Presidents, Vice Presidents, Cabinet members, US Supreme Court Justices, and all foreign ministers in those administrations); and the signatures of all military officers involved in the American War for Independence, regardless of the nation from which they came or the side of the war on which they fought. He also collected signatures of leaders of the Reformation as well as those of great skeptics and opponents of religious faith. His collection was considered the largest private collection in the world at the time of his death.

VOICE OF THE ROD:

A

SERMON,

DELIVERED AT ALBANY, MAY 14, 1841,

THE DAY OF THE NATIONAL FAST.

OCCASIONED BY THE DEATH OF THE LATE

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON,

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 

By WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE, D. D.

PASTOR OF THE SECOND PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.

ALBANY:

PRINTED BY C. VAN BENTHUYSEN.

1841.

To the Rev. W. B. Sprague, D. D.

            Dear Sir—

            The trustees, as well in conformity with their own wishes, as the wishes of others of your congregation, respectfully request for publication a copy of the Sermon delivered by you on the morning of the 14^th inst., the day recommended by the President of the United States for a National Fast.

We are very respectfully,

Your obed’t serv’ts,

JOSEPH ALEXANDER,

A. M’INTYRE,

ERASTUS CORNING,

THOMAS W. OLCOTT,

E. P. PRENTICE,

Jno. I. BOYD,

JOHN TOWNSEND,

A. MARVIN.

Albany, May 15, 1841.

            To the Board of Trustees of the Second Presbyterian Congregation in Albany:

            GENTLEMEN—

            It has not been my custom to apologize for my own productions: on the contrary I have suffered even the most hasty of them to go to the publick for what they were worth; considering it a good general rule, that if a sermon is too poor to print without an apology, it is too poor to print at all.  In consenting, however, to the publication of this discourse, as I am aware that it very imperfectly meets the expectation which the occasion might reasonably justify, it is due to myself to state that it was necessarily prepared in a few hours, when I had but partially recovered from the fatigue of a journey; to say nothing of the fact of which you are already apprized, that I had previously delivered two other discourses on the same subject, in the same place, and to some extent to the same congregation; so that for this there remained little else than the gathering up of the fragments.  But for the mysterious disappearance from my study of the MSS. Of the two former, one of them, would have been given to the publick instead of this, which is now somewhat hesitatingly yielded to your wishes.

            I beg you will accept, Gentlemen, the assurance of my highest regard.

            W. B. SPRAGUE.

May 25, 1841.

SERMON.

MICAH VI. 9.

Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it.

                The occasion which has brought us into the house of God this morning, marks an era in the history of this nation.  Not that this is the first time that the nation has been called to keep a day of humiliation and prayer; but the first time that it has been called to keep such a day for such a cause.  Not that this is the first instance in which death has removed an individual whom we had elevated to the chair of supreme authority; but the first in which such an event has occurred at the commencement, or even in the course, of the Presidential career.  I am sure you will agree with me that every sentiment of religion, every dictate of propriety, justifies this appointment.  I count it an omen for good that our present Chief Magistrate, as one of the first of his official acts, has called upon his people to humble themselves beneath the rod of God.  Whatever his future communications to the nation may be, he has already given us one that will stand the test of time; for it breathes the spirit of reverence for the Divine authority, of confidence in the Divine government.  Whatever measures may characterize his course hereafter, he has adopted one in the beginning which may always be appealed to as worthy of imitation, so long as this nation exists.  God grant that this disposition to acknowledge Him, and to call upon the country to acknowledge Him, may prove the harbinger of a happy administration—an administration through which blessings incalculable in their number and extent shall be conveyed not only to this nation but to the world.

            If I were to meet one of you with your heart bleeding at the death-bed of a beloved friend, I know not what more appropriate counsel I could address to you, than “Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it.”  Or if death had made a fearful inroad upon our congregation, removing someone who had shared in an unusual degree our affection and confidence, and in respect to whom, after he was gone, we should say that an armour-bearer had failed us—here again, I know not what better I could say to you, than “Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it.”  And now that my country hath been smitten of God, and is bleeding under His righteous hand, what better can I say to her—what better can I say to you, my friends, who are assembled here this morning as part of this nation, than “Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it.”  The rod speaks: listen to the warning voice.  Consider the hand that wields it:  it is the hand of the Ruler of nations.

            We shall fall in, I trust, with the design of the occasion, if we consider this national bereavement as having a bearing both upon the past and the future; as administering rebuke on the one hand, and conveying instruction and expostulation on the other.  In the prosecution of this object,

            I.  I remark, in the first place, that this dispensation rebukes our national ingratitude, and calls upon us to form a higher estimate of our obligations to the Divine goodness.

            I do not say that, as a nation, we have been insensible of our superior privileges; or that we have been backward on certain occasions and in certain ways, to speak of them; but I appeal to you, whether it has not been chiefly in a manner that has discovered more of a boasting than of a grateful spirit.  When we have congratulated ourselves on the freedom and the supposed stability of our institutions, has not the secret feeling of our heart been, rather a feeling of complacency in consideration of our possessing these privileges, than a feeling of gratitude towards the bestower of them?  And even when we have professed to recognize them as the fruit of the Divine goodness; when we have said with our lips that it is God who hath made us to differ from other nations, and that He hath not dealt so with any nation as with us; nay, when we have been assembled professedly to recount the tokens of His favour, and offer to Him the sacrifice of thanksgiving; has not our recognition of His goodness been, to a great extent, a mere matter of form;—have we not been too much like those of old who sang His praise, and then forgat His works?  Yes, Brethren, as a nation, we are deeply chargeable with the sin of ingratitude; and I repeat—this dispensation administers a rebuke for it.

            For suppose you had lost an earthly friend—say a parent—whose watchful kindness had been the channel through which, from the first hour of your existence, there had been conveyed to you an uninterrupted stream of blessings; and you had been accustomed always to receive these blessings merely as a matter of course, without lifting your eye to that Almighty Father who gave you your earthly parent and constituted the endearing relation that he sustained to you; I ask whether his removal from the world would not come as a rebuke to your ingratitude;—whether it would not set you to thinking of blessings innumerable which had been forgotten in unthankfulness; and not merely of those which had come to you through the medium of parental kindness, but of others which may have come more directly from the hand of your Heavenly Father?  And why should not the same principle operate in respect to the nation bereaved of its Head?  The President of this nation sustains to it, in an important sense, the relation of a father.  The President who has lately died, though not the choide3 of the whole nation, was the choice of the majority; and I may safely say in view of the mourning which his death has brought over the land, had the respect and good will of the country at large.  I suppose that none of us doubt that he was a man of integrity and wisdom; and there is much reason to believe that, if he had lived, he would have ruled the nation in the fear of God.  Of course, the loss of such a man from such a place, irrespective of all party considerations, is to be regarded as a publick calamity.  We must suppose that a great blessing—certainly that which the majority of the nation accounted so—has been withdrawn from us in his death; and why should not this remind us of other blessings which we have enjoyed and still enjoy, and rouse us from a habit of thankless indifference in respect to them?  We have had other men distinguished for their patriotism and talents and usefulness to rule over us; and instead of being cut off at the commencement of their career, they have lived to complete the term of service which their country had allotted to them.  We have seen our nation going forward in the course of unexampled prosperity; enlarging the bounds of her habitation on the right hand and on the left; and when clouds have lowered in our horizon, they have soon disappeared; or if a tempest has passed over the land, it has lasted but for an hour, and has left a purer atmosphere and a brighter sky.  You who have travelled in other countries, especially on the continent of Europe, know better than others how to value the liberal spirit that characterizes our institutions.  You may have seen much abroad to gratify your curiosity and excite your astonishment; but you come back after all, rejoicing that your home is on this side of the ocean.  You welcome the sight of your own vine and fig tree, beneath which you can sit without any to molest or make you afraid.  Now I say, the effect of this national bereavement should be to remind us of these forgotten and neglected mercies; to lead us to recount them, not with a view to minister to our self-complacency, but to quicken our impulses of gratitude for the Divine bounty.  It will be a beautiful offering to the memory of your departed President, to make his death the occasion of a grateful recollection of your distinguished blessings.

            II.  This dispensation rebukes our national self-confidence, and charges us to cease from man and put our trust in the Lord.

            I honour and venerate my country; but I am sure I do not charge her unjustly, when I say that she has been most criminally given to leaning upon an arm of flesh.  She has gloried in the wisdom of man, as if man had no occasion to take counsel of any wisdom above his own.  She has seen ruin waiting on one set of measures, and safety and glory on another, without remembering that no measures can render her interests secure, unless they are attended with God’s blessing; that her destinies are in the hands of him who putteth down one and setteth up another.  In all this she has dishonoured the Ruler of nations.  She has acted as if she would take the scepter of supreme authority into her own hands.  She has practically bid the Most High stand aside, and without dreaming of the vanity or the madness of her pretensions, has attempted, in the spirit of the ancient builders of Babel, to make to herself a name whose glory should fill the earth.

            But it is not easy to conceive how a more effectual rebuke could have been given to this spirit, than has been in the death of our Chief Magistrate.  In his administration were bound up the hopes of a majority of the nation.  His election had been the result of a struggle, which had well nigh convulsed the country; and those who had placed him in that lofty station, thought they saw in the measures to which he was pledged, all they could ask to ensure the country’s prosperity.  But come, yet self-confident politicians, to your President’s grave, and tell us what ye think now of the wisdom of trusting to an arm of flesh.  Nerveless as a clod is the hand which but the other day received the staff of office.  The eye that looked out upon that brilliant and imposing pageant, sees not: the ear upon which fell the deafening plaudits of the multitude, hears not: the voice that uttered itself with freedom and energy from the highest place in the nation, speaks not: the senses are all locked up in the slumber of the sepulcher.  And death hath removed to another sphere, though by no means blotted out of being, that well-balanced and well directed mind, in which were already treasured up thoughts and plans for the development and execution of which you were anxiously waiting.  That beautiful fabric which your imagination had framed, and to which your heart was so strongly attracted, God has only touched; and lo, it has passed away, like the morning vapour before the sun!  Transfer your confidence, then, from the creature to the Creator.  Remember that if our national interests are safe, they are so only because God’s protecting hand is upon them.  Remember that if we in our folly refuse to put our trust in Him, we have no right to expect, either from His word or His providence, but that He in judgment will withhold His blessing from us.  If we confide in Him unreservedly and implicitly, we may be sure of His favour; and with that we need not fear, though enemies should encircle us, and convulsions should agitate us, and our very mountains should be carried into the midst of the sea.

            III.  This dispensation of providence rebukes our national idolatry of our rulers, and teaches us to remember that they are but men.

            Far be it from me to intimate that we have had too much of that sober and rational regard for those in authority, to which their station justly entitles them:  what I would here reprobate is that idolatrous homage, that fanatical praise, which they are perpetually receiving from that part of the nation that approves and sustains their measures.  I refer not to any particular administration as distinguished in this respect above others; but if I mistake not, you will find in looking through our whole national history, that just in proportion to the prevalence of party spirit, this evil of which I am now speaking has prevailed: the majority of the people have spoken, and written, and acted, concerning our rulers, as if everything they did was right, merely because they did it.  Now it is to be borne in mind that rulers are constituted with the same flesh and blood, the same susceptibilities and infirmities, with other men; and if other men cannot safely be subjected to such an influence, neither can they.  Admitting that they are good men, and disposed to rule with an equal hand; admitting too that they are discerning men, and more capable than most of discriminating between truth and falsehood; yet, after all, if their ears are continually trained to the sound of their own praise, it is hardly possible but that their hearts will beat too vigorously to the idea of their own merit; and as a consequence, that they will commit mistakes and errors which they would otherwise have avoided.  Many a ruler, I doubt not, has adopted measures adverse to the publick good, which he never would have adopted, had he not been kept in countenance by the unceasing flatteries of a party.  The nation that deals thus with its rulers, need not wonder if it should first ruin them, and then render them instrumental of bringing ruin upon itself.

            You see how this dangerous and deceiving spirit is rebuked by this providence.  Rulers are not only, like others, accountable for their conduct at the bar of Heaven, but their responsibility is increased in proportion to the amount of authority which is committed to them.  When they die, they enter upon their retribution, receiving good or evil in another world, according to the amount of good or evil which they have done in this.  Say, then, whether the grave of our departed President does not charge us to beware how we throw stumbling blocks in their way?  It lifts up the voice of intercession in their behalf, and pleads with us to remember that they have temptations enough to encounter, without being subjected to the ordeal of national flattery.  It admonishes us that such a course, more than almost any other, puts in jeopardy the best interests of our country.  And finally, it proposes to us the solemn interrogation, how we can meet our rulers in the judgment, if by our inordinate and unceasing flatteries, we have contributed to nourish their pride, to benumb their moral sensibility, and thus to accumulate for them the materials of an aggravated condemnation.  But on the other hand,

            IV.  This providence rebukes no less effectually our growing contempt of authority, and calls upon us to render honour to whom honour is due.  I am not sure but that I may have introduced this thought in the discourse which you heard on the Sabbath morning after the President’s death; but if I did, it is too important, and too opposite to the present occasion, not to be introduced here, even though it be at the expense of repetition.

            It is the fashion in this country for the party not in power to be exceedingly restless, and to oppose the administration under which they live, with at least an equal degree of zeal with that with which its advocates sustain it.  It is the fashion to level against rulers the arrows of detraction; to watch for every occasion for calling in question either their integrity or their ability, and to find occasion often where there is none; to impute selfish and abominable motives, where nothing can be said against the external act; and sometimes even to talk loudly of revolt and rebellion.  And I must add, it has become the fashion in many parts of our land, to trample upon the laws with mob-like violence; the consequence of which is, that sometimes an innocent man is maimed, or mangled, or torn to pieces, where the laws ought to have protected him; and in other cases the criminal is prematurely and unjustly punished, because the operation of the laws is too tardy for the taste of the people.  If I mistake not, this desperate spirit constitutes one of the worst features of our times.  In every instance in which it is manifested, there is not only an outrage committed against the laws of God, but an act of rebellion against the laws of the country.

            Here again, listen, and you shall hear your President’s grave still speaking forth the language of rebuke and exhortation.  He had indeed but just entered upon his office; but he had held it long enough to know that it was anything else than a bed of roses; and some have imagined that he actually fell a victim  to the fatigue and anxiety by which his introduction to it was attended.  His language to the nation now is, “Your rulers have care and responsibility enough to overwhelm them, apart from all those burdens which ye have been accustomed needlessly and voluntarily to impose.  Let the clamours of party then be hushed.  Let the voice of crimination and insult be heard no more.  Remember that your President is a man, that your rulers are all men, and that you have as little reason to expect perfection in them as have in you.  Be lenient, then, towards their infirmities, and be not too strict to mark even their errours against them.  Remember that they are God’s ministers for good, and as such claim your homage and obedience.  And if you will see their administration most fruitful in blessings, study to alleviate rather than increase their burdens; submit cheerfully to the laws which it is their duty to enforce, and co-operate with them to suppress the spirit of insubordination, and thus promote the best interests of our common country.  Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.  It is due to humanity; it is due to justice; it is due to honour; it is due to patriotism.”

            V.  This affecting providence rebukes our national inconsideration of death, and calls upon us to awake to a sense of our mortality.

            Look through any circle you please, no matter how limited, no matter how extensive, and you find a general inattention to the concerns of eternity.  You may travel through the length of the land, and then through the breadth of it, and it is only here and there one that you will meet, who is not living as if this world were his final home.  The merchant is busy in accumulating wealth, and in proportion to his success, is ever grasping for more; but he forgets that he must die and leave it.  The politician is eager to make his voice heard through the nation; but he forgets that his voice must soon be hushed in death.  The aspiring statesman has his eye upon some lofty place of honour, and labours day and night to lift himself into it; but he forgets that there is a pathway ever kept open even from the throne to the sepulcher.  The creature of habitual thoughtlessness is buzzing about in pursuit of pleasure, like a butterfly in the sun; but it never occurs to him that death may put an end to all his pleasures to-morrow.  Yes, the great mass of the nation are utterly absorbed in this world; and neither their vision nor their aspirations extend to a coming one.

            True there are rebukes to this spirit of inconsideration, every day, and on every side:—every death-bed scene, every funeral procession, every open grave, rebukes it.  But in ordinary cases the providence of God speaks to a comparatively small circle: here it speaks to every individual in the nation; for if the death of the father of a family be an admonition to that family to prepare to die, not less is the death of the Head of a nation an admonition to that entire nation to consider their latter end.  But a little while since, my countrymen, your President spoke to you as a living man, and he told you concerning the projected measures of his administration: today he speaks to you from the silence and corruption of the tomb, and I trust I may add, in view of all the cheering evidence of his Christian character which has come to us,—from that world where the dignity of earthly distinction is forgotten amidst the splendours of a blood-bought crown; but he speaks on another and more momentous subject—your relations to God and eternity.  If you were disposed to heed the voice of the living, turn not a deaf ear to the voice of the dead.  Men of every class and every character throughout this nation, not God’s ministers, but the grave, is preaching to you to-day; and the doctrine is everywhere the same—that you must all die; and the exhortation is everywhere the same—that you should prepare to die.

            Hitherto I have dwelt upon those national sins which are more directly and especially rebuked by this affecting dispensation; but I must now add in the

            VI.  Last place, that God has here sent us a rebuke for all our national transgressions, and is calling us to repentance and reformation in view of them.

            Nothing is so well adapted to set an individual to reflecting upon his sins, as the chastisements of the Divine hand.  Thus, you remember, when Jacob’s sons were brought into circumstances of difficulty and peril in Egypt, they began immediately to commune with themselves and with one another, in respect to their cruel and murderous treatment of their brother; and the reason was that conscience did its office, and recognized the doctrine of a retribution.  And the same principle applies to communities as to individuals.  When the rod of God is laid upon a nation as it has been now upon us, it is adapted to excite the inquiry, wherefore is it that He has thus come out in judgment?  What are the sins of which we have been guilty, that we are thus subjected to the chastisements of Heaven?  I can only hint at those which have not been already mentioned.

            Let me say, then, that we are chargeable with having shut our ears against the voice of God, when he has spoken to us in former judgments.  It is but a few years since the pestilence passed through this land, like fire through a forest.  We had heard of it indeed as the scourge of other lands; but we had looked at the ocean as an effectual barrier against its approach to us.  Presently, however, that barrier was passed; and we read in our own newspapers, under the head of domestick intelligence, as fearful tales of desolation as any which had come to us from across the ocean.  It was not here and there only, but every where; and the graves were multiplying every day by thousands and thousands; and even the most thoughtless were compelled to feel that they lived on the threshold of eternity.  But at length the pestilence passed off, and our anxiety passed off with it; and there is reason to believe that instead of melting the nation into penitence, it rendered it more obdurate in transgression.  At a more recent period, the country has been subjected to unprecedented commercial distress.  Rich men have seen their fortunes vanishing like chaff before the whirlwind; and poverty and bankruptcy and ruin have become as household words, where for years nothing but affluence and independence had been dreamed of.  But the nation has remained unhumbled still.  We have been loud enough and busy enough in referring the evil to second causes; but where have been the evidences of our recognition of the Divine hand;—of our repentance and reformation in view of the Divine rebuke?  And finally, the elements have been commissioned as ministers of God’s displeasure toward us.  The conflagration has swept over no inconsiderable portion of the metropolis of the land, blotting out the productions of art, frustrating the labours of industry, and arresting temporarily the current of expectation and enterprise.  Our vessels have been abroad upon our waters, freighted with youth and beauty, with intelligence and virtue; but the midnight tempest has opened for these multitudes a common grave in the deep; or the terrific explosion has announced their entrance into eternity; or else the flames around and the waters beneath have contended in the work of death, till there have been only enough left to record the horrours of the scene.  These events occurring in fearfully rapid succession, have for the time, spread consternation and agony through the land; and it has seemed as if God’s warning voice were raised to a note so loud and terrible, that the most thoughtless must be forced to consideration; but here again, scarcely have the tidings died away upon our ears, before we have regained our accustomed insensibility, and virtually said to God that if he would melt or humble us, it must be done by some yet more appalling visitation.

            Infidelity is another crying sin with which we are chargeable—yes, infidelity in every form and degree; from the dark insinuation against Christianity that is only whispered in a corner, down to the open rejection of all religion, and the blasphemies of the blackest atheism.  The state of the country in reference to this subject at this moment would, I doubt not, if it could be laid open to us, furnish matter of most appalling interest to everyone who regards his country’s welfare.  We should see that there is no place so high, but that infidelity has been able to reach it; no place so low but that she has been willing to creep into it; and I fear, no place so sacred, but that she is suffered to profane and pollute it.  From every part of this land, and especially from our great cities, there is a voice going up to Heaven, calling for still heavier judgments to descend upon us, because we are so rapidly becoming an infidel people.

            And there is the sin of slavery—yes, silent as we may be in respect to it, because fanaticism on the one hand, and prejudice and selfishness on the other, are lifting up together their discordant voices to seal our lips and palsy our efforts—the sin of slavery is, at this moment, bearing testimony against us before the Ruler of nations, as loudly as any other.  True, indeed, the fact that this mighty burden of guilt rests upon us is no reason why we should act precipitately, and thus defeat our own efforts in endeavoring to throw it off; but it is a reason why we should not remain inactive; and if we are contented to remain so, what else will other nations say of us, what else will our own consciences say of us, what else will God the righteous Judge write in His book concerning us, but that with all our eulogies of freedom, and all our pretended abhorrence of slavery, we are, after all, willing that this sin should lie at our door?

            The spirit of violence and bloodshed too is abroad in the land, and in some parts of it to a degree, to which you will scarcely find a parallel even in the most barbarous country.  The good and useful citizen is decoyed away from his habitation to be murdered at noon-day; and the murderer with a view to escape detection, turns his own dwelling into a sepulcher.  The magistrate, while engaged in the discharge of his appropriate functions, falls dead from his seat, a victim to ruthless violence.  The neighbourhood echoes at midnight to the alarm of fire; but it turns out that amidst those flames there is blood; and the fire has been kindled only to hide the assassin’s hand.  And in some instances the perpetrators of these deeds are suffered to go at large, while justice stands like a statue at her post, as if her eyes were put out, or her hands were palsied, or her life blood were frozen.  My country, thou hast a fearful account to settle for these bloody outrages; especially for such as are voluntarily, deliberately, left unpunished!

            I Had intended to add to this list of our national sins, the extensive desecration of the Sabbath; the neglect of the ordinances of religion; the profanation of God’s holy name, as well as the sin of intemperance, which is still in no small degree prevalent, notwithstanding all that Christian benevolence and Christian enterprise have done to arrest it; but instead of pursuing this train of thought, I will only in conclusion urge you in a single word, to fulfill the great purpose for which the solemnities of this day have been ordained—that of repentance and reformation.  The repentance of the nation must be that of the individuals of which the nation is composed; and as you are among its component parts, I call upon you this day, every one, to break off your iniquities by turning to the Lord, as a debt which you owe to your country.  Repent of your own personal transgressions—of the sins of your heart and of your life, and supplicate grace to enable you to live a righteous, sober and godly life, to the glory of God’s holy name.  Humble yourselves in view of our national sins, and resolve that the full amount of your influence shall be consecrated to the cause of national reformation.  And then go forth and act in the spirit of this day’s solemnities, in the spirit of the resolutions you have here formed, and it will be good for you, it will be good for our common country, that you have engaged in this exercise.

            It is at once a sublime and affecting thought that this great nation is professedly humbling itself to-day around the tomb of its departed Head.  If I had a voice that could be heard from one end of the land to the other, I would say, My countrymen, take heed that ye do not hereafter prove this day’s solemnities to have been a farce.  Ye are professing now to be humble for our sins, and to ask that God’s judgments may not be lost upon you: show your sincerity then by forsaking the sins for which you mourn; by laying duly to heart the chastisement which you profess to recognize.  But if you rise from your knees only to commit the sins which you have confessed; if you go forth from your chambers of fasting to open your bosoms to the influence of party strife, and criminal worldliness, and forgetfulness of God, then remember that you have played the hypocrite amidst the solemnities of an occasion which has had it not more of a fast than of a funeral; and to say nothing of other testimony, the grave of your lamented President will be a witness against you until it shall give up its dead at the great resurrection day.

END.

GOD, THE REFUGE OF HIS PEOPLE

A SERMON,

DELIVERED BEFORE

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY

OF

SOUTH CAROLINA,

ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1850,

BEING A DAY OF

FASTING, HUMILIATION AND PRAYER.

BY WHITEFOORD SMITH, D. D.

COLUMBIA, S. C.

PRINTED BY A. S. JOHNSTON.

1850.

EXTRACT

From the Message of his Excellency, W. B. Seabrook.

            “In recommending, as I now do, that South Carolina should interpose her sovereignty in order to protect her citizens, and that by co-operation with her aggrieved sister States, she may be enabled to aid in averting the doom which impends over the civil institutions of the South, it is fit and proper that, as a Commonwealth, we should, at an early day, to be designated by you, implore the God of our fathers for the pardon of our manifold transgressions, and invoke his protection and guidance in this our day of trouble and affliction; that he would graciously vouchsafe to enlighten the minds of our Federal rulers, the North and its citizens, and direct them in the way of truth, of reason and of justice, and preserve a once happy political family from the unspeakable horrors of civil strife.”

From the Journal of the House of Representatives,

November 26, 1850.

            Mr. Memminger submitted the following Preamble and Resolutions, which were ordered to be considered immediately, and were agreed to:

            Whereas, it becomes a Christian people, at all times to look to the King of Kings for guidance and direction, but more especially in seasons of trial and difficulty; and, whereas, the enactments of the last Congress of the United States have destroyed the equal rights of the Southern States, have invaded the peace and security of our homes, and must lead to an overthrow of the existing order of things: therefore,

            Resolved, unanimously, That we recommend to the people of South Carolina, to set apart Friday, the 6^th of December, as a day of fasting and humiliation, and that the Reverend Clergy throughout the State be invited to assemble their respective congregations on that day, to unite in prayer to Almighty God, that He may direct and aid this General Assembly in devising such means as will conduce to the best interests and welfare of our beloved State.

            2.  Resolved, unanimously, That religious services and a sermon appropriate to the occasion be had in the Hall of the House of Representatives, and that a fitting Clergyman be invited to officiate.

            3.  Resolved, unanimously, That a committee of three be appointed on the part of this House, and that a message be sent to the Senate proposing the appointment of a like Committee to meet the Committee of this House, for the purpose of carrying into effect these resolutions.

From the Journal of the House of Representatives,

December 7, 1850.

            Mr. E. P. Jones submitted the following resolutions, which were ordered to be considered immediately, and were agreed to:

            1.  Resolved, That a copy of the able and eloquent discourse, delivered before the General Assembly, by the Rev. Whitefoord Smith, be requested of him for publication.

            2.  Resolved, That a committee of three, on the part of this house, be appointed to meet a similar committee on the part of the Senate, for the purpose of making the request, and directing the publication.

            3.  Resolved, That two thousand copies be published.

            In the Senate, on the same day, the message of the House was concurred in, and Messrs. Moses, Manning, and Griffin appointed on the committee.

CORRESPONDENCE.

Senate Chamber,

Columbia, Dec. 10, 1850.

Rev. Whitefoord Smith.

            Dear Sir:—We take pleasure in communicating, as a committee appointed for that purpose, the unanimous resolution of both Houses of the Legislature, requesting, for publication, a copy of your able, impressive and eloquent Sermon, delivered at the solicitation of the General Assembly of the State, on the day of fasting, humiliation and prayer.

            In performing this duty, permit us to assure you of the high consideration with which we subscribe ourselves,

            Very respectfully yours,

            FRANKLIN J. MOSES,

            Chair of the Senate Com.

            E. P. JONES,

            Chair of House Com.

Columbia, Dec. 10, 1850.

Gentlemen:—Your note of this date, conveying the request of the General Assembly of South Carolina, for a copy of the Sermon delivered before that body, on Friday, the 6^th inst. For publication, is before me.  I cannot forbear the expression of my profound gratitude for the kind manner in which the discourse has been received by the Legislature.

The manuscript is placed at your disposal.

            With the highest consideration,

            I have the honor to be,

            Very respectfully,

            Yours, &c.

            WHITEFOORD SMITH.

To the Hon. F. J. Moses,

            E. P. Jones, and others,         Committee.

SERMON.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.  Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.  The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.  PSALMS. XLVI. 1, 2, 3, and 11.

            Never, in the history of our State, have our people been called to the observance of a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer, under circumstances so peculiar and critical, as those which now surround us.

            For near three quarters of a century our country has enjoyed a state of almost uninterrupted internal tranquility, and pursued her steady and onward course towards that point of greatness and glory to which the Providence of God had called her.  In the legitimate exercise of the functions of government, there seemed nothing to retard her progress, and the eye of hope was already dazzled with the splendor of the future, while anticipating the development of her illimitable resources.  The capability of man for self-government was the theme of the proud American, as he pointed to each bright page of his country’s history, rendered illustrious by acts of patriotism which claimed the admiration of the world.  No scenes of moral sublimity had Time’s long calendar chronicled, grander than the Declaration of American Independence, and the adoption of our Federal Constitution.  No name shone brighter on the roll which fame had made immortal, than that of the Christian Washington.  The future was radiant with the reflection of the past, and down the long vista of coming years, the sanguine could already discern the last-born star of the political firmament, outshining every sister planet, and reigning “lord of the ascendant.”

            But it is not to be disguised that all these bright hopes have become clouded—that the most serious dissensions have arisen among us—and that while we are at peace with all the foreign powers of the world, we are the subjects of an internal convulsion which threatens the overthrow of our government.  There is reason to apprehend that the confederated States of this Union,

“That stood the storm when waves were rough,

Shall, in a sunny hour fall off,

Like ships that have gone down at sea,

When Heaven was all tranquility.”

            At such a time, when such dangers threaten us, nothing surely can be more appropriate and becoming than that, as a Christian people, we should recognize the supreme control of God, and with a rue and sincere humiliation, present ourselves before the throne of Grace, to ask the guidance of the All-wise, the support of the Almighty.

            While the perilous condition of our country is of itself sufficient to justify the appointment you have made of this day for fasting, humiliation and prayer, the sable drapery of these halls of legislation admonishes us that South Carolina has other griefs, which should lay her in the dust before God.

            For many years past, in every exigency of her history, she has been accustomed to turn her eyes to that favored son, whose wisdom and far-seeing sagacity pre-eminently qualified him to direct the public mind, and upon whose virtue and firmness she leaned as on the pillar of her strength.  But in vain do we look to meet the glance of that piercing eye—in vain do we seek the motion of that hand which always pointed out the path of duty and of honour.  Carolina’s long-loved son is gone,

“Like a summer-dried fountain

When our need was the sorest.”

            The flowers on his tomb are yet scarcely withered—the eyes that wept for him are yet moistened with tears—the hearts that bled at his departure are not yet healed.  But alas! He is gone.  And while the cry of his own dear State is rallying her sons to the rescue, he, who was ever foremost to answer to her call, comes not now.

“He sleeps his last sleep, he has fought his last battle,

No sound shall awake him to glory again.”

            Strange and mysterious was the dispensation of Providence which removed him from us at such a time.  But like the Hebrew Prophet, who had led his people through all the intricacies of the wilderness and the perils of the desert, till they were in sight of the promised land, yet was not permitted to enter that land and head their hosts in battle with their foes; so our illustrious statesman, who for years had predicted the coming of this day and of these events, was only allowed to guide us to the passage of this Jordan, and then his work was done.  May He who has taken away our Moses, give us another Joshua!

            Nor while we visit with tears the grave of our Calhoun, can we forget that he who was called to succeed him in the high honours of the Senatorial office, has likewise followed him with rapid step to the grave.

            From our Judiciary, also, in the last twelve-month, have been removed two bright luminaries of the law; one in the maturity of years and honours, the other in the meridian of life and usefulness.  A visitation so extraordinary may well be expected to produce the deepest impression.  While we are thus solemnly reminded of the uncertainty and frailty of all human dependence, it becomes us to put our trust in Him who is the rock and the refuge of his people.  Surely Heaven could scarce address us in plainer or in louder tones, commanding us to cease from man, and to make God the only object of our faith.

            It is a practice sanctioned by a high antiquity, and commended by every consideration both of reason and religion, that a people, in any crisis of their history, should turn their thoughts to God.  Even heathen nations, whose brightest illuminations were but the indistinct lights of natural religion, acknowledged this propriety.  Political disasters were followed by sacrifices and humiliation; and difficulties were solved, and perplexities relieved, by consulting the oracles of their gods.  And surely nothing is more fitting to a Christian people, bowed under the weight of manifold afflictions, than a true and penitent humiliation—nothing more proper to them, when surrounded by peril, than acts of supplication and prayer.  And let it be distinctly remembered, that we claim to be a Christian people.

            The causes which have led to the existing crisis in our public affairs, have been often superficially and imperfectly considered.  By forgetting our relation to God as a Christian nation, we lose sight of moral causes, and turn our eyes only to external and political ones.  He who supposes that all the excitement and danger which now pervade our land are the result of abolitionism alone, has not thoroughly explored the subject, and has formed a very inadequate conception of the evil.  The disposition to interfere with the slave institutions of the South, is but one of the ebullitions of a spirit of insubordination and lawlessness, of infidelity and atheism.  In the eyes of this fanaticism, the rights of the South are as sacred as those of the North.  But to it, no rights are sacred.  The law and revealed will of God have declared it to be consistent with his moral government and wise purposes, that differences should exist in human fortunes; that there should be rich and poor, high and low, bond and free.  It is in antagonism to these great principles of our holy religion, that the wild passions of the godless are arrayed.  In their esteem, a Bible, which proclaims the right of one man to a larger possession than another, is a cheat, an imposition, a cunningly devised fable.  A God who should order such inequalities in the temporal condition of men, is no God.  Religion, therefore, they consider priestcraft—revelation a shameless imposture—the God of the Bible their sworn and bitter foe.  They may not yet have gathered the strength and courage necessary for so open an avowal of their views and designs, or, with a cunning policy, they may be biding their time for the declaration; but when the one or the other shall justify the announcement, the war-cry of their ranks will be universal equality and no religion—their oriflamme, the bloody flag.

            When that day shall come, which to all appearance is fast approaching, they who now, instead of supporting the Constitution and laws of our Government, either passively look on at this gathering storm of human passion, or seek to direct it hither for their own security, will be the first victims of its violence. For, let them not suppose that the infuriate mob will desire to seek their homes amid the malaria of southern swamps, when they can so easily avail themselves of a nearer possession in the beautiful villas of the Hudson and the Delaware.

            It is, unfortunately, too common, to confound the religious freedom which our Constitution secures to every man, with infidelity and atheism; to suppose, because we repudiate Church establishments, we acknowledge no religion.  Nothing can be more false in fact—nothing more fatal in practice.  The laws and institutions of our land are all avowedly Christian.  While preeminence is given to no particular church or denomination—while no religious tests of conformity or orthodoxy are demanded—while freedom to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience, is guaranteed to every man—yet still we claim to be a Christian people.  What means the adjournment of this General Assembly from Saturday to Monday, but the recognition of the Christian Sabbath?  What arguments have we for the protection of our rights of property, that are not founded on the Christian Revelation?  What insurmountable barrier do we present against the pretended philanthropy of those who would overturn our domestic institutions, but the living oracles of God?

            It may well constitute a subject of humiliation to us on this day, that, in this particular, our practice has been so far beneath our creed.  We can scarcely suppose that any intelligent citizen of this State can be found, who would be willing to imitate unhappy France in her bloody revolution, either in the repudiation of religion, or in the general and authorized profanation of the Sabbath.  Yet, how frequently it happens, that those who shudder at the thought of what would be the result of a general and legalized act, seem unconscious of the evil of an individual or partial dereliction!

            Think not, Legislators of South Carolina, when a portion of your fellow-citizens appeal to you in petitions for the suppression of immoralities and the prevention of violations of the Divine Law, that it is with any disposition to coerce their neighbors into the practice of religion by the civil power.  The idea of conversion by force is the exploded theory of a bye-gone age.  But it is because, with the spirit of true patriotism, they look upon this as a Christian State; and they would have all its statutes built upon a sure and permanent foundation.  They believe that a due respect to God’s laws is the certain way to secure his favor for their land—to promote its prosperity—to augment its glory.—They have learned, as well from the history of all the kingdoms of the earth, as from the inspired record, that “righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”  And when the day of invasion or peril shall come, they would gird on the harness of war, not trembling with fear, the first-born child of guilt; but triumphant in hope, the fruit of confidence in God.  They would answer the reproachful addresses of their foes in the language of the once happy Israel to the haughty Assyrian:

            “The virgin, the daughter of Zion, hath despised the, and laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.  Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed; and against whom hast thou exalted thy voice, and lifted up thine eyes on high?  Even against the Holy One of Israel.”

            Since, however, the peculiar domestic institution of the South is made the ostensible cause for all the wrongs of which we complain in the Federal legislation of our country, let us turn our attention to it briefly.  As Christians, we are called to admit that all things are under the special, superintending providence of God.  We shall not go back to trace the origin and history of slavery through the patriarchal and prophetic ages, nor stop to note its Divine recognition in the dispensation of God’s chosen people.  These are matters too patent and indisputable to be questioned even by its most relentless opponents.  But the horrors of the slave-trade have furnished a copious theme for philanthropic declamation, while the barbarism and cannibalism of the untaught African have been always overlooked.  Can we doubt that the hand of God was mighty enough to have prevented all this inhumanity, if his providence had no purposes of mercy and wisdom to serve in the permission of a temporary evil to effect an ultimate and incalculable good?  And if we could dispossess our minds of those prejudices which warp our better judgment, and look rather to the way in which God brings good out of seeming evil, to what different conclusions should we come, than when, following the blindness of our own reason and passions, we undertake to challenge His justice and goodness?  If we form our opinions of good and evil, not according to principles of worldly expediency, but, as Christians ought to do, according to the word of God, considering a future life as well as the present, can there be any question that the negro race among us, under all the supposed disadvantages of slavery, are happier than were their fathers in their native land, or than they themselves could be in any place or in any condition that is really practicable?  They who make slavery a cause of offence, fight not against us, but against God.  Who, in the creation, formed these lands and suited them to that peculiar culture which makes their product the great staple of the world?  Who, of all the various tribes of men, has adapted this peculiar people to this climate and fitted them for this very toil?  Who, in his own infinite wisdom, gave those rules for the regulation of this relation, so that it might be a blessing both to the master and his slave?  Who has caused, in the last twenty years, a spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice in the hearts of good men, and led them to consecrate themselves to the great work of evangelizing and saving this portion of the human family?  Who has crowned these Christian labors with such eminent success, unparalleled in the history of modern missions, so that in our own State alone, more than fifty thousand of these very people are in the communion of His Church?

            And what is it that these sworn foes to slavery desire to do?—Is it to place the negro race in a better condition, civilly, politically, or religiously?  Have they not written their own hypocrisy in capitals before the world, by forbidding their entrance into many of their States?  And in those free States, where a scattered remnant of them still survive, are they not “the most degraded, under-foot, down-trodden,” victims of inhumanity?  What would they come to teach them?  Is it contentment, and peace and piety?  What text-book would they give them?  Is it the Bible?  No, no!  They would come only to desolate and to blight.  Under a pretence of religion, they would institute “a higher law.”  Under the pretended sanction of the Gospel of peace, they would light up the fires of an exterminating war.  Under the affectation of Christianity, they would teach the doctrines of devils.

            Some of the more moderate and thoughtful among those who array themselves against us on this subject, profess an unwillingness to interrupt by force our existing relations, but at the same time desire to effect a peaceful change in public sentiment among us.  Ignorant of the true state of things, and misled by imaginary evils, they would teach us a better way.  To all such offers, “be our plain answer this:  The laws we reverence are our brave fathers’ legacy—the faith we follow, teaches us to live in bonds of charity with all mankind, and die with hope of bliss beyond the grave.  We seek no change; and, least of all, such change as they would bring us.”

            There is a singular fact connected with the history of slavery among us, which seems to have escaped public notice, and which conveys a most important moral lesson.  In the early periods of our history, this institution was viewed at the South with an evil eye.  It was commonly regarded as a hindrance to the prosperity of those States in which it existed.  So common was this feeling at the South, that many of our youth were sent for their education into the free States.  Thousands who were born and reared among us, looked forward with hope to the day when we should be able to rid ourselves of a slave population, and when our territory should become the abode only of the free.  At this time, there existed among this great body of people no Christian missions.  They lived and died in as utter heathenism, as did their pagan progenitors.  No man cared for their souls.  To speak, therefore, of their emancipation, was to address the philanthropy and Christian feeling of the human heart.

            A little more than twenty years ago, attention was first turned to their religious culture.  It was remembered that they were human beings—that though they were our property, they were also our fellow-creatures.  It was discovered that their oral instruction in the elementary principles of practical and experimental religion, was compatible with the public safety, and even tributary to the master’s interest.  To our own State belongs the honour of having originated this enterprise, and it stands associated with a name of which South Carolina has always been proud.  Since that time, in many of the slaveholding States, the different churches have engaged in the work of teaching them their moral responsibility, their duty to God, and to their masters.

            Now, mark in this, the hand of a wise and gracious God, accomplishing his own designs in ways we had not known.  Had the torrent of fanaticism which now threatens to desolate the land, come upon us and found us unprepared—had we no moral and religious barrier to interpose against this professed philanthropy—its progress had been irresistible.  The great mass of Christians in the slave States would have been paralyzed—the public sentiment among ourselves would, in all probability, have been greatly divided—and no unanimous concurrence of our people could have been expected in its defense, when the institution was regarded only as a political one, and, by many, considered as an evil.

            But the public mind has now received another direction.  Missionary efforts for the salvation of the negro race have turned the attention of Christians to the more calm and correct appreciation of slavery.  They found the authority for its existence in the Bible—they discovered its obligations and duties sanctioned by a Divine Revelation.  The more its discomforts and inconveniences were modified and alleviated, the firmer hold did it take upon every Christian heart.  And when the battle-cry of fanaticism was raised in its first serious attack upon the slave institution, its first bold repulse was from the Christian church, whose adamantine fortification was the Word of God!

            This was no “odium theologicum.”  The question at issue was no metaphysical point of speculative theology.  It was a question of practical religion, grave in its character, momentous in its consequences.  And the Southern Church occupied the platform which inspiration had laid, when, with the spirit of prophecy, it foresaw the licentiousness of later times.  “Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and His doctrine be not blasphemed.  And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit.  These things teach and exhort.  If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil-surmisings, perverse disputing of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness:  from such withdraw thyself.”

            And now, hallowed by this sacred connection, and assured of the righteousness of our cause, and of the promised protection and blessing of Heaven, the Christians are among the foremost to plant themselves in the breach, and to defend with their lives this institution of God and our fathers.

            What could more powerfully enforce the salutary lesson, that the faithful fulfillment of the duties involved in this relation is the best security for its preservation; and that the only danger to be apprehended in connection with it, is the want of fidelity to our stewardship!  Look around through all the slave States, and you shall find that wherever the greatest attention has been paid to the moral duties of this relation, there, the greatest unanimity exists, and the loftiest courage is exhibited in its defense.

            No apology will be needed for having occupied your attention so long on this topic.  It is well that on so solemn an occasion our conscientious conviction of the rectitude of our cause should be declared before the world.  And it is likewise most proper that we should know whether we have a right to expect the Divine blessing, which this day has been specially set apart to seek.  If our cause be an unjust and sinful one, our humiliation and prayers shall be all in vain.  For, as saith the Psalmist, “if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”  But if, on the contrary, we are assured of its righteousness—if we can appeal to the Searcher of hearts for our sincerity and integrity—if what we defend is the institution of God, and consistent with his revealed will, then we know that our prayers shall be answered and the Divine blessing be given.

            But although the justice of our cause may well embolden us, yet is this day most properly consecrated to humiliation and prayer.  We have many sins for which to mourn and repent.  Let us not indulge in a spirit of pride and vain-boasting, but examine wherein we have failed of our duty to God.  It is not the rage and malice of our enemies we have to fear.  We have a conscience void of offence towards them.  We have not wronged them; we have not deserted them in the time of their need; we have not sought their hurt.  But our only fear is that we have provoked the displeasure of our Heavenly Father, by neglecting his commands, and being too forgetful of Him—that in the pride and fullness of our hearts, we have lost sight of our dependence upon Him.  Let us return unto Him with penitence and tears.  Let us rend our hearts and not our garments, and put away all evil from us, and in sincerity and truth devote ourselves to Him.  Let us remember the Sabbath He hath sanctified, and keep it holy.  Let us meet the high responsibilities of a Christian people with cheerful and willing hearts.  Oh!  I would that He who looketh into all hearts might behold in every one of us to-day, and in all our people who are surrounding his altars, the spirit of a true contrition and of a living faith!  Oh!  I would to Heaven that this day’s acts of penitence and prayer might come before the mercy-seat as an acceptable offering, the odour of a sacrifice pleasing to God!  Oh! That there might follow this day’s humiliation, such an effusion of the spirit of love, and of power, and of a sound mind, as should inspire our people with a moral courage, adequate not only to the necessity of these times, but of all times; such a spirit of rejoicing and heavenly triumph, as neither danger can disturb, nor disaster overcome, nor death destroy.  Then should there be heard the shout of a King in the camp, and the people of the Lord should do valiantly.

            Let it be deeply impressed upon our minds, how insufficient is human wisdom, how inadequate human power, to achieve anything of itself, without the aid of God.  It is too common for men to rely upon themselves more than upon God.  This is perhaps one of the abuses we make of our moral agency.  It is true that we are not to neglect the right and proper means for the accomplishment of an end, but the best and most efficient means may be utterly unavailing, when, depending on them alone, we refuse to put our trust in the Lord.  The secret spring of all moral power is faith in God.

            It were falling infinitely below this great occasion, and losing sight of the moral issues it involves, if we should place our security and trust in any other than an Almighty arm.  We claim that our cause is the cause of justice and of truth.  We appeal to God, as did our fathers in the darkest days of their peril, for support; and we believe that He will guide us safely through.  But let us not anticipate his time, nor, by any rash precipitancy of our own, take our cause out of his hands.  Human pride is human weakness.  Our sufficiency is of God.  If we entrust our cause to him, our steps shall be ordered surely.  Cast your eyes around you, and ask, if we were disposed to lean upon earthly aid, whence is that aid to come?  Yet, this need not intimidate us.  For, what though we were deserted by men?  What though the world were in arms against us?  Has God never delivered his people under circumstances as threatening and desperate as even these would be?  Man’s extremity has always been God’s opportunity.  And if we had not a hand to lift for our defense, the voice Almighty might be heard, bidding us, “stand still, and see the salvation of God.”

“Lo! To faith’s enlighten’d sight,

All the mountain flames with light,

Hell is nigh, but God is nigher,

Circling us with hosts of fire.”

            While prayer cannot sanctify that which is unholy in principle, yet how great is its advantage, when the object of the prayer is good.  How powerful, then, should be the influence of this day’s service upon all our hearts.  “For, if God be for us, who shall be against us?”  It becomes those who are supported by such high considerations, to be above all petty heats of passion—to repose with a steady confidence on God—to deliberate calmly—to act courageously.  In all we purpose and in all we do, let the fear of God be before our eyes, but not the fear of man.  For, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; but the fear of man bringeth a snare.

            Through the length and breadth of the land, too, it shall be told, that South Carolina is not engaged in an unhallowed cause.  It shall be known, that she has taken no step, engaged herself to no line of action, until she had asked direction of Heaven, and committed her cause to Him that judgeth righteously.  But let us not forget, that when we come to place ourselves under Divine guidance, and to seek illumination from above, we should dispossess our minds of all antecedent prejudices, and sincerely implore Almighty God to show us the way in which He would have us go.  It may not comport with His will, to workout our deliverance in the way we might desire.  And it would be impious in us, while asking his counsel, to be determined to pursue the course which our prejudices or passions might prefer.  It has been frequent in the history of nations and of men, that the ways in which He has wrought out the deliverance of his people, have been very different from those which they anticipated.  We are taught to pray, “Thy will be done.”

            Whether it shall please Him to interpose at this time, for our deliverance, by producing a revolution in public opinion throughout the land, making even our enemies to be at peace with us; or, by some signal judgment upon those who persecute us, manifesting the strength of his displeasure; or, by cursing them with a mental blindness, that by farther aggressions they may drive the most tardy and timid into a ready co-operation with us—whether He shall be pleased that this Confederacy of States shall still continue, with the wrongs of which we complain redressed, and with a Constitution rescued from the dust, and environed around with new securities—or, whether it shall be His will that the bonds which have united us shall be severed, and new combinations formed; all these should be left in His hands.  Nothing is beyond the reach of His power.

            We have not been nursed in the lap of Christianity, and taught the Bible from our infancy, without learning that it is not with the Lord to save by many or by few.  It is not numbers which constitute right; neither in morals, do numbers constitute might.  A firm and true reliance upon God is worth more than a Macedonian phalanx.  A secret and lurking infidelity in our hearts may say, the age of miracles is gone.  But a living faith confesses no abatement of Jehovah’s power.  Under the protection of that power, we place ourselves to-day. We cannot tell, in the boding future, through what dark scenes our path may lie.  We know not who may survive to witness the triumphs of constitutional freedom.  But, come what may, in weal or in woe, this shall be our rejoicing, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”  Whatever insignia may wave over the bannered hosts of other States, let the glorious and encouraging motto on our flag be this:  “The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.”

 Gentlemen of the Senate

And House of Representatives:

            You occupy this day the most honourable, and yet, the most responsible position which it is possible for men to hold.  In your hands, under God, are our destinies, and the destinies of our wives, and children, and servants.  The eyes of your fellow-citizens are upon you, awaiting, with intensest interest, your action.  Our State has been traduced and mocked, as rash and hasty.—No efforts have been spared to wean from her the support and co-operation of her sister States of the South.  Her chivalry has been made a bye-word of reproach.  Her nice and delicate sense of her constitutional rights, has been distorted into disaffection to the Union.  Her avowed determination to maintain those rights “at any and every hazard,” has been met by threats of coercion if she dare resist.  Everything has been done that could be done to provoke your wrath, and urge you to an impetuous and precipitate act.  You understand the design, and hitherto, South Carolina has taken no step which she has had to retrace.  You know full well that a constitutional revolution is not the work of a day.  They who desire our destruction would rejoice to force you into a wrong position.  Let them find that your indomitable courage is tempered by a wise discretion.

            When you adopted the resolutions by which this day was set apart for these religious purposes—when you invited the ministrations of religion to hallow your deliberations, and called upon the whole people of our State to unite with you in prayer to God in this great emergency; you sent a thrill of joy through every Christian heart, and inspired hope and confidence in the breasts of us all.  Then we saw that our Legislators were placing us “rectus in curia” before the world—that you were recognizing your dependence, and ours, upon God—that you were taking counsel where wisdom dwelt, and seeking alliance with a mightier power than all the kings of the earth.

            And how encouraging to your own hearts must be the thought, that, united with you in spirit to-day around the throne of the heavenly mercy, are the people you represent, and supplications are ascending for you for thousands of souls—that infancy, in timid accents, is lisping its early prayer; and old age, trembling under its infirmities, commends you to God; and female tenderness, with its accustomed faith, implores on you the blessing of Heaven; while manhood adds all its strength to the general intercession.

            And may we not suppose that the knowledge of this day’s transactions shall have its effect far beyond the borders of our own State?  May not God make the position of a praying people terrible to their foes?  May not the dark clouds which have hung portentously over our sky, be removed by an Almighty Hand?  The attitude in which you have placed yourselves by this day’s proceedings shall reflect honour on your names among the generations to come.  For it declares that, while you fear no earthly power, you own subjection and fealty to the King of Kings.

            Gentlemen, to the best of my humble abilities, I have performed the duty with which your kindness has honoured me.  I have endeavored cautiously to abstain from dictating to you in those things which are legitimately confided to your hands, as the Representatives of the people of South Carolina.  I have only sought to point you to the true source of wisdom, to the fountain of all grace and good.  And now, I commend you to God.  May He enable you so to direct our ship of State through all the perils of the present storm, that she may gallantly ride each heaving billow, and find safe anchorage in the Port of Peace!    Amen.

Our Political Idolatry.

A

Discourse

Delivered in the First Church in Roxbury,

On Fast Day, April 6, 1843

By George Putnam,

Minister of that Church

Published by Request of the Parish.

Boston:

William Crosby and Co.

1843.

Isaiah 10:11

Shall I not, as I have done unto Samaria and her idols, so do to Jerusalem and her idols?

            These are words of warning.  The application to be made of them is obvious.  They related to a proud and self-confident nation, a people who, regarding themselves as in some sense the chosen people of God, their city as the religious center of the world, with a temple in which they said all men ought to worship, a favored people, highly privileged and exalted, imagined that on this account their national existence and welfare would be shielded for ever by a peculiar Providence, irrespective of national character.  But they were woefully mistaken.  The moral law of God makes no exceptions.  They sinned, and their sins were visited rigorously upon them as upon others.  They fell, as they had been warned, into captivity and ruin, like other nations that had in like manner corrupted their ways. 

            Our own country needs the same warning; and would that we might give better heed to it than they did whom the prophet had in his mind!

            Our Fast day is not a Sabbath.  It derives its appointment from the civil authorities.  We come up hither today as citizens of the State, in obedience to the call of the magistrate.  It seems, therefore, as much in accordance with propriety as with usage, that the observance should be as peculiar as the occasion; that, omitting the usual Sabbath-day topics, we should consider, in some of their more moral aspects, our public condition and civil relations,—not as to the details of the political expedients and measures of the day, but those principles which underlie them all, and the tendencies that direct them,—not party politics, but the elements of our social system.  And inasmuch as this is professedly not a day for congratulations and rejoicing, but a day of humiliation, it is not a fit time to take flattering views, or prophesy smooth things; but to look upon the darker side,—the side of error and danger,—and see wherein we should take shame or take warning, for evils committed, or evils to be apprehended.  If we meet here for any one definite object more than another, it is to contemplated and mourn for our public sins, mistakes, calamities, and dangers, and to be humble before God on account of them. 

            Our text leads us to this remark, namely, that our nation is liable to the same errors and sins which have in all ages brought distress or ruin on other nations, and that, greatly favored as we are in some respects, if we do as other nations have done, we shall suffer as they have suffered.  Jerusalem and her idols must fare as Samaria and her idols.

            Our people think otherwise.  They seem to imagine that our free institutions, universal suffrage, and the establishment of what are called popular rights, are in absolute pledge and infallible means of national welfare; as if, by avoiding privileged orders and monarchical power, we had turned out of the only path, and must needs be safe.  This is a great delusion, and it is high time to awake from it.  We flatter ourselves that we are free indeed, and absolutely, and always must be, if we keep on as we are going on,—free, in a sense in which people, under different forms of government, never were, nor can be.  No such thing; we have a sovereign, and on that threatens to become, if he be not yet, as absolute, as arbitrary, as uncontrolled, and as capricious too, as ever sat upon a throne.  That sovereign is the majority, a dominant party.  Out of seventeen millions, the nine millions constitute the sovereign, and the eight are subjects.  We are never under any rule but that of a party,—a party,—a sovereign always rendered vindictive and oppressive by the bitter struggle through which alone he ever gets into power.  The sovereign people means, of course, a sovereign majority.  And this mighty sovereign is subject to dangerous tendencies and misleading influences, similar to those which have made individual monarchs unscrupulous and tyrannical.  As, for instance,—the one thing that perhaps more than any other has perverted and made insupportable the absolute monarchies of the Old World,—the system of courtiership,—that is, a few persons, of little principle and great address, besetting the sovereign, and, by insinuating flatteries, and professions of unbounded devotion to his person and service, securing the honors and emoluments in his gift, and the fatal powers that accrue to court favorites.  They get their places by flattery, and use them for their own aggrandizement, and in disregard of the subject’s welfare. 

            And now is not our sovereign monarch beset just so?  As a general rule, those who aspire to favor with our king, Majority, pursue the same course; they fawn upon him, flatter him, assure him of his unparalleled wisdom, his universal and astonishing intelligence, his incorruptible virtue, of his perfectly cool and passionless judgment; above all, (and this is always the most agreeable incense to the ear of monarchs,) they tell him of the rightful extent of  his prerogative, how he ought to rule with absolute sway, how certain checks to his power ought to be removed an shall be, and nothing stand between him and the exercise of his divine instinct of right, his unerring wisdom and good pleasure.  They are careful not to tell him, that to err is human, that he is liable to passion and may do wrong, to mistakes of judgment and may err, and that therefore he ought, for his own safety and the welfare of his subjects, to surround himself, and keep himself surrounded, with regular checks against his own mistakes and caprices.  O, no!  if he ever did do wrong for a moment, it was because he was innocently misled by this or that false friend and bad adviser, who has squandered his money, or disparaged his wisdom, and must be put away. 

            Never was there a sovereign more courtier-ridden than ours, more easily duped by flatteries, or intoxicated by the sweets of power and the pride of dominion.  Our public men, and would-be public men, are of the genus Courtier, to as great an extent as any set of men that ever surrounded an absolute throne; and they do—as why should they not?—corrupt the sovereign as much, and do as much to blind him to his faults, and to make him a reckless and conceited tyrant.  A demoralized sovereign must be as pernicious here as elsewhere.

            The downfall of liberty and the decline of states has generally been brought about by the sovereign’s gradually engrossing into his own hands all the powers of the state, and ruling with the unrestrained sway of pure despotism.  That sovereign may be an aristocracy, as in Venice, and in Rome at one period; or an individual man, as in France before the first revolution; or the mass of the people, as in France after that revolution, and in some of the states of ancient Greece; in either and every case of unrestrained, unbalanced power, whether of monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy,—no matter which,—the liberty and safety of the individual and the good order of the state have been the sacrifice. 

            Our fathers seem to have understood perfectly this fearful lesson of history, and, in establishing a republic and framing our system of polity, they appear to have been as anxious to guard against an unmitigated democracy as against an unmitigated monarchy; they designed the one as little as the other; they designed neither.  They placed the sovereignty in its most rightful and proper depository, the people; but they were careful to set up all the checks against its despotism that were compatible with such a sovereignty; they desired to have, and they provided, as many guards as possible against the ambition, the rashness, the vindictiveness, the destructiveness of excited numbers, victorious majorities, and headlong party.

            This is not the place, and I am not the person, to show in detail how wisely our fathers managed this matter, teaching the young sovereign that he must set and maintain salutary restraints upon himself, and keep himself from doing wrong in the coming day of his pride and passion.  I will only refer to one of these checks,—the judicial system.  Here is one great branch of power, the administration of justice, taken away from the sovereign, removed as far as possible from his control, not intended to be subject to any vote of his, he himself even being made amenable to its decisions.  Our fathers designed that the rampant monarch, the major party of the day, should never assume, nor indirectly approach, this department of government,—the judiciary.  They put the appointing and the removing power of this branch, as far as practicable, out of the reach of party cabal and popular caprice, that it might be as much as possible independent of the sovereign, a barrier between the monarch, Majority, and the individual subject.  Experience has proved how wise they were.  The judiciary has been unapproachably the highest in character, the purest in its administration, of all the departments of the government.  Uninfluenced by party spirit, uncontrolled by this or that ruling faction, not obliged to court the smiles and bespeak the sweet voices, of the fickle multitude, it has stood aloof and incorrupt,—independent in its dignified and beneficent function.  It has fearlessly asserted the majesty of law.  It stands in its place, the calm and passionless organ of individual right and eternal justice, the curb of the strong, the defense of the weak, and the impartial guardian of all.  Here, as everywhere, where its independence is secured, it is the bulwark of liberty against the encroachments of arbitrary power, in its insidious pretensions, or its open violence. 

            This provision for and independent judiciary, as well as many others, shows that our fathers dreaded and would avert despotism, that is, concentrated power, whether lodged in a king or a multitude.  They never designed and unmixed democracy.  But here, as everywhere, the grasping sovereign makes constant efforts after absolute power.  It is ever of the nature of a sovereign to do so.  He always chases at the restraints put upon him.  Now conflicting parties contend which shall best secure and deserve the name of Democracy; and whichever can most firmly fix the title on its banners is nearly sure of triumph.  Here, as everywhere, whoever can most flatter and exalt the sovereign, and raise him into unfettered absolutism, will, of course, win his smiles and sit at his right hand. And men seem to be seeking how they shall outdo one another in professions of unlimited loyalty to the monarch, and give freest play to his passions and his will. 

            The present stage of our history is strongly marked by the tendency to make the sovereign, Majority, absolute and unfettered in his sway.  Just so in the palmy days of the Caesars, all Rome was studying ways to exalt the emperor’s power, and remove all hindrances from his way.  Public sentiment seems to be upon the steady, onward march towards changing our old republic, with its numerous checks and guards, into the despotism of an unmixed democracy.  As in a single instance, already referred to,—the judiciary,—is it not plain that the idea is working in the sovereign’s mind, that that institution must, in some way, be brought under his more immediate control,—must not be so independent of the popular voice,—must have done with its abstract right and absolute justice, and learn to echo only the popular acclamations,—must come every year to the sovereign to beg for a precarious subsistence and for the boon of appointment and reappointment, and so learn to dispense justice according to the behests of partisan press, the votes of a caucus, and the interests of this or that party struggling to get or keep the ascendency?  When king James II wished to play the despot, the great step was to get the courts of law subject directly to his will, and a Judge Jeffreys became a notable instrument in the sovereign’s hands.  The king made him Lord Chancellor.  It is always one great step towards despotism to get a dependent and subservient judiciary.  And our sovereign will probably take that step, and many more.  A raging thirst of power burns in the heart of this sovereign.  He is but too unlikely to observe the limits he at first set to himself, and there is none else to compel his observance of them. 

            I am showing that there is the same room for, and danger of, a despotism, under our institutions, as under any other, and that the same consequence must follow.  Why is there not the same room for it?  Let us see. 

            One leading maxim under a monarchical government is this, that the king can do no wrong; that is, he cannot be called to account, tried, or punished for anything he may do.  This maxim is probably essential to sovereignty and to the stability of a government; but it is a great help to a king toward becoming a tyrant.  The same maxim here pertains to the sovereign majority, and is more potent here than elsewhere; for an individual tyrant may be put out of the way, like a Julius Caesar, a Charles I., or the Russian Paul, and the many kings that have been dethroned; but our multitudinous sovereign may commit what outrages he will, out-herod Herod in atrocity, and there is no remedy, legal or illegal. 

            It is little relief, that the majority may change every year, now this side triumphing, and now that.  If the system be such as gives absolute power to the ruling party, little is gained by a frequent change of masters.  The rival houses of York and Lancaster alternated on the English throne, every few years, for a long period; but it made little difference in the condition of the oppressed subject which side was uppermost.  So let the principle be established, that a numerical majority is absolute in power,—the constitutional checks removed or evaded,—and it will matter little to individual citizens which party triumphs today or tomorrow.

            Is our sovereign any less likely to commit violence than other sovereigns?  The greatest atrocities on record have been committed, not by kings, but by excited and dominant masses, sometimes with, and sometimes without, the forms of law. 

            That great interest, so closely connected with the prosperity and morality of a nation,—Property,—is that more likely to be respected under an absolute democracy that under any other absolute power?  No; the popular passion and jealousy are more easily excited against this interest than any other.  From the nature of things, property, if it exist and flourish at all, must be very unequally divided.  It is true, we have not, and cannot have, any permanently rich class.  The families that are rich now are no more likely than others to be so a few years hence.  But those, who, for the time being, happen to hole property in large masses, are always objects of jealousy, often bitter and rabid, to those who have little or none, for the time being; that is, to the majority, the sovereign.  At least, such a jealousy may be easily awakened by the interested demagogue.  Let that majority become the absolute, unlimited monarch, according to the tendency of the times, and the security of property is gone.  The assault will be gradual and specious at first, but effective.  It will show itself in a noisy and meddlesome zeal for the rights of the poor, in petty persecutions of property, all sorts of embarrassments thrown in the way of its operations, inquisitorial proceedings instituted over private possessions and affairs, innumerable means of  thwarting, vexing, hampering the thrifty and successful,—making them odious and suspected.  This is the way with despotism, whether popular or monarchical.  There is nothing in our institutions, after the removal of a few barriers,—which are no more than bulrushes in the hand of our mighty sovereign,—nothing to hinder our approaching the condition of some Oriental states,—(for the thing has been comparatively unknown in modern Europe, except in France, during the reign of the Jacobin clubs,—) Asiatic states, I say, in which the possession of riches subjects the holder to such exactions, persecutions, and dangers, that treasure is hidden in the ground, carried out of the country, disappears, is hunted out of visible existence, by the jealousy or cupidity of the potentate.  It would be no marvel, if another century should witness such a state of things in this favored land; for such a potentate is growing up here, and, under the plausible motto of Popular Rights, sounded from all tongues, is fast approaching the fatal absolutism. 

            Once more,—is our boasted sovereign one that is sure to surpass other sovereigns in the moral character of his dealings with mankind?  Will this sovereign manifest a high-toned conscience, a scrupulous regard to honor and good faith in his engagements?  This question is answered but too plainly already.  To the infinite shame and sorrow of every high-minded citizen, the answer I written down before the eyes of the world in facts as black and foul as any, of this class, that ever yet blasted the fame of prince or people.  In some States of the Union,—and God only knows how it would be in other States under like difficulties, or how it will yet be in some of them,—in some States debts have been openly repudiated, or else evaded under flimsy pretexts more disgraceful than open repudiation, because more mean.  And this by the people, the infallible majority, the immaculate heaven-born sovereign of the New World, the model government, the desire of all nations!  Our good name is gone beyond the power of many ages to redeem.  The most beggarly prince in Europe, who strives to maintain a tottering throne, or who only goes out on adventure to acquire one, is a more welcome applicant to the capitalist than many a State in this Union, ore the whole together; and our glorious sovereign, Majority, that we fondly dreamed was to eclipse all others in the splendor of his power and the exaltation of his character, is a disgraced swindler, that can no longer be trusted for a mess of pottage.  After this, any, the gloomiest, apprehensions for the career of our great potentate, in his future strides to absolutism, will not be deemed quite fanciful or gratuitous.  Ten years ago, had this moral outrage of repudiation been predicted, the prophet would have been scouted, as a libeler, that could be no lover of his country.  Yet now it is fact,—a fact that should secure a charitable hearing for one who ventures to whisper his fears of calamity and disgrace yet to come.

            We are accustomed to place our great reliance on the intelligence of the people.  Certainly we must place it there, if anywhere.  There is probably as much intelligence diffused among our people as among those of any country in the world.  But, after all our efforts for the cause of universal education, who does not know that there are, and always will be, great numbers, who really know almost nothing of the institutions or interests of the country, and do not at all know the duties or feel the responsibilities of the sovereignty which they share?  It is an unpleasant truth,—but who seriously doubts that it is a truth?  Nay, worse, there are great numbers who have no interest in the permanency and good management of our institutions,—or do not feel that they have,—who partake of the sovereignty; and may be said to hold the destinies of the country in their hands; for none will doubt that such persons are more numerous, a hundred fold, than the difference between the majority and the minority on any disputed question that ever divided, or ever will divide, the people.

            In fact, it seems to be of the nature of sovereignty everywhere, that men acquire it, not by competency, but by birth.  And, from the nature of the case, it would be as absurd for us to inquire into the fitness of a man to share the sovereignty by his vote, as for the Russians to inquire into the fitness of the crown prince to reign.  He is born to reign, and in either case he must reign, fit or unfit, qualified or not,—and either nation must bear the consequences, or guard against them as it can. 

            It can avail but little for our security, that we have, and may continue to have, what is called a government of laws.  The legislatures in many States—and there is too much cause to say the same of the national councils—seem to be losing the character of independent deliberative bodies.  They meet, not to deliberate, but to act,—not to exercise their judgment, but to carry out at once the express or presumed decrees of sovereign party,—each member pledged and bound, not to think, but to do as he is commanded,—a dead hand, to register the edicts of the monarch.  A legislature thus conducting itself will soon cease to be an assembly of wise men,—or, if they be wise, their wisdom will be as useless as their folly,—and it will become, as to a great extent our have become already, a mere index of the party passion and popular caprice of the year, enacting the changeful our-door clamor into laws as changeful.  Our legislative bodies are becoming as subservient to the sovereign, as much mere automatic machines in his mighty hand, as ever was a British parliament under the eye of a Henry VIII or a queen Elizabeth.  Unless our people pause soon in this career of revolution, and begin to retrace their steps towards the original theory of our government, the meeting of a legislature will come to be dreaded by quiet and order-loving citizens, little less than the gathering of a mob.  Grave discussion gives place to party cabal, to foul-mouthed violence, nay, to open brawls and occasional homicide.  A busy, capricious, and arbitrary legislation, continually unsettling all things and keeping them unsettled, echoing ever the gustful passion of the hour, will soon cease, as things are going on, to give us any comfort in the mere name of a government of laws.  A legislature that basely lays down its independence at the feet of the sovereign, whether that sovereign be a crowned king or a triumphant party, always was and will be more an oppressor than a guardian, more a scourge than a blessing,—a supple tool of tyranny.        

            But why indulge these somber and unusual apprehensions?  Why reflect thus on unhappy possibilities and fearful tendencies?  It is not that we would depose our sovereign, or change him for another, if we could.  He is—as American citizens we will maintain—the best in the world.  I will cry with him who cries loudest, long live the Republic!—as long as it can live and be truly a republic.  God grant that may be forever!  We are born the subjects of this sovereign, and would render to him all true allegiance.  But we will watch him, jealously, as every strong sovereign must be watched.  We would not wrap ourselves up in our notorious national vanity, and refuse to see the peril.  We will respect our changeful ruler, the Majority; but we would not be so duped by our own ceaseless and absurd adulation of him, as to be blind to the fact, that he can as easily become, is as eager to become, and is as likely to become, and absolute and arbitrary tyrant, a ruthless scourge of liberty, as any potentate that ever wore a crown.  Such he has been in other parts of the world, and he may become such here.  Let him become such, let all barriers fall away, and nothing stand between the individual citizen, and the passions and caprices of king Majority, always at war with, and perpetually exasperated by, a rival Minority, nearly equal, and close upon his heels, and often displacing him to take his turn in power and plunder, both made greedy and hot by the chase,—let this come to pass according to the strong tendencies of the age, and then, woe to the lane!  The Assyrians be upon thee!  As it has been with Samaria, so must it be with Jerusalem! 

            Absolute and unmitigated democracy, such as we are approaching,—far distant be the day of our reaching it!—is tantamount to downright and insupportable despotism, the worst in the world, because it is the reign of chaos and confusion.  That is a condition that cannot be borne long,—never was borne long.  When it comes to that pass, men must have relief, and it is only found in some single mighty are, able to seize and hold the scepter.  Some “man of destiny” always arises at such a crises, and gives the only protection and rest then attainable, gives it beneath his iron heel and blood-red banner.  He finds the people torn by faction, weakened by ceaseless dissensions, wearied out and impoverished by the instability of every private and public interest, fit and glad to welcome any master that can give them repose.  Thus Greece got her Alexander, thus Rome got her Caesar, thus France got her Napoleon.  Our “man of destiny,” we trust, is not yet born; but we are doing more than we are aware towards laying for him the foundations of a throne, broad and strong enough to overshadow and crush us. 

            Miserable forebodings, these!—yet I see not how any man, who stands apart from political strife, and watches the tendencies of the times, can help sometimes entertaining them; they are but echoes of the sad lessons of history, voices from the tombs of ruined nations; and, if ever these are to be uttered, when so fitly as on the day set apart for public humiliation?

            Humiliation,—a word most appropriate to our subject.  It is the one thing that this nation needs,—humiliation!  We want it; not such as consists in shame and disgrace without repentance, of which kind we have enough; but humiliation before God.  Our pride needs to be humbled.  We are a vain-glorious people,—none more so ever flourished.  Pride such as ours must be put away, or it must have a fall and we with it.  The truth is, we have set up an Idol.  The specious name we have inscribed upon its car is Popular Rights; a noble title, a precious possession, and never to be disparaged, ever to be honored,—yes honored and guarded, but not worshipped.  Our people worship it, make a god of it.  Our public men can never laud it and magnify it enough.  It is the one great theme of state papers, and the daily press, and the popular harangue.  “Take care lest Popular Rights be abridged, or called in question, or secretly undermined, or be not worshipped enthusiastically and loudly enough.”  This is the one precept, the universal homily of politics; as if any one questioned the validity of those rights; as if the least conceivable speck of danger lay in that direction of all others; as if the one great and only peril with us did not consist in exalting the popular will into a divinity, and men’s believing that the voice of the people is in very truth the voice of God; as if the only possible despotism for us did not threaten us singly and solely from the side of party passion, and sweeping popular domination, majority exalted into a tyrant.  One of the worst Roman emperors, Domitian, I think, had his closet paneled all round with mirrors, so that no assassin might approach him unperceived.  His thoughts were always upon assassins; he could conceive of the existence of no other evil; not considering that the dangers and miseries of Rome were centered in himself,—him alone, his power and his cruelties.  So our emperor, the Popular Will, who is not nearly so bad as Domitian, has mirrored himself all round, and is watching with sleepless eye for the approach of an enemy; conjuring up fearful specters, of king or aristocracy,—phantoms that exist nowhere in this country, but in the cant of demagogues, and in the brain of the ignorant and deluded;—his guards proclaiming, every moment, from every quarter but the right one, “Here they come! Here is the danger!”  when, in fact, it is from himself alone that the ruin of our liberties can possibly come; in himself lies the only conceivable danger. 

            We worship a political idol; Popular Rights, Equal Rights, Inalienable Rights, is the flaming inscription; but under that title we worship man, human nature, ourselves, our idea of speedy perfectibility, our own omnipotence and infallibility, our unparalleled intelligence, and unequalled liberty, and glorious destiny.  This idol may crush us yet, as it has others; as Samaria, so Jerusalem.  In this idol, and our fanatical worship of it, lies our danger.  When we learn to believe in God as firmly, and to worship him as devoutly, then, and not till then, the danger will be overpast. 

            Would that there were in fact, as well as in name, one day of true fasting and real humiliation throughout the land,—a day when the whole people, tearing off the sevenfold veil of national conceit, should confess with shame and contrition their political idolatries, their atheistic pride, their clamorous ambition for rights, to the forgetfulness of duties, their thirst for power, their rash removing of the father’s landmarks, their woful breaches of honor and integrity, their party rancor, their political lies and flatteries and endless chicaneries and self-deceptions, their cringing, self-seeking pretenses of devotion to the despot they are rearing and pampering,—the whole vast, complicated idol worship, which blinds them with self-sufficiency, and estranges them from their God!

            This land is indeed a Jerusalem, and a glorious temple of liberty has been built therein, but a political idol usurps the place of the shechinah of the Lord; so it must not be, or that temple must fall into the dust, and bury us in the ruins.  Such is the law of the God of nations.  So it has been, so it must be.  “Shall I not, as I have done unto Samaria and her idols, so do to Jerusalem and her idols?”                            

     SERMON        

On the Moral Uses

Of the Pestilence

Denominated

Asiatic Cholera

Delivered on
Fast-Day August 9, 1832

By Rev. Orville Dewey

Pastor of the First Congregational Church in New-Bedford

published by Request of the Society

New – Bedford

Printed by Benjamin T Congdon

1832

SERMON

Isaiah XXVI

When Thy Judgments Are In The Earth, The Inhabitants of the

World Will Learn Righteousness

   The visitation of a calamity in some respects of an unprecedented character, has awakened the world to an unusual degree of consideration.  It is most desirable that this consideration should be rightly directed; that it should be guarded from all resorts to superstitious reliances and from an absorption in mere world fears; and that it should yield some results adequate to the greatness of the occasion.  If the world after this calamity shall have passed over it, is to be no wiser than it was before, such a failure must, to every sober mind, believing in providence, be a deep cause of regret.  The end is more important than the means.  It more concerns every being to improve God’s discipline, than to escape it.  To fail of that end, to fail of the improvement of the discipline would be a greater calamity than it is to endure the visitation of the pestilence itself.  For surely we are not , as Christians to forget that there are worse evils than the pestilence—worse evils than all outward calamities— evils so much worse , that all outward calamities  are designed to be their antidote and cure.
   

This consideration too, of the moral uses of the prevailing pestilence, would tend more than anything else, to allay the fears it inspires.  To caution the people against being alarmed, to reiterate  and multiply admonitions on this point, to warn the timid and terror-sticken, that this panic is among the surest harbingers of the dreaded disease, to tell them continually that the more alarmed , the more exposed they are, to exhort and urge them, as they value their lives, to be calm,  to recommend to them , in fine, by such constant implication,  to try not to be afraid—this seems to be very ill adapted to answer the purpose.  It is as if we would frighten people out of their fears, or hurry them into moderation and calmness.  Besides, it is not easy, unless we look at the moral aspects of this calamity, to prevent some natural tremors, some agitations, perhaps of unmanly fear.  If the elements are left to work their will upon us, if they are working to no end, but to show their awful and destructive power; if the scourge is borne upon the uncommissioned winds and its pavilion is darkness and its way is mystery and its end is death and there is no object and no explanation and nothing for the mind to deal with, but elements and powers, but inevitable fate and dire necessity.  How can mortal hearts sustain themselves in the dread encounter with agents so blind, inexorable and awful!  But if there is a Power, beneficent as it is mighty, that stays at its pleasure, the pestilence that walketh in darkness and the destruction that lays waste at noon-day; if it suffers the prevalence of disease to answer wise purposes.  If this calamity , however singular it is , nevertheless a part of the universal providence; if it is , like all other means for the reform and improvement of the world , to do more good than evil; then surely may we learn to look upon it with calmness and acquiescence.  Then indeed shall we look seriously upon it and we shall look upon it and we shall look upon it with fear too, but with a fear that is rational  and religious ; with a fear that will turn very much indeed upon the state of our own minds.  We shall think much of ourselves and so much more the less of the outward and physical forms of this evil.  We shall think much of the good it is to do millions of our fellow-men and so much the less of the mere bills of mortality , dreadful as they are.  In fine, we shall have our fears, but they will mingle much of devout and grave consideration with them —a trust and satisfaction in the wisdom of God’s providence; an apprehension lest we and others shall not reap the good designed to be communicated and these moral considerations will assuage and moderate those panic sensations which are now occupied with nothing but danger and rumors of danger.
     

There is another argument for attention and for universal attention.  The visitation of this calamity is a voice to the world.  Other calamities have been partial in their extent.  Other forms of pestilence have been confined to particular countries, or districts of country.  No famine ever devastated a whole continent.  No war ever raged from ocean to ocean.  But to the ravages of this fearful destroyer, neither oceans nor continents have set bounds.  It has compassed the habitable globe.  From the plains of India, from the mountains of central Asia, its march has been steady and irresistible.  It has traversed deserts and seas.  It has broken through all the defenses which the power and vigilance of governments could set up against it; till that which for years has been the rumor of far off evils, is suddenly become terrific reality and the spoiler of two continents knocks at the door of our American homes.

At such a visitation, it is meet that the world should pause.  It is meet that days of fasting and humiliation and prayer should suspend the ordinary pursuits and cares of life and give an opportunity to meditate upon the “ways of God to man”. 

I have thus far urged the propriety and advantage of a sober and attentive consideration of this extraordinary calamity, but is there anything to consider?  Is there any meaning in this visitation which can without presumption, be fixed upon by us, as the subject of attention.

I ask in reply:  Is there not a providence in it?   Permitted, or produced, does it not come within the range of the Almighty power and Agency?  Who will say that it is without the sphere of God’s government?   Who will tell us where those dread regions are, over which God has no control, in which He does not His pleasure?  Has not the whole course of events which take place in the world, a design?  Did they receive their original, do they receive their present impulses from the tendencies of matter, or the ordinations of fate?  But if there are ends to be accomplished by all things, will there not be a relation, an intentional relation between the means and the ends?  Why then —- so far as the agency of any event is specific —-why shall we not say that the object, the design, the meaning, is specific.

And now, let me ask, was there ever a calamity in the world, not miraculous, which apparently possessed such a high and solemn moral significance as this pestilence?  Was any design of earthly events ever more clear, specific or solemn?  We saw an evil, the most insidious and deadly, entering the world by a thousand avenues and gaining a strength, unknown to former ages, by the modern improvements, if improvements we must call them, in the process of distillation.  We saw the produce of ten thousand harvest-fields wrought, from all wholesome uses, into an intoxicating and destroying poison.  We heard the voice of wailing and lamentation and despair, from ten times ten thousand dwellings: and we asked, with many others, what can stay the progress of this horrible evil?  What is to save the world?  What is to leave in the world, any innocent father, mother, sister, friend, not utterly broken-hearted?  And now, at this very crisis, when good men had begun to be alarmed, indeed, but when the good were more alarmed than the bad were reformed—at this very crisis, there appears in the world, a disease  unknown to former times and it appears as the grand antagonist power to the monster, Intemperance.  It strikes as its foremost victims the votaries of strong drink and to them, its blow, though all others, or nearly all, with prudence may escape-–to them its blow is almost inevitable death!

If this be not providence, what is providence?  If this be not a voice from heaven, by what tokens shall we know such a voice?  If all the pains and penalties that follow vice, are held, in all creeds but that of the atheist, to be the remedial and disciplinary process of the Supreme wisdom; if those specific diseases, which set their mark and brand upon particular vices, are justly to be regarded as possessing, in a more striking degree, the same admonitory character, what less shall we think of a visitation like this unprecedented pestilence?  If a new species of brain-fever were to appear in the world and if it made gamesters its principle victims, what more specific and solemn moral would it hold out, than to be found in this plague of the cholera?

It is true, indeed, that the desire, natural to the reflecting mind, of finding reasons for things and of finding reasonableness, intelligence and wisdom, in the whole surrounding scene of life, may have carried us too far.  It is true, too, that this is one of the subjects that comes not within the range of demonstrative, but only of moral evidence. I do not say that I know that this is a special visitation, designed to check a particular vice; and on the other hand, no man can say that he knows it is not. I can only say, that my mind leans to this view of the subject.  I firmly believe that if there had been no intemperance in the world, this pestilence would not have been in the world.  But what do I say?  I had thought that I was arguing and I find that I am stating a simple fact.  Certainly there would have been no such pestilence in the world; there might have been such a disease and it might have prevailed like other diseases—but there would have been no such pestilence in the world, if it had not been for intemperance.  Intemperance is its very haunt, its resort, its prey—that without which it could not live.  Intemperance has occasioned it, created it, called it into being.  Has it not?  What means then, the language of every medical report and opinion on the subject?  What is to be made of the sense and experience of the whole world upon this point?  Why do the intemperate everywhere feel that it is they who are exposed, that it is they who are meant?  And why are so many moderate drinker, as the disease approaches nearer and nearer to them, setting down the untasted cup?  Is it too much to say , that it was designed for the check and destruction of the vice in question?

But it may be said, that the intemperate are not its only victims.  It is true, that they only its chief, its most conspicuous victim; others suffer.  But this only comports with the general order of God’s providence.  The innocent are everywhere suffering with, and for, and through, the guilty.  It may possibly be said, also, that this pestilence does not, after all and will not, altogether reform the world and so will fail of the alleged end and therefore could not have been designed for that end.  The general answer to both these objectives is the same.  God’s providence over the mind, is adapted to the mind; does not compel it or overwhelm it with flagrant and instantaneous results, but appeals to its reason, elicits it powers, respects its freedom, deals with it by influences that are gentle and persuasive and not coercive and irresistible.  Whether the world will be reformed or not—it is warned—and this is the material point for us to establish.  It  is all the less likely to be reformed, till it feels that it is warned.

It is for this reason that I am concerned to urge the doctrine of a providence, in relation to this stupendous and wide-spreading calamity: for indeed the facts without the doctrine, are sufficient for my main purpose.  And so eminently providential does it appear, that it might not be difficult for us to persuade ourselves, that it was designed to teach and explain this great doctrine of a providence, to the generation of the thoughtless, the negligent and skeptical.  Let us then, dwell a moment longer on this point, to illustrate this use, if not design, of the affliction that is sent upon us.

The difficulty sometimes found with the doctrine of a providence is, that it is held to be special, that it recognizes the efficacy of prayer, that it is believed to interpose at the call of human weakness and distress and penitence.  It is the interposition of providence, that is by some doubted.

But let it be supposed that the world were to be reformed from the vice of intemperance and then, the cholera—that peculiar disease which is now prevailing—would cease.  It would cease, because it would no longer find victims.  The very element which supports it, would be taken away.  On what condition then, would it cease?  The answer is, on the very condition of repentance.  It would cease at the voice of humiliation and prayer; at the voice of a sorrowing and reformed people.  Here then, in a general view, is the efficacy of prayer and here is the doctrine of a providence.

And why may we not go farther?  Why may we not go beyond the general view?  Why should it be thought “a thing incredible” with us, that who inflicts the blow, should with an interposing hand, suspend it, when its purpose is answered?  It is here perhaps, that the difficulty about a providence presses hardest.  Are not the operations of nature, it may be said—are not the laws that govern the elements, uniform?  I answer, we do not know that they are.  What saith the visitation of this calamity?  It reminds us how wide a theatre there is for the operations of the overruling hand—how vast a region, before which the vail is lifted up, that none can penetrate.  Where is the origin of this dread pestilence?  Where are its dark magazines, out of which swift destruction comes?  Where is the secret of its presence and the hiding of its power? Wisdom is baffled in the inquiry and experience is but a blind guide.  Whether it is in the heaven or in the earth or in the waters under the earth, it is questioned and it is questioned in vain.  Whether it is in the atmosphere or in the human system—whether it is contagious or infectious or epidemic or local, the understanding of the learned has not found out and the wisdom of the wise has not decided.  It has travelled through the world: the eyes of millions have been eagerly bent upon it; the voices of every language have invoked from it, its dark secret; the seers of every healing art, from the Ganges to the Atlantic shore, have sought for the interpretation of its fearful signs and still it is shrouded in impenetrable mystery.  The object is clear; it is proclaimed as with the voice of a trumpet; all else is darkness and silence.  Where the bolt strikes, we can see; we see who are its foremost victims; but the bosom of the black cloud, as it rolls onward, no eye has penetrated.

Let no man tell me, that in the bosom of that black cloud, there is no might or mystery beyond the reach and measure of His understanding—no space for the secret work of God—for the operations of an inscrutable and interposing providence.  Let no man tell me, that he who rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm, is bound by the chains of any fate or necessity.  He does his pleasure amidst the armies if heaven, amidst the thrones and powers of the firmament and among the inhabitants of the earth and none can say unto Him, what doest thou?  None can know what He does, or may dare to say what He doeth not.  What is interposition or what is not interposition; how far the overuling hand is stretched out or where it is stayed; what chord in the mighty system of things it touches or what hidden spring it unlocks; what it binds that shall not be loosed, or losses that shall not be bound.

But the skeptic will perhaps say, in fine, that man is a creature too insignificant to be the object of such attention and care, as we allege, that the Being who sits enthroned above the heavens and governs millions of world, will not stoop to regard a thing so inconsiderable and indifferent as this dweller in the dust.  But look at this being, when struggling as a victim in the grasp of the fell destroyer.  If it were the lot of man, to drop from the course of life like an animal, a mere inert lump of clay, we might think differently.  But what is the death of a man?  What is it when it comes in the form of this disease, held to be so terrible?  It is not any frightful paroxysm of pain, which makes that hour so awful; it is not the gathering mist that settles upon the closing eye-lids, that makes it so dark; it is not convulsion and grasping for breath and the mortal strife , that gives such intensity to every thought and feeling; but it is parting from the thousand ties that bind the heart to life; it is the solemn vision of eternity opening upon the soul; it is that intense spiritual consciousness that seems to concentrate all that is solemn and sublime in the universe, upon that dread moment; it is an element mightier than any earthly power, that imparts such grandeur to the death-bed scene; it is a portion of the Divinity, that is holding conflict with disease and pain and sorrow and death.  Will not God regard it, in its great and perilous hour?   Can He hold that which was made in His own image, as too mean for His interposition or disposal?  Can we believe that thousands and millions in the world are dying under the stroke of this one peculiar and extraordinary infliction and that there is no providence and no meaning in all this?

II. But if there is a meaning in this, what is it?  If there is a providence, what does it teach?  What do facts teach, let the doctrine be what it may?

The answer to this question has been necessarily implied in the previous discussion; but we should be totally wanting to the occasion that has assembled us together, if we did not give it our direct and separate attention.  I say then, that which providence teaches, that which facts teach the world in this great calamity, is a lesson of temperance.  The calamity itself, as I think, naturally leads us to recognize a providence and a special interposing providence.  But providence, if there be any in this matter, has an end.  That end, if there be an end, must be, I repeat, to teach the world a lesson of temperance.

Will it not teach this?  Will not increased temperance be the effect?  And if it will, why should we not say, that it was intended to be the effect?  But will it not, I repeat?  Suppose the cholera were to remain ten years in this country or in Europe : there is no reason to expect its speedy disappearance—it has already returned to some of the cities in Europe—it has been a long period in Asia: if I say, the cholera were to remain ten years among us; if for that length of time it should hover in the air, ready to stoop with its deadly talons upon any dissolute city or village or individual, can it be doubted that by such an agency, the work of reform would be carried on with a success  and effect, beyond all former example?  Can it be doubted, that ten years, with the sword hanging over every man’s head, would make us comparatively a temperate people?  How many is this single summer’s experience showing that they can live without spirituous drinks and that they are altogether better without them!  “When thy judgments are in the earth,” saith the prophet and surely when such judgments are in the earth, “the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.”

And if they are to learn righteousness, or if this going forth of the pestilence is fitted to teach them, then I am prepared to take another step, and to say, that it is a beneficent visitation.  If you doubt whether your ears hear me rightly, I repeat it, and say it is a beneficent visitation.  I confess that I do not partake of the unmixed and supreme horror, which many feel at this disease.  There is another calamity, another curse, which, as I believe, it is designed to remove, and which impresses me with greater horror.  The Cholera, I am firmly persuaded, will prevent more suffering than it will occasion.  The woes of unrestricted intemperance in this country for ten years, would be far greater than the woes of a ten years’ plague.  I cannot pray, therefore, without the most careful qualification, and the most guarded submission, that this pestilence should depart from our borders.  I dare not say, it is best for us that it should depart.  I dare not absolutely pray for the removal of this disease, any more than for the removal of many diseases.  I see clearly that the world would sink at once into the ruins of sensual indulgence, if no pain or sickness followed excess.  I see that to indulgence, disease, of some kind or other, is the antagonist power.  I now see indulgence of one particular species, rising to a most alarming height; and I see a disease breaking out at the same time to counteract it.  This, to my apprehension, is the method which Providence has adopted for teaching the lesson of temperance.  Say that his pestilence is developed by intemperance itself, or say that its causes, not of any new creation, have always lain hidden in the bosom of the elements; or say that it is the result of general laws; still it is none the less the teaching of Providence.  And I dare not absolutely ask that the teaching should be suspended till the lesson is learnt.  Though the discipline be costly and dear, I dare not ask it.  I know that it is taking from us the lives of some valuable and beloved citizens, but I do not esteem even their lives too precious a sacrifice for the salvation of the land.  I see the innocent, indeed, dying for the guilty; but I see in this, only the usual order of God’s providence; I see, indeed, the order of his grace; I see, as it were, Jesus again in his members, dying for the world.

The horrors of the Cholera, I must be allowed to repeat, are not the greatest horrors that are to be found in the abodes of the civilized world.  The convulsions of this disease are not, in my eyes, so horrible as the paroxysm of drunkenness—the riotings of its merriment, or the writhings of its fury.  The delirium of sickness is not so dreadful as the madness of the inebriate man. The dreaded “collapse” presents not a picture so dreadful as the poor wretch who lies by the wayside; no waiting friends or sympathizing kindred around him; senseless to the passing jest or buffet; no longer a human being, but the ghastly ruins of what was once human.  And a brief sickness and a speedy death carry no such agony to the bosom of a family as ten, or twenty, or thirty years of dissoluteness in it; no, nor as one year’s woe and shame of intemperance, in one of its before cherished and beloved members.  Nor doth the land mourn, nor ever can it mourn for a pestilence, nor is its substance wasted, nor are all its laws and safeguards sapped and undermined, though all the plagues of Egypt fall upon it—no, there is no such peril to any people in all this, as there is in the poisoned fountains of intoxication that are now deluging the world—there is no such sorrow, as the sorrow of millions by their desolate hearths, made desolate by this accursed indulgence; there is no such “cup of trembling” and of “wrath poured out without mixture,” as the horrible cup or excess!

It is impossible not to observe in this connection, that this judgment of Providence on the people at large, is especially a voice of admonition, a call for reform, to cities and populous places.  It has always been found that in proportion as men congregate together, and wealth increases in the hands of some, and poverty presses hard upon others, that the vices shoot up into monstrous and fearful luxuriance.  The most splendid advantages, the brightest gifts of heaven as they seem as least to most men, are here set in glaring and mournful contrast with most awful abuses of them.  It is here too perhaps, that the noblest virtues are developed and formed; but the powers of good in these circumstances have hitherto held but a feeble and doubtful conflict with the powers of evil; they have not, indeed, been put forth; and Christian men and women in our cities, are yet, perhaps, to learn the measure and the methods of their duty. 

It would be dullness, worse than ingratitude, and more inexcusable, not to refer in this view to the noble efforts for teaching the poor and rescuing the vicious, which are now making by a Christian ministry devoted to those objects, in the metropolis of our own State—efforts, which it is hoped will in process of time, present to the world, the model of a Christian City.  This Ministry for the poor in cities, like the Sunday School, and the improved Prison Discipline, and the Bethel Churches, I regard as one of the great moral discoveries of the age.  Physical causes, I trust, are also to lend their aid.  It seems to me, not an extravagant anticipation, that the astonishing improvements about to be introduced in the facilities for carriage and passage,—the rail-roads, I mean—will have the effect to prevent the enormous growth of cities, to send their inhabitants abroad to build beautiful and delightful abodes in the country, and will thus tend to break up those hot beds of vice, those congregated masses of filth and misery which are now found in them.  Meanwhile this pestilence is doing its work—its work of mercy as well as of judgment—its work of physical as well as moral purification.  It would be scarcely too much to say, that the cleansing of our cities and villages, especially if it may be a precedent for future years, will save more lives, than the cholera will destroy. 

Will there not be a moral cleansing, also?  Will not this judgment of the Most High, strike a salutary dread into the scenes of drunkenness, debauchery, and Sabbath-breaking—and of that horrible filthiness which is itself a heinous sin?  Is not that very point—the mass of evil in cities—that  wickedness in high places, to which, of all the earth, the philanthropist and Christian have looked with the greatest despondency,—is it not to have light poured in upon it—the light of inquiry and of hope?  Are not the miseries of those ten thousand thronged abodes, which it makes the heart ache to think of—are they not to be relieved?  Is not that pestilential atmosphere of contagious vice, forever hanging ever the cities and crowded villages of the world, and every year drawing millions from the healthful airs of a simple and rural life, to breathe it and die—is it not, at length, to be purified?  Is not this fearful stroke of the lightning from the heaven, to break the heavy and thick and settled cloud, beneath which such iniquities and abominations have been done for ages?  When, ye children of darkness and vice and vileness!  Will ye hear?  Hath not trembling and death come into your habitations?  Hath not horror taken hold of your hearts?  When, till the judgment-hour break upon you, will ye listen to the voice of God?

I feel, too, that the visitation ought to speak to men in power, to the rulers of the earth, and to those, who, by their influence, reign in society.  Why are those masses of vice, and filth, and famine, and bodily prostration, where the cholera finds its haunt, suffered to exist?  It is, in part, because great men, aye, and good men, have failed to do their duty.—Much of this prostration, physical and moral, is to be referred, ultimately, to political oppression, to arbitrary distinctions in society, to cruel and unjust laws, and to proud self-complacency and selfishness, “passing by, on the other side.”  In Asia, helpless millions have been swept away, the victims of grinding tyranny and of unparalleled social abuses.  Such victims are to be found in Europe, too; nor are they wanting America!  When, let me ask then—ye great ones of the earth, and ye good men!  When will ye hear?  When will the whole power of the world, political and moral, arise to do good, and to heal the wounds of society, and to build up the fallen fortunes of afflicted humanity!

No, I am not indifferent to the fate of the unhappy victims of this visitation, hurried as they are by thousands to an untimely grave, and to a sudden and unlooked-for judgment.  Who, with a Christian’s heart, will not mourn for them, as well as for the evil that they have inflicted upon the world? And yet, what can I say to them, or to the partakers of their guilt—what can I say, more or less than this?  “You have been reasoned with, pleaded with, besought, warned, by every voice of tenderness and by every voice of terror, that God has given to man, or to woman, to utter, and it has been all in vain.  You have resisted the outstretched hands of affection, and the pleading eye, and the breaking heart.  You have trampled upon the dearest interests of society, as if it were without remorse.  You have trampled upon all the admonitions of God’s word and providence, as if it were, without fear.  You have trodden under foot all the agonizing remonstrances of your own heart and consciences, as if they were but fit to pave you way to the resorts and haunts of indulgence.  Would to God, that all this had not been in vain; but it has been in vain.  It has been all in vain!  You would not hear.  You would not relent.  You would not give up the deadly draught that bereaved you of everything to respect, and of everything to love.  The child, the wise, the friend, have asked permission but to respect, but to love you; and you have hardened yourself against appeals, that might have broken—Oh!  They might have broken, a heart of stone.”  What then shall we say?  Must we say and think, that it is hard, very hard, that this additional, this last dread infliction, has come upon the victims of excess,—that this bolt has fallen, as it were, direct from heaven, to dash the guilty cup from their hands?  God Almighty give them grace to be wise in the day of his rebuke!  We dare not prescribe the term of this, to the vicious, tremendous day.  May it be shortened, we are ready to say; yet we dare not ask that it may be shortened, but through the intervention of repentance, at the instance of a humbled and reformed people!

This, my friends, is the only escape, of which we can feel any assurance, or ought to feel any very strong desire.  This pestilence has a moral mission to fulfill; its fulfillment is the only pledge for its termination.  No services, no offerings to God, coming short of this, can promise us any relief.  No wall of prayers is to be built up, to keep out this dreaded disease; no mere solemnities of fasting and humiliation, will disinfect the atmosphere; nothing, within our knowledge, but removing the cause, will remove the curse.       

One word more, and I will relieve you attention from the unusual task, which I have ventured, at this time, to lay upon it. 

What is it, then, I ask, which imparts to the pestilence, whose ravages have been the occasion of setting apart this day of solemn prayer and humiliation,—what imparts to this pestilence, I say, its peculiar horror?  And, I answer, it is the terrible speed with which it does its work.  It is not that its victims, according to present appearances, are likely to be more numerous than sometimes are the victims of a prevailing influenza, of a malignant fever; not more numerous, than are, every year, the victims of consumption.  It is, that the cholera, unlike every other disease that has appeared among us, makes but a step, between us and death.  It is, that death has been brought near to many minds, as it never was before.  The impression has been made upon them, in a character and with an emphasis altogether new, that they might, indeed, die suddenly; that their moral account with this life, might be made up, and settled, and sealed forever, in a few brief hours; that although to-day in the midst of life, to-day walking in the same negligent course as for years before, to-day unprepared to die,—yet that to-morrow’s rising sun might behold them dead, and its parting ray might shine around the grave, that had closed upon them forever. 

It is, my brethren, a most solemn and monitory conviction.  This pestilence has created an era, I believe, in many of our minds, from which a new spiritual life ought to be dated.  We have erred in this matter; we have erred in regard to the strict account, which we have to give, of life.  We have been misled, with the negligent world, into the irrational, the absurd idea, that we may live in sin, and yet die in safety; that we may live without religion, and yet die with it; that we may at last find some gracious dispensation from the law that is to “render to every man according to his living deeds.”  We have vaguely and vainly imagined, with multitudes in the same delusion, that our sickness may, at length, do, what our health will not;  that the last feeble pulses of life, may be strong enough to turn back the mighty current of tastes, and affections, and habits, that for years has been flowing on with accumulated power. 

This is one of the grand ruining delusions of the world.  “It is not this day,” men are perpetually saying, and still with every successive period of life they are saying, forever saying, “it is not this day, it is not this year, on which I can venture the decision of the great question for eternity; by and bye,” is the secret thought of thousands of hearts, “by and bye, amidst the days of sickness and sorrow, or of old age, I will prepare for heaven.”  Let this solemn visitation of God, let this voice of the pestilence, break up forever that tremendous delusion.  It speaks not only to the heinous transgressor, but scarcely less awfully to the careless neglector of his duty.  It is in his heart, a voice of weighty admonition.  What meaneth,—if it means not this—what meaneth that fear, curding the very heart’s blood,—the fear of smiting disease and sudden death?  Yes, its meaning is moral.  It is not a mere dread of pain, or of parting with life.  It is fear, breathed in the deeper recesses of the soul.  It is a voice, that speaks of duties neglected, of sins indulged, of the soul, unprepared for death.  That very fear, that very voice, believe me, shall yet give witness at the bar of judgment: for us, or against us,—to proclaim our fidelity, or our neglect,—to declare that we have listened to the voice of God’s judgments, or have hardened ourselves in the day of his rebuke.  But let me not close with the words of this last dreadful alternative upon my lips.  Let us hope better things, and things, that pertain to salvation.  Let us give all earnestness, to meditation, and watchfulness, and humble prayer, that we may be found faithful to all the teachings of God’s wisdom, and all the tokens of God’s will!   

The conduct of Men,

Considered in contrast with the Law of God.

A

DISCOURSE,

DELIVERED IN THE CALVINIST CHURCH, WORCESTER,

ON FAST DAY, APRIL 7, 1836.

BY D. PEABODY,

PASTOR OF SAID CHURCH.

PUBLISHED BY REQUEST.

WORCESTER:

PRINTED BY HENRYJ. HOWLAND.

1836. 

ADVERTISEMENT.

It may be due to those readers of the following Discourse who heard it from the Pulpit, to state, that, as it was originally prepared in a double form, and delivered with sundry extemporaneous additions, it was found necessary, in preparing it for the press, to make several alterations; which, it is believed however, do neither change its character, nor detract from what little value it may have possessed.

DISCOURSE. 

DANIEL 9:5.

“We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts, and from thy judgments.”

                In pursuing the rain of reflection naturally suggested by the text, it will be my object, my hearers, to lead you to look at the world—at man—in contrast with the Law of God; to furnish you with some views of human character on a large scale, as it appears in the light which is reflected from the Decalogue; and hence to deduce moties to humiliation and prayer.  You are perfectly aware, indeed, that the world lieth in wickedness; and you need no arguments to convince you, that man, as a race, is opposed to the divine Law.  All this is familiar, because often affirmed and illustrated; all this, too, is to your minds unquestionable, because you see the evidence of it both on the pages of Revelation, and in living exhibition around you.  But we need something more than conviction, something more than knowledge.  We need a frequent repetition of well known lessons, a fresh representation of admitted truths, with such variations of light and position, as shall, in some degree, impart novelty to what is old, and impressiveness to what is familiar.

            Some men are disposed to complain of us, that we make the world far worse than it really is; that we spread over it shades of depravity much darker than do actually exist, except here and there in the lives of those who are to be regarded rather as anomalies than as fair examples of human character; and that we carefully shut out from view the bright sports of innocence and joy, which no unjaundiced eye can fail to discover.  These men, however, we apprehend, are either not over-zealous students of the Bible; or else they imagine, that when that antiquated book was written, human nature was vastly worse than it is at present.

            But what is the present moral condition of the world?  What is its actual state, compared not with any Utopian scheme of excellence and virtue, not with any standard of perfection which man has devised,—but with the universal, the unchanging, the only obligatory standard—the law of God?  Why, in sober truth, its state is such, that a holy and impartial observer—suppose an angel that has never sinned—who should critically survey it in all its operations and principles of action, would conclude at once that men had banded together in one general conspiracy to set the divine laws at defiance, except as far as the observance of them is found indispensable exception; but it makes nothing against our position; for when men act in accordance with law only because their own temporal interest requires it, they cannot be said, in any proper religious sense, to obey law, but only to obey the impulses of a selfish nature.  From such an impartial survey, we should be prepared to return to our closets with something of the penitential sorrow of the Prophet, and mourn over what we had discovered in the midst of ourselves and everywhere among men, saying, “we have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments.”

            Let us see, then, in what this departure consists;—let us compare the conduct of men extensively with the requisitions of the Decalogue, fixing on those points—since we cannot on all—in which the contrast is most strikingly apparent, or which are peculiarly worthy of attention.

            Take the first and second Commandments; which together require that men have no other gods but Jehovah, and that they render to him, as a spirit, spiritual worship.  With these in your hand, travel abroad among men, and make your observations.  First, visit if you will,—though these are not within the province of our immediate concern,—the four hundred and eighty millions of Pagans, three fifths of the human family, who, to a man, have set their faces against God; and here and there a tribe only excepted, have changed his glory into the corruptible image of men, birds, four footed beasts, and creeping things.  All that portion of the race you must set aside at once as palpable transgressors of the fundamental and universal law—that law which constitutes the basis of the whole moral code.  If from them you turn to the Jews and Mohammedans,—in the one you discern a people, who, though professing to worship the God of Abraham, have long since virtually rejected him; for of them the Savior said, “He that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me;”—and in the other, a people, who, amidst many corrupt notions of the Deity, have in truth elevated their Prophet above his throne.  How far all these are from obeying that comprehensive rule, which requires all men to render unto God a spiritual and undivided homage, is sufficiently apparent. 

            But not to linger on ground so remote, and so little a matter of our concern to-day, you will come back and cast your eye over what is passing in nominally Christian communities.  And you will say—“Surely men here have no other gods but Jehovah.”  But tell me can He be said to be their God whom they never affectionately acknowledge; whom they never devoutly worship; to whom they erect no altar in their dwellings; whose word and ordinances they regard with indifference; towards whom they feel in their hearts no reverence and no love!  If Jehovah be their God, why not serve him; why not confess him before the world; why not make at least some decided demonstration of their homage and attachment?  Is it enough that they do not put themselves to the trouble of openly and boldly denying him?  Enough that they do not announce to the world that they are idolators or atheists?  Judge ye,—for if the Lord be God, he is a great God and a jealous; and if he is chosen by you as your God, you will worship him, ay, in spirit and in truth,—judge ye, how many such worshippers the eye of Omniscience discerns among all the thousands of decent, honest, kind hearted, moral, church-going men in Christian lands!  Of how many can the Omniscient Searcher of hearts say—“They have no other gods before me?”  If by their fruits we are to know them, few, alas! We must judge, are the spiritual worshippers of God.

            Again: Repeat your tour of observation with another article of the Decalogue:  “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”  Profane oaths and blasphemies, it is well known, abound among the heathen; and it is a remarkable and melancholy fact, that the first sentences of a Christian language which pagans learn to pronounce, are generally—at least to a great extent—sentences of profaneness and blasphemy.  So true is this, that travelers in heathen countries have often been surprised by a salutation accompanied by an oath, in their own tongue, when the speaker could scarcely pronounce any other word in the language.

            Of the frequency of this vice among ourselves, you are sufficiently aware.  You have daily examples of it, in various forms more or less gross among almost all ages and classes in society, from the brisk gentlemen of the bar-room and the theatre, down to the unruly and vulgar school-boy.  By some men, and some too who profess to be men of sense and respectability, one might suspect, a covenant had been entered into with their lips, that they should never utter the sacred name of God, except in connection with an oath!  They know not how to approach their Maker in prayer; but they can dare him to vengeance on themselves or their fellow men just to give expression to momentary anger, or,—what is if possible still more contemptuous of Heaven,—to impart grace to a period or pungency to wit!  Such is the treatment, from vast numbers, which this third most easy and reasonable requisition of the Divine Law receives.

            Again:  God demands, in his immutable Law, that one day in seven shall be consecrated peculiarly to him, as a day of holy rest.  The voice in which this demand was originally made known, seems, either with full emphasis or in fainter echoes, to have gone abroad everywhere among men, and been reiterated down through their successive generations.  But, my hearers, take another survey, and see how this law has been observed.  By a great majority, the day has been employed merely to mark into convenient divisions the lapse of time.  Some have regulated by it the seasons of licentious festivity and idolatrous worship—sad perversion surely of its original design!

            But,—to turn to a more important inquiry,—what is the manner of its observance among Christians?  How and to what extent, does it appear that they who bear the Christian name, are in this point obedient to the Law of God?  Why, my hearers, you shall find a numerous class of them who regard the Sabbath of our times as a mere human institution.  They observe it, not because it has been consecrated by divine authority, but because it is required by human convenience.  They honor it not as arising from an ordinance of Heaven, and, of course, they honor not the ordinance whence it arises; but because they consider it as, on the whole, a happy accident of custom, and even perhaps essential to the good order and well-being of society.  God and his Law they leave entirely out of view; and the Sabbath, in their estimation, has little more to do with either, than have the stated terms of legislative assemblies and judicial courts.

            Another numerous class acknowledge the divine origin and binding authority of the Christian Sabbath; but still suppose it to be designed as a day of rest from labor for the refreshment and reinvigoration of the exhausted body and mind; and not at all as a day holy unto the Lord for purposes of spiritual worship and improvement.  Consequently, with them it is a holy day—a season of relaxation and amusement.  Possibly they may be found in the sanctuary occasionally in the morning or evening;—but it is to gratify friends, or to fall in with established customs, or to break up the monotony of the week’s affairs.—Their motives in all this are essentially the same with those, which require on the Lord’s Day a particularly sumptuous entertainment or a ride for pleasure, as a necessary part of its sacred observances.  They cannot imagine what harm there can be in a little social visiting, with its edifying accompaniment of gossip and gaiety; and if the evening should pass away without a friendly call given or received, why then the holy season has been to them altogether incomplete and unsatisfactory.

            And even of that other class, who feel in some measure, or profess to feel, the claims of the Christian Sabbath upon them, as the day of God, the feast day of the soul, the seed time for the harvests of eternity,—how few devote its precious hours to the sublime purposes for which they were appointed!  How, even by the best class that can be selected among men, is the intent of the Divine Law, as interpreted by the principles and examples of Christianity, frustrated and lost!  Some deem the season well spent, if they have placed themselves within hearing of the ordinary number of sermons and prayers in the house of God, or kept their eye running over the pages of some religious book,—no matter whether or not the mind apprehends or retains a single truth, or whether or not a single devotional feeling is stirred in the soul.  Some plead hard the necessity of laboring, at particular times, on this day; and would rather run the risk of diminishing, by their example, the respect that is felt for it in a hundred hearts, than hazard the loss of injury, from the contingency of bad weather, of a little precarious property.  On this principle, the farmer drives his team afield, to save a half eared crop from a gathering storm; and the man of business indulges himself and his family in a ride to a neighboring town; or commences or prosecutes a journey to a distant mart of trade; and our wise legislators enact laws requiring the transportation of the mail, and the employing of thousands of hands, and the famishing of thousands of souls; and continue their deliberations on important questions almost till the very dawn of the holy morning—all on the day which they hold to be sacred to religion and to God; and all, I say, on the same principle, That man’s secular profit or convenience may set aside the laws of Heaven.  It is nothing more nor less than this.  Not one of them can offer any apology for such a desecration of the Sabbath, that does not involve the principle—that mere human profit or convenience may in these cases,—and if in these cases, why not in any other?—countervail the ordinances of Infinite wisdom.

            Our country is deeply stained with the guilt of violating the Fourth Commandment.  The stain is upon our Statute Books; upon our legislative halls; upon our rulers;—and upon the common body of the people.  Touching this matter, we are a guilty nation:—are we not guilty, too, as individuals?  Certainly it becomes us to be silent concerning the nation’s guilt, so long as we allow ourselves to act—though perhaps on a smaller scale—on the same unhallowed principle.  In view of all this, we surely have occasion to humble ourselves before the Lord to-day, and to say with the Prophet, “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy statutes and from thy judgments.”

            Turn now a rapid but honest glance on what is passing in domestic circles.  Suspend the precept, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” in the interior of every dwelling; and under it write the multiplied and diversified delinquencies which occur in every household—the unkind words, the disobedient acts, the disrespectful demeanor, the ill wishes, the unuttered heartburnings, and longings for freedom from parental restraint, together with all other varieties of this sin;—do this, not merely in heathen communities, which are proverbial for a want of natural affection,—but among ourselves, where Christianity has labored to exert its purifying power; and then collect the scattered items into one aggregate amount, and weigh them in the balance of the Sanctuary; and say whether there be not matter here, if the Divine Law is to be strictly interpreted, of deep humiliation before God.  Is there not a growing prevalence of this sin amongst us, which calls not only for grief and self abasement, but also for active efforts to stay the evil and avert the consequences?

            But there is one point on which, you may flatter yourselves, that the most patient and critical scrutiny, will be able to detect no guilt, except among the most inhuman and ferocious of the race.  “Thou shalt not kill.”  Rarely, you may imagine, is this law broken.  Well, then, before you pronounce with confidence, take some post of extensive observation, and note down your discoveries.  Confine your view, if you will, to our own Christian community.  Let us see with what scrupulosity this Sixth great command of God is obeyed.  How often, in the intercourse of life, do you perceive this and that man angry with his brother without cause!  They, according to the moral code of Jesus Christ, are murderers.  If they cherish anger in their hearts, so that it becomes a settled passion, they are, in temper and spirit, chargeable with the murder’s guilt.  It is not necessary, however, to dwell on cases so little tangible.

            Look up, now, to the higher walks of life.  Who is he whom you see blustering and storming at his fellow in a hurricane of passion?  It is a man of honor, who has been entrusted perhaps with the responsibility of enacting laws for you and your country.  The delicate scarf-skin of his honor has been wounded by some unkind remark of his friend;—and now, when the violence of anger ought to be subsiding in feelings of forgiveness, he coolly intimates the necessity of reciprocal compliments of pistol-shot to atone for the insult and restore friendship.  The challenge in due time and form is given and accepted.  Look once more, and see these dignified personages, at the hour appointed, stealing away with their attendants to some solitary glen, on this honorable errand.  The ground is measured—the arms are prepared—the preliminaries are completed—the signal is given, followed by the flash and the peal;—and whether both fall, or one, or neither, they leave the ground, dead or alive—murderers, murderers in the sight of God and man.

            And these tragedies, as we well know, are acted over by our lawmakers—not to speak of others encouraged by their example—so frequently that the appellation of duelist applied to them excites no surprise; and sometimes almost within sight of the Capitol.  Not a few of our most admired statesmen, are men who have thus aimed the weapon of death at a fellow’s breast, and perhaps left the field stained with his blood.  And, tell me, as they go back to their sacred work of preserving and enriching the ark of our liberties, does not that blood follow them; and as they put forth their hands to write or seal our laws, does not that blood mark and remain upon the parchment—unseen indeed by men, but read by Omniscience, and heard, too, in its cry to Heaven for vengeance on a guilty land?

            There are those,—and their number is not small, as recent occurrences testify,—who seem to care nothing for the shedding of blood, whether of one man or of thousands; who would be willing to involve the country in war, and commit it to all the direful consequences of war, for the sake of a few millions of dollars, or for some other reason, if possible more insignificant, for which this was held up as a mere pretext and disguise.  Happily, indeed, through a merciful Providence, the dreaded event has been forestalled.  But how must God regard a people on whom he has lavished the riches of his goodness, who to so great an extent and for so unworthy a reason, were almost on the point of sending forth their ships to belch death on the ocean, and drawing up their troops to cut down every one of their once honored allies who should land on the shore!

            These suggestions are made in the spirit—not of a political partisan, but simply of a plain advocate of the principles of the Divine Law.

            Would, my hearers, that the work of death in our land ended here.  But—to pass over that common waste and destruction of the vital energy by means of animal indulgences, which might be set down to the score of suicide—there are ways not yet alluded to, in which men are ready to engage in the wholesale sacrifice of life.  Distillers and venders of intoxicating liquor are yet found among us.  In a single town in this Commonwealth, five thousand hogsheads, it is said, are manufactured annually.  Nor is this the only manufactory general of this essence of misery and death.  Many a fountain, it is true, and we would be grateful for the fact, has been dried up; but you may still see them scattered here and there over almost the whole surface of the country, pouring out their deadly streams, to be distributed wherever man’s beastly appetite or love of gold may convey them.  And observe, as these streams flow on, how every place through which they pass, is accursed.  Disorder, poverty, famine, crime, disease, and death, hold their revels along their borders, and laugh and batten amid the desolations which the poisonous waves spread around them in their course. 

            And to facilitate the work of destruction, there are, very fortunately, men holding some a more and some a less honorable rank, according to the kind of service to be performed in the general business, who regularly divide and subdivide these streams into smaller currents, and distribute the precious poison for the public good at so much per gallon and so much per glass, that all those families and individuals may be accommodated, who are disposed to ruin their health, squander their estate, and make shipwreck of their souls,—and are able to pay the rumseller for the privilege.

            So extensively is this business still carried on in the midst of us, and so prolific is it in all the varieties of human woe, that it would seem as if our Great Enemy might cheerfully consent never more—except as the legitimate fruit of this—to breath famine or pestilence from his shriveled lips, or sound the alarm of war among the nations.  One might suppose, that, insatiate as he is, this alone, since it is so easy to obtain auxiliaries often of very respectable character in the work, might suffice to glut his ravenous appetite with victims, and stay the greedy yearnings of his malice.

            Ah! My hearers, here is matter of grief and humiliation.  From this cause, there is blood on our country;—is there not blood on some of our own hands?

            In relation also to the Seventh Commandment—for in this review we must omit none of the Commandments of God—a careful examination would disclose guilt around us, of the extent and deep dyed aggravation of which we are little aware.  I shall not dwell here on those offences against the law of purity, which, being confined to the imagination and the heart, are known only to conscience and to God; but which, as Jesus Christ assures us, are regarded as positive transgressions.  Nor shall I do more than allude to those dens of wickedness which the persevering efforts of good men have not yet been able to remove from our cities and large towns; to the purlieus of our theatres, and other chambers of abomination which, though perhaps on a small scale, would, if opened, “shame the eye of day.”  I should hardly be believed, should I fully describe to you the systematic exertions of wicked men, acting by a common understanding and concert in many of our large towns, with the manifest design of corrupting the young and unsuspecting; and preparing them to become hereafter a prey to the grossest seductions of vice.  Such an association of profligates has actually been discovered, within a comparatively short period, together with their obscene pictures and other machinery of like character, with which they carry on their infernal plans.  And this is only a sight glance, a mere surface view of the evil, as it exists in the community.  Such is its prevalence in our most populous cities, that it is often found unsafe for unsuspecting innocence to trust itself, even in respectable families, without the most vigilant protection.  The young and the aged, the married and unmarried, the respected and the despised, are frequently alike guilty.  My hearers, it is my sober belief, that if we were fully apprised of the extent to which this sin, in its various forms, prevails; how many licentious practices, natural and unnatural, exist among us; and what wide spread mischief, moral and physical, is their legitimate result,—we should start back with horror to find in the midst of ourselves, so many foul features of resemblance to the people of Sodom whom God destroyed.  There is in the community a generation of vipers gliding often under a specious disguise,—possibly there may be some of them in our own neighborhood;—and it becomes families to be on their guard, lest they discover “the trail of the serpent” when too late to escape the poison.  Let mothers, let fathers, let confiding youth, beware!

            Verily we have reason to enter into our closets to-day, and mourn over the guilt which rests upon us as a people and as individuals; and to say, “O God, we are ashamed and blush to lift up our faces unto thee; for our iniquities are increased over our heads, and our trespass is grown up unto the heavens.”

            Look abroad then with a microscopic eye;—and what do you discover?  Is there no unfairness here—not in singular and solitary instances, but in the common business transactions of men?  Is there no study to take advantage, in as honest and polite a way as possible,—but nevertheless to take advantage,—of the ignorance, or the necessities, or the vices of other men?

            In the first place, of their ignorance.  Is there never a concerted scheme among merchants, or an attempt made by individuals of them, to raise or keep up the market, for the express purpose of augmenting their own gains at the purchaser’s expense, who is ignorant that the balance of trade requires a reduction?  I do not speak here of professed merchants exclusively; but of all who are engaged in buying and selling;—and I ask, if they do not often contrive to turn to their advantage the ignorance of those with whom they have dealings, by concealing the true state of the market, or by managing to keep it up where it cannot justly be held?

            Again:  In respect to the quality of what is manufactured, or bought or sold, is there not frequently a dishonest use made of the ignorance of others?  Is it not common with the manufacturer and vender, to make the commodity pass for more than its real value; and with the purchaser, to labor to obtain it for less, crying, It is naught, It is naught, while the bargain is pending, and then, when he has accomplished his purpose, boasting of his adroitness and success?  And does the mechanic in his work, study durability and good service, as much as strict honesty would require?  Or, is his eye rather on the number of articles he turns off and the amount of profit he gains; and does he not often laugh in his sleeve over the ignorance and gullibility of those who may be so unfortunate as to purchase his fabrics for their use?  These may serve as examples of what I mean by taking advantage of another’s ignorance.  And, unless I mistake, this is not a rare thing among men who would be held respectable.

            In the second place, advantage is often taken of another’s necessities.  Suppose that a time of great scarcity is seen to be approaching.  Immediately the price of the “staff of life” is raised, and raised sometimes quite above the reach of the poor.  What is the consequence?  Numbers of them are reduced to great suffering, if not to absolute starvation.  But a few are enriched, enriched by the misery and destruction of their neighbors.  This may serve as an example of a numerous class of cases of similar kind.  I know they are vindicated on the ground of the universal laws of trade.  But are they, can they be vindicated by the holy Law of God?  Is there a whit more regard paid here to the rights and well-being of these men, than is paid by the high-way robber to those of the man whose property he seizes?  In the one case, the alternative presented, is the payment of the price demanded, or death by starvation: in the other, the tribute of your purse, or death by the bullet or the bludgeon.  In the one, a demand is made, backed by necessity; in the other, by violence.  And in the sight of God, what, judge ye, is the difference between the two, in point of honesty and justice?

            And, in the third place, would not a careful observer discover a large class of men, who gladly turn to their advantage the vices of others?  Who would sell to another the material of his ruin, but for the profit of it.  It is said, indeed, that it is an equitable bargain; that on each side there is so much given and so much received, forming a true and satisfactory balance.  One party receives his lucre, and the other his poison, and both are content.  But suppose a man calls on you for a half gill of aqua-fortis to drink, under the insane but honest impression that it will do him good; and offers you the fair market price for it; and you sell it to him.  Is it, think ye, in the eye of God, an equitable bargain?  Our standard, be it remembered, is not human law, but divine.  And according to this standard, in other words, in the sight of God, is it an equitable bargain?  Is the article, so used, of any value to the purchaser.  Does he not pay you for that which is infinitely worse than worthless, when applied to such purposes?  And if you should engage in the business of such traffic, would you not, in addition to all other guilt, the guilt especially of being accessory to another man’s self-destruction, which comes under the prohibition of the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” would you not be guilty of taking from him that for which you return no proper equivalent—nothing but misery and death;–and so come, to say the least, fearfully near the confines both of murder and robbery?  True the purchaser imagines he receives and equivalent; but you know he does not.  He consents freely to be imposed on and deluded; but you know it is a delusion.  Is it, then, as viewed by a God of justice, a sufficient vindication?  Can the imagination of a man whose vices have made him, on this one point, insane, and who under this insanity, offers you a purse of gold for a few gallons of deadly poison, can his imagination constitute the traffic honest, in which you are engaged?  What is it but turning to your advantage the hallucinations of vice, and taking from a fellow man, with his consent, under a delusion, it is true, that money which enriches you, but is paid back to him in no equivalent—nothing but disease and death, both of the body and the soul!  And this is palpably condemned by the obvious principles of the Divine Law.

            The law, which in terms forbids Slander,—“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” may be considered, like all others in the Decalogue, as embracing in its prohibition a large class of sins, but aimed specifically at the highest of the class.  In a direct, liberal application, it seems to forbid slander only.  But interpreted more generally, yet in perfect accordance with acknowledged principles of interpretation, it will be found to prohibit falsehood of perhaps every conceivable kind.  A very large proportion, certainly,—indeed I believe it correct to say, the whole, of the falsehood which is uttered, tends in some way or other to the injury of our fellow men.  It may not be aimed directly against their character: yet it may be equally against their happiness.  If a man deceives in trade, or by falsifying a promise, or in any other of a thousand ways which might be mentioned, he violates the spirit of this law, quite as much, it may be, as if he sought to injure his neighbor’s reputation.

            Write, then, this law on every door-post; inscribe it on the inner walls of every dwelling; and let it stand emblazoned in every place where men congregate for business or pleasure;—and as each breath of slander or injurious falsehood passes over it, let it send back a power that shall silence the tongue of the offender;—and my hearers, how much worse than wasted breath would be saved; how much more quiet would be the public haunts of men, and how much less loquacious, allow me to speak it, would often be the private coteries of women!

            Should we extend this prohibition so as to embrace all the varieties of falsehood, what a vast amount of guilt should we find in every community and neighborhood!  Even if it was in his haste only, that David exclaimed—“All men are liars”—we are compelled by a deliberate survey, to admit that few are entirely innocent of the transgression.  It cannot be concealed that there is much of practical, if not of literal, verbal lying in almost every branch of the intercourse which man carries on with man.  It abounds in the commercial, and, if possible, still more in the political world.  It has well nigh come to this in our country, that a politician who, on all occasions, boldly speaks the truth and acts the truth, must be set down as scarcely better than a driveller.  The cunning, necessary for political promotion and glory, is little else than consummate skill in violating the ninth Commandment.  And when that skill is possessed by any individual, who has talents enough to enlist in his favor more than one half the tongues and presses of the people in the same unholy art—his success is sure.

            Let me not be misunderstood.  I speak not in accusation of a party, but rather in rebuke of a sin, which is too extensively characteristic of the people.  To whatever political party we look, and to whatever sphere of action, we find sufficient evidence of the prevalence of this sin, to cover us with shame and confusion.

            But once more:  The Law of God finally forbids all Covetousness.  This is a disposition of the heart, an internal principle of action, a root from which springs no inconsiderable proportion of the vices and crimes most common in the world.¹  To give a brief and summary definition of it, it is an inordinate desire of natural, worldly good—of that good or that measure of good, real or imaginary, which it is not proper that we should possess, either because it belongs to another, or would be injurious to us.  It seems to have been originally, and to be still, the first principle of evil, the elementary germ of sin in the heart.  Most wisely, then, does the holy Decalogue close with this prohibition.  The axe, in its final blow, is here laid at the root of the tree; and were this law obeyed, the whole aspect of the sinful world would be changed.  Avarice would no longer grind the face of the poor, and hoard its ungodly grains.  Ambition would no longer aspire at power, and trample on the rights of men.  Sensuality would no longer spread snares for the unwary and riot in polluted pleasures.  Pride would give place to humility, and vanity to meekness.  Envy would be exchanged for sympathetic joy; and anger, malice, and revenge, for pity, grief, and love.  We should be greeted with the smile of contentment and the song of gratitude, instead of the lowering brow of care and the bitter plaint of repining.  And in all habitations and along all the walks of men, we should breathe the balmy atmosphere of cheerfulness and peace.

            But, alas, what a contrast to this, does the actual condition of the world around us present!  What is it, I might almost inquire, that puts every wheel in society in motion,–that keeps all its active elements astir,—but some form or other of Covetousness, an inordinate desire of worldly good?  How much of this is embodied in the enterprising schemes of speculators and merchants!  How much of it enters into the patriotism of the statesman and the fervid eloquence of the orator!  How much of it is couched under that zeal for the public good, so loudly professed by partisan sycophants and aspiring demagogues!  Subtract this principle with its kindred adjuncts from the motives which stir and govern the world,—substituting nothing else in its place,—and almost the whole machinery of life would stand still.  Here and there would remain a spring still operating, of a temper and elasticity drawn from above; but with this exception, it would be like destroying the principle of gravitation in nature, causing every orb in the firmament to stop in its course.  It is covetousness, too often, that, with the help of winds and waves, wafts our Commerce over every stormy sea, and to every sickly shore.  It is Covetousness, too often, that smiles at the counter and presides over the day-book of the tradesman.  It is Covetousness, too often, that urges on the march of improvement in husbandry and the arts, clothing the earth with richer harvests, and making the most ungovernable elements subserve the convenience and comfort of men.  It is Covetousness, too often, that drowns the noise of our water courses with the din of machinery, and causes our villages to resound with the hum of business.  It is Covetousness, too often, that distils in the honey of flattery or the gall of invective from the Editor’s pen, and throws off the sheets of political cant from a hireling press.  It is Covetousness, always, that oils the lying lips of the cheat; and gives dexterity to the hand of the gamester; and emboldens the thief on his nightly errand; and nerves the assassin’s arm for its deed of death; and feeds the fires of the distillery, and pours off, and transports, and distributes its sublimated poison.  It is Covetousness, always, that sits snug in its abundance, closing its ear against the cry from Zion’s wastes at home, and the habitations of cruelty abroad; that prompts the perjurer’s oath, and by the aid of law filches the bread of the widow and the fatherless; and sends forth the adulterer at midnight, and fills peaceful homes with shame, infamy, and wretchedness; and rivets the chains of Slavery; and presses the foot of despotism on the neck of nations; and deluges empires with blood.

            Such is Covetousness,—so powerful as a principle, so subtle, so diffusive, so universal in its operation.  It finds its way into almost every channel of human feeling and action, sometimes mingling itself with better principles, frequently producing valuable results, but always corrupting and degrading the soul.

            And what a dark picture must this be to the eye of a holy God!  The law has gone forth from his mouth,—Thou shalt not covet; and as he looks down to see if there be any that do understand and obey, and with the exception of here and there a bright spot partially redeemed from the common waste, beholds the whole world alive and busy with the workings of Covetousness, must not his displeasure be enkindled, as it was against Israel, when he said, “For the iniquity of his Covetousness was I wroth, and smote him!”

            Perhaps in no country, certainly in no Christian country, is this sin more prevalent and more pernicious in its influence, than our own.  The facilities thrown here in every man’s way, for the attainment of wealth, honor, and power, tend directly to cultivate this passion, and give it a disastrous supremacy over the mind.  They have undeniably had this effect; and Covetousness is one of our crying, national sins.

            Thus have we taken a rapid survey of the condition of the world, as it appears in contrast with the Law of God.  And surely every step of our progress, every discovery we have made, has furnished fresh matter of sorrow—fresh occasion for humiliation and fervent prayer for forgiveness before the Lord.  We might have paused, at different points in our progress, to notice what lights there are, in connection with the shades of the picture; but the shades, deep, heavy, and almost unrelieved, form the appropriate object of our attention to-day.  The first Table of the Law, prescribing summarily the duties which we owe to God; and the second Table also, prescribing in the same summary manner the duties which we owe to man,—both the more forcibly enjoined for the use of the negative and prohibitory form,—we have seen to be transgressed, to a deplorable extent, among all classes of mankind.  Except by a remnant, God is not worshipped in spirit and in truth; his reverend name is blasphemed; and his Sabbath violated by multitudes.  Parents are dishonored, it is feared, to an increasing extent; life is often wantonly sacrificed; adultery, in its protean form and fair disguise, steals abroad through the community; virtual fraud often marks the commercial transactions, of men; slander and falsehood are so common as to have become almost a necessary art; and Covetousness is the mighty spring of action and enterprise throughout our busy world.

            This picture is not too darkly drawn.  The pencil has been dipped in no deeper colors than those employed by the pencil of inspiration; nor than those which an eye that has gazed on Sinai’s brightness, discovers in the present state and character of mankind.  There is no view which can be taken of men and their doings, so mournful and mortifying, as that which presents them in full-drawn contrast with the Divine Law.  While we honestly endeavor to form a true estimate of the character of men, holding in one hand the Tables of the Decalogue, radiating light from every line, and unrolling with the other the dark moral map of the world, we are constrained to say, “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from the precepts and from the judgments of our God.  O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, because we have sinned against thee.”  Such a view, as far as time allowed, I have labored to set fully and faithfully before you.  Let your minds dwell upon it, my hearers, while in your closets, you bow down at the Mercy Seat, humbly confessing your guilt and earnestly imploring pardon.  Let a sense of guilt,—of guilt personal—for are we not personally involved in the prevailing iniquities?—of guilt national—for we as a people have grievously transgressed,—rest on every heart, till with sincere penitence and earnest longings for mercy, you can pray, “O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord hearken and do; defer not, for thine own sake, O my God.”  “Turn us, O God of our salvation, and cause thine anger towards us to cease.”

            But, my hearers, if the view which we have taken, should be productive of nothing more than mortification and sorrow, our labor will have been in vain.  Let it be a godly sorrow, working repentance, that ye may receive damage by us in nothing.  Send up not only your importunate supplications for forgiveness, but like Israel, when they returned from their backsliding, enter into a covenant to seek the Lord God with all the heart and, like Jehoshaphat, when he not only sought the God of his fathers, but walked in his commandments.

            Ye who love Zion, the design of this day calls you to double your diligence, watchfulness, and fidelity.  Let the multitude of your thoughts within you, prompt the individual inquiry—“Lord what wilt thou have me to do?”  “What can I do to stay this mighty tide of iniquity!”  Let all on whose hearts the Divine Law has been inscribed anew, array themselves close and strong against those sins which abound in the land, and with untiring perseverance and with all the power of example, influence, and prayer, labor to suppress them.

            Let the young also set their faces as a flint against them.  To you, under God, is soon to be committed, all that remains of the hope of our country.  Fall in carelessly with the prevailing tide of sin, and the last rays of that hope are extinguished.  Take for your guide the eternal laws of Heaven, and better omens will yet cheer us; the clouds will pass away from the sky; and our sun, now threatening to fall from his mid-day height, will still rejoice, as a strong man, to run his race of glory.

            Finally; God calls upon you all, to day, my hearers, to array yourselves under the banner and in support of his righteous Law; relying on his strength, to plant yourselves in eternal opposition to sin, wherever and in whatever form it exists; and to toil on, year after year, in the conflict, till, at least in your own heart, the victory shall be complete.  This is the day to commence the work.  For to keep a Fast acceptable unto God, is not merely for a man “to afflict his soul, and bow down his head as a bulrush, and spread sackcloth and ashes under him.—But, to loose the bands of wickedness”—(whether they bind your own souls, my hearers, or the souls of other men;) to undo the heavy burdens; to set the oppressed free; and to break every yoke; to deal thy bread to the hungry; to bring the poor that are cast out to thy house;”—in short, to act under the constant impulse of a spirit of heavenly benevolence, irrevocably pledged to a war against sin, to the defense of right, to the relief of woe.  “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee; and the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.”

END.

A STRICKEN PEOPLE’S CONFESSION.

A

DISCOURSE,

PREACHED IN

ST. ANDREW’S CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA,

BY

REV. JOHN A. CLARK, D. D.

May 14, 1841,

On the occasion of the National Fast recommended by his Excellency John Tyler, President of the United States.

PHILADELPHIA:

HOOKER & AGNEW.

1841.

PREFACE.

            The following Correspondence is inserted merely by way of preface to explain the occasion of the publication of this Discourse.

Philadelphia, May 14, 1841.

REV. AND DEAR SIR:

            At a meeting of the Vestry of St. Andrew’s convened immediately after divine service in the morning, the following Resolution was unanimously adopted.

            “Resolved, That the Rector be requested to furnish the Vestry with a copy of the Sermon preached by him this morning, for publication; and that the Wardens be requested to make the application.”

            In compliance with the Resolution of the Vestry, we respectfully solicit from you a copy of the Discourse for publication.

With great regard we are

Sincerely and truly your’s

C. STEVENSON,

LAMBERT DUY,      Church Wardens.

Rev. John A. Clark, D. D.

Rector of St. Andrew’s Church.

Philadelphia, May 15, 1841.

C. STEVENSON, ESQ.

LAMBERT DUY,                  Church Wardens.

GENTLEMEN:

            I have just received your communication, enclosing a Resolution of the Vestry, requesting a copy of my Sermon preached yesterday morning, on the occasion of our national fast, for publication.  The request quite surprised me, as the Discourse which you would thus honour is of the most unpretending character, and was prepared in a very feeble state of health, and without the remotest expectation that it would be desired for publication.  I hope the feelings of personal kindness on the part of the Vestry towards me—multiplied and unceasing expressions of which I am happy to record I have continued to receive during my whole connexion with St. Andrew’s Church, a period of six years—I hope their feelings of personal kindness have not prompted them, in this instance, to prefer a request which, if granted, their after and more mature judgment will not approve.

            The views I endeavoured to present in my Sermon yesterday, are such as the events transpiring around us have forced upon my attention.  I am not aware, however, that there is anything connected with these views, new or original, and I am sure that there is nothing in the mode in which they were presented, deserving the publicity you would give them.

            Still, as I am desirous ever to gratify those who have in so many ways sought to promote my comfort, and have uniformly evinced towards me so much personal regard and kindness—if in the honest judgment of the individuals composing the Vestry, it is believed that the publication of the Discourse will be useful, in the smallest degree, in arresting the progress of those national sins, which now unhappily darken and overshadow our land—and in leading the minds of our fellow countrymen to the love and practice of that “righteousness” which alone can “exalt a nation”—it shall be at their disposal.

With great regard, dear sirs,

I am sincerely and truly

Your friend and pastor,

JOHN A. CLARK.

Philadelphia, May 24, 1841.

REV. AND DEAR SIR:

            We have received your note of the 15h inst., and laid the same before the Vestry, and we beg leave to assure you that the opinion of the Vestry remains unchanged in relation to the expediency of publishing your Fast-day Sermon.  They believe that the views it contains are such as the great majority of the people would do well to hold and act upon; and they are convinced that its publication would tend to the good of those into whose hands it might fall.  With these feelings they were induced to request your consent to its publication, and further reflection has served but to increase their desire that this step might be taken.

We are, very respectfully,

            Your most obedient servants,

            G. STEVENSON,

            LAMBERT DUY,      Church Wardens.

Rev. John A. Clark, D. D.

                                                                                                            Philadelphia, June 1, 1841.

C. STEVENSON, ESQ.

LAMBERT DUY, ESQ.        Church Wardens.

GENTLEMEN:

            In consequence of my absence from the city, I have not till now had an opportunity of replying to your second letter, bearing date of the 24h ult., in which the request is still reiterated on the part of the Vestry for my Sermon, preached on the occasion of our recent national fast, for publication.  Having already left the matter wholly to the verdict of the Vestry—I herewith send you a copy of the Discourse.

            With great regard,

            I am, gentlemen, truly

            Your affectionate friend,

            JOHN A. CLARK.

DISCOURSE.

            “Thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly.”—NEHEMIAH, ix 33.

We are presented, in the chapter from which our test is taken, with the affecting scene of a whole nation congregated in one vast assembly, to observe a solemn national fast.  They appear clothed in sackcloth, with earth upon their heads: and among their confessions to Almighty God, whose hand now lay heavy upon them, are the words of our test—Thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly.

            These words seem well suited to the occasion upon which we have assembled, and will naturally lead to a train of reflections in keeping with this day—a day in which a great and mighty nation, in conformity with the suggestion of their chief magistrate, are bowing themselves down in deep humiliation before that august Being whose breath called them into existence, and who in just displeasure has smitten them with the rod of chastisement.

            We are assembled here this morning in the sanctuary of God, in compliance with the Proclamation of our present Chief Magistrate, who has recommended to the people of the United States, of every religious denomination, to observe this as a day of FASTING and PRAYER—“and to join with one accord in humble and reverential approach to Him in whose hands we are, invoking Him to inspire us with a proper spirit and temper of heart and mind, under the frowns of His providence, and still to bestow his gracious benedictions upon our government and our country.”¹

            We may truly say, that “the frowns of God’s providence” are upon the nation:—and glad we are to know, that this truth is recognized and admitted by one who now, by the fiat of that same Providence, sits at the helm of our government.  Truly can we take up the sad response, and say—the frowns of God’s providence are upon us.  Most emphatically do the words of ancient Judah’s holy seer depict the state of things around us at this moment, when he said, “the land mourneth!”  Yes:  the land mourneth!  It mourneth, because God hath smitten us with the rod of his displeasure.  He hath smitten us, not simply once, or twice, but many times; and this in a great variety of ways.  Just now again he hath repeated the blow, and stricken us at a point and in a way which justifies the appropriation to ourselves of the strong language of Israel’s pathetic lament—the Lord hath covered us with a cloud in his anger, and cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel.

            And if the inquiry be made—what is our duty at this moment, and under these circumstances?  We reply, unquestionably it is to imitate smitten and stricken Israel—to look up and say, to Him whose chastening hand is upon us—“Thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly.”

            The leading idea—the main position—in our text, is the assertion of the entire justice of God in the infliction of judgments upon Israel in the case referred to, and consequently in all cases, and in reference to all nations upon whom he in his wisdom sees fit to lay his chastening hand.

            This idea, and the truth it asserts, we shall endeavour to elucidate, and distinctly set forth, in the remarks offered on the present occasion.

            Before we proceed to this main position, however, we desire to call your attention to three preliminary considerations, which will greatly tend to illustrate and confirm this position.

            1.  And first I would remark, that all the nations of the earth are under the control of Jehovah.  This idea is necessarily involved in the fact of a divine government, and of an overruling Providence.  This idea, with its various ramifications, runs through every part of the divine record.  In the test itself there is a distinct recognition of this truth.  Why should it be said, that God was “just in all that was brought upon” the Jewish nation, unless all that befell them came from His hand—unless their destiny was under His control?  And it is not merely of the Hebrew people, in reference to whom the scriptures affirm that Jehovah exerts a controlling power—but in reference to every people and tribe.  It is in this sense that he is emphatically described “THE KING OF NATIONS;” and it is distinctly affirmed that “by Him Kings reign and Princes decree justice.”  His ability to control the destiny and to regulate the movement of nations, is described in the most sublime strains by the Prophet—“Behold the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance.”  “Have ye not known?  Have ye not heard?  Hath it not been told you from the beginning?  Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?  It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth; and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers, that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell           in: that bringeth the Princes to nothing:  He maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.  Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown; yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth:  And He shall also blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble.”

            So indisputable is Jehovah’s control over all nations, that in designating Jeremiah to the Prophetic office, who was to predict, as God’s messenger, the fall and rise of many people, he says to him—“See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, and to destroy and to throw down—to build and to plant.”

            The idea of this absolute divine control over nations, is still more graphically depicted in a subsequent chapter of the same Prophet—“The word came to Jeremiah, saying—Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there will I cause thee to hear my words.  Then I went down to the potter’s house, and behold he wrought a work on the wheels.  And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter:  So he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it.  Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying—O house of Israel, Cannot I do with you, as this potter? Saith the Lord.  Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.  At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and pull down, and to destroy it:  If that nation against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.  And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it:   If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said I would benefit them.”

            No language could more explicitly assert the absolute control of Jehovah over the nations of the earth than this.  They are all in his hand, as the clay is in the hand of the potter.  He can mould them as he pleases.  He can destroy them when he chooses—and out of their ruins raise up other nations and empires.  When the Lord would punish Israel, he employs “the Assyrian” “as the rod of his anger.”  But when the king of Assyria would come against Israel contrary to the will of Jehovah, he “puts a hook into his nose,” and “a bridle into his lips,” and “turns him back by the way by which he came.”  When God hath any purpose to accomplish, “he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains,” and “all the inhabitants of the world and dwellers on the earth, see it,” and are moved.  When “the nations rush like the rushing of many waters,” “God rebukes them, and they flee far off, and are chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind.”

            The eternal Jehovah causes “Palestina” to be “dissolved”—“Moab” to “howl”—Damascus to be taken away from being a city, and converted into a ruinous heap”—“the Egyptians” to be “given into the hand of a cruel lord”—“Tyre to be laid waste, so that there is no house—no entering in.”—Yea, adds the prophet, “behold the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.”  Do not these statements show the entire sovereignty of God over the nations of the earth?  Does not Jehovah most distinctly assert his indisputable control over nations, and kingdoms, and empires, when he says in reference to a wicked prince, “remove the diadem, and take off the crown; I will overturn, overturn, overturn it, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it to him?”  Is not God the Lord of the whole earth, and of all the creatures that move upon it?  Is he not the universal, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable sovereign?  Are not all creatures in his hand?  Unquestionably they are!  And as God controls the destiny of individuals, orders their lot, and numbers the very hairs of their heads, in like manner does he control the destiny of nations.  The hearts of kings, the deliberations of senates, the issues of war, the wealth and prosperity of nations, are all in the hand of God.  Look at the great empires that have risen, and filled the earth with their fame.  Where are they now?  Swept into oblivion!  In the hour of their highest prosperity, God foresaw and foretold their ruin.  His decree sealed their fate.  The history of Tyre, of Babylon, of Egypt, of Greece, of Rome, and especially of the Jews, demonstrates the truth that all the nations of the earth are under the control of Jehovah.  The traveller in the oriental world, whose feet treads upon the dust of Babylon, once “the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of Chaldee’s excellency”—or upon the marble ruins of Gaza—or within the rocky places of Petra—or amid the broken pillars of ancient Thyatira, is constrained to see and feel that cities, and kingdoms, and empires, rise, and flourish, and decay, at the bidding of God.  All nations are wholly under his control.

            2.  Again we remark, that all nations are not only under Jehovah’s control, but under his moral government.  Nations have a moral responsibility as well as individuals.  God holds them accountable for their conduct just as strictly as he does individuals, and will just as certainly punish them for their sins.  Hence, it is said of Israel, “The Lord hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions”²  And again, “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned: therefore she is removed.”³  Nations are punished for national sins.  Those are regarded as national sins which pervade the great mass of the people.  Those also are accounted as national sins which are connived at, or sanctioned, either by legislative acts, or by the example and influence of individuals who are appointed to govern the nation, or who are the official representatives of the people, chosen or appointed by the nation to enact her laws and to conduct her government.

            This, then, is to be distinctly noted: the sins of the great mass of the people—the sanction of wrong on the part of government—and the open depravity of the rulers of any people, all come under the class of national sins.  As the moral governor of the universe, and a God of justice, Jehovah must punish these sins.  What was the destruction of Sodom and the cities of the Plain—what was the fall of Tyre, and Babylon, and Jerusalem, but an illustration of this very principle—that God holds nations morally accountable to him for their national acts?  It was not until the drunken Chaldean king in that night of his fatal revel, as he sat amid his thousand lords, commanded the sacred vessels which had been taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem, to be brought—it was not until those sacred vessels were used as common wine cups by “the king and his princes, his rulers and his concubines,” lifting up their voices in profane songs, “praising the gods of gold and of silver, or brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone”—it was not until this last heaven-daring act of desecration, that the fingers of that mysterious hand came forth and wrote upon the plaster of the wall the doom of the king and the nation.  “That very night Belshazzar was slain, and Darius the Median took the kingdom.”

            Does not God hold nations morally accountable to him for their conduct as nations?  Look at Nineveh!  Consider Jonah’s commission!  “The word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.”  And what was the proclamation tht Jonah was to make?  Simply this!  “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed.”  Nineveh was an immense city—the seat of a great empire—containing a population among which there were more than sixty thousand of so tender an age that they “knew not their right hand from their left.”  These were to be involved in the general destruction.  Though individually innocent, yet as a part of the nation, they shared the national guilt, and were to be involved in the national destruction.  Within forty days, Nineveh, then flourishing in the zenith of its glory, was to be laid in utter ruins; its doom was sealed; and it was to perish on account of its wickedness.  A messenger is sent by the Almighty to proclaim this through its streets—“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed!”  Had this message been unheeded, just as sure as God is on his throne that city, like Sodom, would have been whelmed in destruction.  But “the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.  For word came unto the king of Nineveh; and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.  And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh, (by the decree of the king and his nobles,) saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing; let them not feed, nor drink water.  But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God; yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.  Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?  And God saw their works that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.”  Here we see fully carried out, that principle in the divine government, which Jehovah himself had laid down, and upon which he acts in the administration of that government as it respects nations.  “At what instant I shall speak concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and pull down and to destroy it; if that nation against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.”  You see, therefore, that the divine government under which nations as well as individuals are placed, is a moral government.  Sin in nations as well as in individuals, displeases God, and he will certainly empty upon them the vials of his displeasure.

            3.  Again:  I remark that God punishes nations for national sins, by the infliction of TEMPORAL JUDGMENTS.  It is only here that they have a corporate and national existence.  Individuals, each one for himself, will for their personal sins have at last to meet the retributions of Christ’s judgment-seat.  But God judgeth the nations, and awards to them their allotments, while they still have a name and local habitation upon the theatre of this world’s existence. 

            The instruments which God employs for the execution of his displeasure upon  any people whose sins cry to heaven for vengeance, are multiplied and various.  He has infinite resources at his command.  War, and pestilence and famine, and flame and flood, are all ministers that wait upon his beck.  He can, at his pleasure, open the windows of heaven, and break up the fountains of the great deep, to drown a sinful world.  He can cause the heavens to empty a deluge of fire upon the cities of the plain.  He can turn the waters of Egypt into blood, and send death into every habitation.  He can bring up locusts upon the land to eat up every green thing.  He can “make the heavens as brass, and the earth as iron.”  He can “smite with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew.”  He can make the embattled thousands of Assyria, the rod of his anger to punish Israel; and he can send the angel of destruction into the camp of the Assyrians to “punish the stout heart of the king of Assyria, and the glory of his high looks,” by smiting with the silent withering touch of death, a hundred and eighty-five thousand of his armed warriors in a single night.⁴  That same God who did such wonders in ancient times, still lives; and still holds the same sway over the nations of the earth.  He still abhors sin; and still possesses infinite expedients by which to execute his displeasure upon the nations that cast away his fear, and trample upon his law.  God punishes nations now, as he did formerly, for their sins.  He punished Israel.  Though they were his peculiar people—though they were highly exalted above all other nations, he would not allow sin in them to go unrebuked.  When they cast his law behind them, he held them responsible not only as individuals, but as a nation.  He therefore brought upon them national judgments.  He therefore brought upon them national judgments.  He caused them to be carried away captive.  He allowed the crimson tide of war to roll over their land.  He sent multiplied judgments upon them.  He wrested from them their property, and subjected them to a foreign yoke.

            Now the position laid down in our text is, that in the infliction of these various judgments, God acts strictly in accordance with the principles of rectitude and justice.  The history of the Jews, as far as their case is concerned, most strikingly demonstrates this position.  This, at the time they observed the great national fast referred to in our text, they distinctly acknowledged.  Their language in their humble confession to Almighty God, was “Thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly.”  God had in all respects acted as a righteous governor.  In all the inflictions of judgment upon the nation, he had proceeded no farther than was necessary to uphold his moral government, and to indicate his deep and changeless displeasure against sin.

            And what was affirmed of Jehovah in that case, may be affirmed of the divine administration in every case.  “Thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly.”

            The great truth asserted in our text, would lose much of its force on this occasion, and the object for which we are assembled in a great measure be defeated, did I not in this connexion call your attention particularly to the undoubted fact, that God has been displeased with us as a nation.  During the last ten years he has rebuked us in a variety of ways, and spoken out his displeasure in tones that have been reverberated through the whole land.  How solemnly did he speak to this whole nation, when he permitted the Asiatic cholera to be wafted on the wings of the wind across the great deep, and bade it hang like a dark cloud of death over every city in our land!  Was not the voice of God in that pestilence!  With what awful tread it marched from place to place, filling all hearts with dismay, and sweeping thousands into eternity!  And when the moral impression of this awful visitation faded away like “the morning cloud and early dew,” Jehovah again spoke to us in flame and fire.  A mighty conflagration was kindled in the very centre of the great mart and metropolis of our land, which no human power could stay, till edifice after edifice, and block after block had fallen, and millions of property had been swept away in one fatal night.⁵ 

            Since that period, how often, how emphatically, how distinctly, has the Most High spoken to us by tempest,⁶ and by flood, on the sea and on the land!  Since that period, what unwonted scenes have been acted upon our great rivers, and bays, and along our coast!  Were not the three combined elements of flame, and frost, and flood, manifestly the ministers of the Lord, and acting in obedience to his word, when in a single night—in a single hour—they became the dread executioners to sweep hundreds from time to eternity; and in the sudden, awful, and bitter bereavement they occasioned, carried grief and mourning through the whole land!⁷

            But, more particularly, and no less distinctly, has God spoken in the silent, noiseless, but deadly blight that has fallen upon our national prosperity.  We were prosperous; we were heaping up wealth; thousands were enjoying perfect ease of circumstances a few years since.  A wonderful change, however, has come over the land.  The wheels of business have suddenly stopped.  The sinews of trade have been cut in sunder.  The affluent have become poor; men who considered themselves rich, have seen their property melt away like the dew of morning.  Individuals who supposed that they had a competence for life, have unexpectedly found poverty staring them in the face.  And all this has occurred in a time of peace—when no enemy had been among us to lay waste and destroy—when no civil commotion had occurred to shake the pillars of our government—when everything upon which national prosperity is supposed to depend, seemed auspicious—and at a period when the earth has not withheld her bounties, but has poured forth her productions with unwonted profusion.  Now, men may speculate, and theorize, and ascribe this to a variety of secondary causes; but if we are not atheists, if we do not shut out God altogether from the government of the world, we shall see His hand in this.  “Shall there be evil in a city,” or a land, “and the Lord hath not done it?”  Whatever may have been the proximate, political or natural causes that have brought these disastrous influences upon us, the hand of God has most assuredly been in it.  We can read our sin in our punishment.  “The Lord hath done that which he had devised.”⁸

            Men, however, did not choose to look at the matter under this aspect.  God’s hand was not seen.  They looked to secondary causes.  Still, however much, and however honestly they differed, in relation to the causes which they supposed had involved the nation in this wide-spread disaster, and borne it down to the very dust in depression; all were ready to concede the fact of the disastrous state in which our country was involved.  Various were the expedients devised to roll away this dark cloud of adversity.  But among all the propositions which the wise counselors suggested, how few thought or said—“Bring hither the ephod, and let us inquire of the Lord.”⁹  Men undertook to settle this matter themselves; some in one way, and some in another.  A large majority of the nation looked for relief in the elevation of a new and favourite candidate to the Presidential chair.  The nation was agitated to its very centre to compass his election.  He was proclaimed the successful candidate.  He was inducted into office with the accustomed ceremonies, amid assembled thousands of his countrymen.  Combining in his character every public and private virtue, all hearts began to be drawn towards him, and all eyes were fixed upon his movements.  Every step that he took, seemed to be directed with so much caution, and to proceed from such singleness of heart, that public expectation fastened still more intensely upon him every day, as the agent that was to extricate the nation from all its difficulties.  In all this, it is to be feared, men looked not to God, but to human instrumentality.  They forgot that it was for their sins that the nation’s prosperity had been cloven down.  And, therefore, in the midst of the people’s acclamations of triumph, while the laurels which were hung around their representative head at his inauguration, were still fresh and blooming, God stretched forth his hand, and suddenly touched him with death.  No one had anticipated such an event.  Of the hundreds that saw and heard him on the day of his inauguration, who thought of his dying before the expiration of his Presidential term?  “His eye was bright; his voice was clear; his step was firm; no part of his iron constitution gave signs of failing.”  But, one short month was scarcely completed, amid the cares and toils of government, and the news flew through the land—The President is dead!

            Now, the point to which we wish to call your attention, is, that in this—that in all that has been brought upon us—God has been rebuking us.  He has done right.  The pestilence, the flame, the flood, the commercial depression, the fall of our beloved President; all these are to be regarded as so many successive tokens of God’s displeasure against our national sins.

            Have we not national sins?  Can there be any question in relation to our having “done wickedly” as a nation?  No people under heaven ever enjoyed more civil liberty than we.  In soil, and climate, and laws, and advantages of education, and religious privileges, God has distinguished us above all the nations of the earth.  And yet, what wretched returns have we made to him for all this!  What sins and enormities disgrace our land!  Go through the whole Decalogue, and see what command has not been openly trampled in the dust by this nation.  Some of the Legislatures of our States have scoffingly rejected, and driven out with scorn from their legislative halls, all recognition of God and of his control.¹⁰  In how many instances have the legislators of our land, in the very temples of justice, trampled on all laws, human and divine, cherishing and uttering sentiments full of murder and blood!  How often have they set at defiance all decency; being notorious for drunkenness, and debauchery, and every evil work!  How often have they desecrated the Sabbath, and profaned the name of Jehovah, and scoffed at religion!  These things our rulers have but too frequently done.  And God has seen it all.  This, however, is only a small part of our national guilt.

            As in the days of one of Israel’s prophets, so now with great force and truth it may be said, “because of swearing, the land mourneth!”  Profanity is one of the crying sins of our land.  Go from one end of our country to the other, and all along our rail-roads, and canals, and navigable rivers, and national roads, you will hear one continued volley of profane oaths bursting upon your ears; and that, in utter contempt and defiance of that divine precept proclaimed from the burning top of Sinai, “Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”  We are not strangers to these things.  We can scarcely walk along through a single street of our city, without having our ears assailed with oaths, and curses, and awful profanity.  God sees all this, and keep a record of it in the book of his remembrance.

            Drunkenness is another sin of our land.  Notwithstanding all the laudable efforts that have been made to suppress intemperance, this sin, like a wide spreading pestilence, stalks abroad everywhere through the land; the foul minister of disease, and ruin, and death.  In a statistical calculation made recently by an intelligent clergyman of this city, from accurate data which he had collected, it was stated, that the amount paid annually in our country, for intoxicating drinks, exceeded the amount paid out to sustain the government, to sustain all our schools, to sustain the preaching of the gospel at home, to sustain our charitable institutions, and all our missionary operations: that a larger number of persons had been destroyed since the declaration of American Independence, by intemperate drinking, than had ever been called into the field to defend our country in all the several wars in which this nation has been engaged: and that at the present moment, so wide spreading is this evil, if you were to allow twelve hours for each day, there is on an average a drunkard committed to the grave, somewhere in the United States, every six minutes each day, from one end of the year to the other.  What an idea does this give us of the extent and frequency of this terrible sin of drunkenness!  And does not the Holy One of Israel see and abhor all this?  And will he not visit for these things?  What does he mean when he says to Israel, “Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which are the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!  Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which, as a tempest of hail, and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand.  The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet.”¹¹

            Licentiousness is another of our national sins.  Of all the sins that defile the earth, none can be more hateful to God than this!  And yet its extent, especially in our large towns and cities, is truly awful and appalling.  Were it proper or possible to give statistics here, what startling facts would be brought to light!  How many thousands and tens of thousands is this sin yearly hurrying forward to a ruined eternity!  And how many who wish to claim high respectability in society, and to be ranked even among the virtuous, give countenance and support to this vice!  O, what scenes of pollution does the all-seeing eye of God behold around us on every side!  The only wonder is, that having drunk so deep into Sodom’s sin, we have not, ere this, shared its fate.

            But I pass on to another point.  Among the causes which have operated to involve the nation in great and crying sins, and which have contributed to the utter shipwreck of private character, is the undue love of money, which has pervaded the whole mass of society, and spread its infection through all classes like a fearful pestilence.  Men everywhere, in all ranks and stations in society, were “in haste to be rich.”  The old paths of patient toil and honest industry were deserted, and new ways devised, by which the object of men’s pursuit could be more speedily attained.  Hence, those extensive schemes of speculation, and of wholesale gambling, which in their operation have fallen with suh disastrous influence upon the most safely vested interest in the country.  This mania for speculation, not only scattered the fortune of thousands to the winds, but exerted a most deleterious moral influence upon the public mind.  It seemed to crush and obliterate the few vestiges of moral sense that had remained in the human mind.  This was manifested in a variety of ways.  The whole country began speedily to put on a new aspect.  Singly, and in masses, men hesitated not to adopt new courses of action.  They no longer waited around the gates of justice, but, in many instances, trampled down into the dust all respect for law and authority.  The mob undertook to be umpire, and to settle all questions in a summary way, by an appeal to the excited passions of the worst portion of the community.  There is nothing that has stained the fair honour of our country with so foul a blot—nothing which has made us so much the sport and by-word of European nations—and nothing, we may believe, which has been more offensive in the eye of God, than the existence and toleration of mobs in this land.  Our own city has participated in the guilt, and been the theatre upon which one of these disgraceful scenes has been acted.¹²

            Alas, what elements of depravity are around us!  The workings of iniquity are seen under ten thousand varied manifestations.  It seems as though the crime and corruption of the old world had been transplanted here, and was springing up with increased vigour on our soil.

            Among the sins which are rife around us, we must not forget to mention that of systematic gambling.  How many rooms—how many dwellings in this city—are yearly rented for the express purpose of carrying on this nefarious business, and exclusively devoted to this object!  And how many individuals are there that calculate to get their livelihood by this system of deliberate robbery!¹³

            Another of the crying sins of our land, is the desecration of the Sabbath.  In the early history of this country, there was nothing that ore strikingly characterized those venerable men who cleared away the mighty forest, and planted the first germ of our nation, than their strict and conscientious observance of the Sabbath.  They proceeded upon the plain and obvious principle, that they were not to look for success in their various enterprises, unless they feared God and kept his commandments.  And to them the Most High acted on that rule of his government, declared by the man of God to Eli, “them that honour me, I will honour.”  While our fathers honoured God, the banner of prosperity waved over our country, and we were overshadowed with the blessings of the Most High.  But a new order of things for many years past has sprung up among us.  The ancient reverence for the Lord’s day has greatly declined.  Men have allowed their love of pleasure, and of gain, to urge them on to an utter disregard of the command so sacredly enjoined by the Almighty, remember the Sabbath-day and keep it holy.  Where can you now go, and not see crowds around you on every side, trampling this sacred injunction of Jehovah in the dust?  And alas, this sin is participated in by almost all classes in society!  This disregard of divine authority does not escape the omniscient eye!

            Again:  So common has dueling become in this country—that it may with great propriety be mentioned as one of our national sins.  How long, and by what distinguished names has this barbarous and heaven-daring sin been upheld and practiced in our country!  And even to this present moment, how many there are that would contend that it was their privilege to avenge any imaginary or real wrongs they have suffered—by the pistol, or the bowie-knife!

            What law of Jehovah has not been set at defiance by the nation?  Look around!  What acts of peculation, of embezzlement, of high-handed fraud, have been committed, not only by private individuals but by officers of public institutions—by those holding high official stations under government!  What dishonesties—what derelictions from the path of rectitude have been practiced—what forgeries have been committed—what developments of depravity—what tales of murder and bloodshed have come to our ears, or have been acted in our very streets!  And does not God see and abhor all these?

            I might here specify several other national sins that lift up a mighty voice to heaven, calling down upon us the wrath of God.—But I pass over these, and close by remarking, that the greatest of all our national sins is the neglect and contempt with which the gospel of Christ is treated; and the utter disregard which has been manifested to the various and multiplied rebukes which Jehovah hath put forth to recall and reclaim this nation.

            Though to all the people of this land, there has been proffered and proclaimed a free and full and everlasting salvation—a salvation purchased by the tears and toil and agony and death of the incarnate Son of God—these riches of infinite grace have been utterly neglected or despised!  Of the seventeen millions that form the entire mass of our nation, by far the great majority act and live just as they would if Christ had never come here on the errand of their redemption—had never poured out his precious blood for their salvation!  How few in all this land have truly received and truly submitted to the glorious gospel of the Son of God!  God’s greatest gift to man—that gift which filled all heaven with amazement—has been scorned and rejected by millions in this land.  This, I repeat it, is our greatest sin—the neglect or rejection of Him who came down from heaven for our redemption.

            And we have not only closed our ears to the sound of the gospel—but to the voice of God as he has been speaking in his various providences.  Who hath heard and regarded his voice?  Who, under these various divine rebukes which we have noticed, hath turned from his evil ways and humbled himself under the mighty hand of God!  And though God’s long-suffering and forbearance with us have been so distinguished—where shall we find any proper sense of gratitude at all commensurate with the extent of this goodness!  Indeed, how few, how very few in all this land have any adequate conception of the goodness of Jehovah to us as a nation!  What multitudes and multitudes have set him utterly at defiance!

            Now, when you consider the forgetfulness and neglect of God of which this nation has been guilty—when you consider what an immense amount of crime is spread over all this land, and how the depravity of the people has broken forth in every form;—and then, when you consider in connexion with this, that God claims to be the moral governor of this nation, and that he has determined to punish our national sins with national judgments, can you be surprised at what has befallen us?  Do you not rather wonder that he hath dealt so gently with us?  Who that reflects will not unite with Israel and say—“Thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly?” 

            But we must hasten to a close.  Allow me to call your attention in conclusion, to three practical deductions.

            1.  It becomes us first of all to acknowledge the justice of God in his dealings with us.  He has chastened us.  We see his hand in the various calamities that have befallen us.  It was the Lord that took away our chief magistrate.  He took him away on account of the sins of the people.  This was JUST on the part of God.  We deserved it.  Our sins deserved it.  “Thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly.”

            2.  At this time, we are especially called upon to confess and bewail our sins.  Even if we have not personally participated in those national sins to which we have alluded, yet as members of this great national compact, we all share in the guilt, and so we must in the punishment of our national sins.  We are bound therefore to confess them before God, and to mourn over them, and seek for pardon, that the divine displeasure shall no longer rest upon us as a nation.  How sad it is to remember, that the good old General who had fought for his country so many battles, and had now reached the evening of life, and was garnering up his hopes for heaven, and diffusing happiness by his presence in the domestic circle—had he been left in his happy home might have passed many more years on the earth—but when he was torn from that retirement, and invested with the robes of office, and placed at the head of the nation, then the nation’s sins came upon him, and he was cut down for their sake.  We trust he has gone to a world where sin is unknown.  But it becomes as none the less to humble ourselves before Almighty God, for those sins which called down this last heavy stroke upon our country.

            3.  And, finally, it becomes us on this occasion not only to acknowledge the justice of God in all that he has done—not only to confess our sins before the Lord, but to pray and labour for a universal reformation through the land.  What will all our confessions, and rebukes, and fasting, amount to, if we go on in sin just as we have hitherto done?  Listen to the divine word, “Is not this the fast I have chosen?  To loose the bands of wickedness; to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?  Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?  When thou seest the naked, that thou over him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?”  In other words, we are to seek to bring about a great and extended reformation—to roll away that load of sin which presses down this nation, “as a cart is pressed down that is full of sheaves.”  For this we are to labour and pray without ceasing.  Let us begin with ourselves.  Let us embrace if we have hitherto neglected to do so, at once, the Lord Jesus as our Saviour.  Let us break off every sin, and seek to have the light of our example such as becometh the gospel of Christ.  Let us do wickedly no more, but live as enlightened, free, Christian men, ever remembering that it is “righteousness” alone that will save, preserve, and “exalt” our “nation.”

            Let this day be spent by all in prayer.  Let us seek the face of the Lord, not only in public but in private.  Humble prayer to God is mighty, and it is the duty to which we are now especially called.  Let us not fail to call upon God, with one accord, for his mercy and for his blessings.  If we—if all thus humble themselves before the Lord—thus call upon his name, we may hope that for the sake of our great Intercessor he will turn, and show mercy upon us, and continue to bless us in all our interests as a nation.

END.