Part 2

This inefficacy of our government to produce moral and social reformations should be well understood, because it throws the fearful responsibility of maintaining our institutions directly upon the people, where it must rest. A government originating in society, can have but slight ground to stand on in resisting its downward tendency. That there is in society such a tendency, all history shows. As nations have become older, they have invariably become more corrupt. They have never reached that point in general morality at which men cease to corrupt each other by associating together. Such a tendency, not counteracted, must be fatal to republican governments, for republican government is self-government, and as the internal law becomes feeble, external force must be increased; and accordingly we find that every people hitherto, have either been under regal power from the beginning, or have, in time, reached a point in corruption, when that power became necessary. Republican government then, is not so much the cause of a good social state, as its sign. It can never be borne up, with its stars and stripes floating, upon the surface of a society that is not strongly impregnated with virtue. Take this away, and it goes down by its own weight, and the beast of tyranny, with its seven heads and ten horns, comes up out of the troubled waters. Here is the turning point with us. All depends upon the influences that go to form the character of our people. Those who control these influences will really govern the country. To this point we turn our eyes anxiously. At this point we look to legislators to stand in their lot, and do what is appropriate to their station. At this point we look especially to fathers and mothers, the guardians of domestic virtue.--Those waters will be sweet that are fed by sweet springs. We look to christian ministers, to enlightened teachers, to patriotic authors and editors, to every good citizen. If there ever was a country in which all these were called upon to do their utmost, this is that country; if there ever was a government that was called upon to second in every proper way the efforts of these, this is that government. To all these we look; but our trust is only in the influences they may bring to bear from the blessed gospel of Christ, from the government of God. "We ought to obey God rather than men."

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I have thus shown, as fully as the time would permit, though far too briefly to do justice to the subject, the grounds on which we ought to obey God rather than men. These are to be found in the relation of the divine, and of human government respectively, to the ends of individual, and of social existence. But the occasion on which the text was uttered, a subject having directly refused obedience to rulers lawfully constituted, will lead us to consider the effects of the principle of the text when acted upon by men in those relations in which civil liberty is directly involved--in the relations of subjects and of rulers. What then will be the effect of an adherence to this principle on the part of subjects, as such?

There is a tendency in irresponsible power to accumulate. It first gains control over property, and life, and every thing from which a motive to resistance based on the interests of the present life, could be drawn. But it is not satisfied with this. Nothing avails it so long as there is a Mordecai sitting at the King's gate that does not rise up and do it reverence. It must also control the conscience, and make the religious nature subservient to its purposes. Accordingly, the grand device of the enemies of civil liberty, has been so to incorporate religion with the government, that all those deep and ineradicable feelings which are associated with the one, should also be associated with the other, and that he who opposed the government should not only bring upon himself the arm of the civil power, but also the fury of religious zeal. The most melancholy and heart-sickening chapter in the history of man, is that in which are recorded the enormities committed by a lust of power, and by malignity, in alliance with a perverted religious sentiment. The light that was in men has become darkness, and that darkness has been great. The very instrument appointed by God for the deliverance and elevation of man, has been made to assist in his thraldom and degradation. When christianity appeared, the alliance of religion with oppressive power was universal. In such a state of things, there seemed no hope for civil liberty but in bringing the conscience out from this unholy alliance, and putting it in a position in which it must show its energies in opposition to power. This Christianity did. It brought the conscience to a point where it not only might resist human governments, but where, as they were then exercised, it was compelled to resist them. This appeared when the text was uttered, and there was then a rock raised in the ocean of tyranny which has not been overflowed to this day. The same qualities which make the conscience so potent an ally of power, must, when it is enlightened by a true knowledge of God and of duty, and when immortality is clearly set before the mind, make it the most formidable of all barriers to tyranny and oppression.

By thus bringing the moral nature of man to act in opposition to power, and by giving him light, and strength, and foothold, to enable him to sustain that opposition, christianity has done an inestimable service, and has placed humanity at the only point where its highest grandeur appears. At this point, sustained by principle, and often in the person of the humblest individual, it bids defiance to all the malice of men to wrest from it its true liberty. It bids tyranny do its worst, and though its ashes may be scattered to the winds, it leaves its startling testimony, and the inspiration of its great example to coming times. The power to do this, christianity alone can give. No other religion has ever so demonstrated its evidences to the senses, and caused its adaptations to the innermost wants of the soul to be felt, as to enable man to stand alone against the influence of whatever was dear in affection, and flattering in promises, and fearful in torture. Other religions have had their _victims_, who have been led, amidst the plaudits of surrounding multitudes, to throw themselves under the wheels of a system already established; but not their _martyrs_, who, when duty has permitted it, have fled to the fastnesses of the mountains; and when it has not, have stood upon their rights, and contested every inch of ground, and met death soberly and firmly, only when it was necessary. When this has been done by multitudes it has caused power to respect the individual, to respect humanity; and while christianity was wading through the blood of ten persecutions, it was fighting more effectually than had ever been done before, the battles of civil liberty. The call to obey God rather than men met with a response, and it is upon this ground that the battle has been opened in every case in which civil liberty now exists. It is upon this ground alone that it can be maintained.

I deem it of great importance that this point should be fully and often presented, because it is vital, and because there are constant attempts made to obscure it. Whatever elevates the individual, whatever gives him worth in his own estimation and that of others, whatever invests him with moral dignity, must be favorable both to pure morality and to civil liberty. Hence it is that these are both incidental results of christianity. They are not the gifts which she came to bestow--these are life and immortality. They are not the white raiment in which her followers are to walk in the upper temple; but they are the earthly garments with which she would clothe the nations--they are the brightness which she leaves in her train as she moves on towards heaven, and calls on men to follow her there. These belong to her alone. Infidels may filch her morality, as they have often done, and then boast of their discoveries. But in their hands that morality is lopped off from the body of faith on which it grew, and produces no fruit. They may boast, as they do, of a liberty which they never could have achieved. But under its protection they advance doctrines and advocate practices which would corrupt it into license. Their only strength lies in endeavoring, in the sacred name of liberty, to corrupt the virtuous, and to excite the hatred of the vicious against those restraints without which liberty cannot exist, and society has no ground of security. "Promising liberty to others, they are themselves the servants of corruption." Liberty cannot exist without morality, nor general morality without a pure religion.

The doctrine thus stated is fully confirmed by history. The reformation by Luther was made on strictly religious grounds. He found an opposition between the decrees of the Pope and the commands of God, and it was the simple purpose, resolutely adhered to, to obey God rather than men, that caused Europe to rock to its centre. In the train of this religious reformation civil liberty followed, but became settled and valuable only as religious liberty was perfected. It was every where on the ground of conscience towards God that the first stand was taken, and in those countries where the struggle for religious liberty commenced but did not succeed, as in Spain and Italy, civil liberty has found no resting place for the sole of her foot to this day. It is conceded even by Hume that England owes her civil liberty to the Puritans, and the history of the settlement and progress of this country as a splendid exemplification of the principle in question, needs but to be mentioned here.

In speaking thus of the resistance of christian subjects to the government, perhaps I should guard against being misunderstood. In no case can it be a factious resistance. It cannot be stimulated by any of the ordinary motives to such resistance--by discontent, or passion, or ambition, or a love of gain. In no case can it show itself in the disorganizing, the aggressive, and in a free government, the suicidal spirit of mobs. Christians have in their eye a grand and a holy object, and all they wish is to go forward, without violating the rights of others, to its attainment. In so doing they set themselves in opposition to nobody, but merely exercise an inalienable right, and if others oppose them, they must still go forward and obey God, be the consequences what they may.

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We will now consider, as was proposed, the effect of an adherence to the principle of the text on the part of rulers. This becomes appropriate from the peculiar form of our government, and the relation which the rulers hold to the people. Rulers have indeed, in all countries, need to be exhorted to obey God, but when their will is supreme, and their power is independent of the people, there can be no propriety in exhorting them to obey God rather than men. In this country, however, this principle needs to be enforced upon legislators and rulers quite as much as upon the people, perhaps even more. It is at this point, if I mistake not, that we are to look for the danger peculiar to our institutions through those in authority. In other countries the danger is from the accumulation and tyrannical use of power. With us, limited as is the tenure of office, there is little danger of direct oppression. The danger is that those who are in office, and those who wish for it, will, for the sake of immediate popularity, lend the sanction of their names to doctrines and practices, which, if carried into effect, must destroy all government. How is it else that mobs should often escape with so little rebuke? How is it else that we hear such extravagant and disorganizing doctrines maintained in regard to the rights of a majority respecting property, and their power to set aside any guaranties of former Legislatures? Certainly the people are the fountain of power. They establish the government, they have a right to alter it; but when it is established, the state becomes personified through it, and its acts are to be consistent. When it is established, it _is_ a government, it has authority, it becomes God's institution, and those who administer it are to obey God rather than men. Wo to this country, when the people shall become to those in place, the object of adulation and of an affected idolatry. Wo to this country, when the people shall cease to reverence the government as the institution of God because it is established through them; when they shall suppose that it is in such a sense theirs, that they can supersede its acts in any way except by constitutional forms.

There is also another reason why the principle of the text ought to be especially regarded by the rulers of this country. So far as a nation can be considered and treated as a moral person, its character must be indicated by the acts of its rulers. Accordingly, we find that under every form of government, God has made nations responsible, as in the natural course of things they evidently must be, for what is done by their rulers. But if this is so in monarchical governments, where the agency of the people is so little connected with public acts, much more must it be so in one like ours. Here the rulers represent the people more immediately. They indicate in the eyes of the world, the moral condition of the people, and hence the peculiar responsibility of those who act under the oath of God in making and administering the laws of a representative government. If it can ever be required of God to vindicate his administration by the treatment of any people, it must be of one whose government is thus administered.

I observe then that the principle of the text should be adopted by rulers, because it furnishes the only broad and safe basis of political action. The adoption of this principle I consider the first requisite of a wise, in opposition to a cunning and temporizing statesman. Statesmanship, as distinguished from that skilful combination of measures which has for its object personal advancement, consists very much in a perception of the connexion there is between the prosperity of states, and the accordance of their laws and social institutions with the laws of justice, and benevolence, and temperance, which are the laws of God. The laws of God are uniform. The general tendencies which he has inwrought into the system will take effect, and nothing, not shaped in accordance with these can stand. Now it is an attempt to evade the effect of these tendencies by expedients in particular instances and for the sake of particular ends, that has been called statesmanship; while he only is the true statesman who sees what these tendencies are, and shapes his laws and institutions in accordance with them. The mere politician, if I may so designate him, perceives the movements which take place in the different parts of society relatively to each other, and is complacently skilful in adjusting them to his purposes, but he fails to see that general movement by which the whole is drifted on together, and which is bearing society to a point where elements that he had not dreamed of will be called into action, and where his petty expedients will become in a moment, but as the barriers of sand which the child raises upon the beach, when the tide begins to rise.

"I tremble for my country," said an American statesman, in a sentence, which, though awfully ominous in the connexion in which it was uttered, does equal honor to his head and his heart, "I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just." In that sentence are involved the principles of that higher statesmanship before which the expedients of merely expert men dwindle into nothing. He knew not how, or where, or when, the blow might fall; but he knew that there was always a joint in the harness of injustice, where the arrow of retribution, though it might seem to be speeding at a venture, would surely find its way. The higher movements of Divine Providence include the lower. Sooner or later all particular, and for a time apparently anomalous cases are brought under its general rules, and he has read the history of the past with little benefit, who has failed to see how the giant machinery of that Providence, in the intermediate spaces of which there is ample room for the free play of human agency, takes up the results of that agency as they are wrought out, and applies them to the execution of its own uniform laws, and the accomplishment of its own predicted purposes. These purposes, as declared by those divine records whose prophecies have now become history, were often such as no human sagacity, looking merely at second causes, could have anticipated, such as no human power then existing could have effected. Still, they were wrought out in conformity with that higher, and uniform, and all-encompassing movement with reference to which he who stands at the helm should guide the state, but to ascertain which, he must not take his bearings from the shifting headlands of circumstances, but must lift his eye to those eternal principles which abide ever the same. On this subject there is written upon the walls of the past a lesson for statesmen that needs no interpreter. Look at Babylon. Who is it that stands before its walls, and utters its doom? It is a despised Jew. And who is he that walks in pride upon those walls, and as he points to that mighty city as the centre of civilization and power, as combining every advantage of climate and of commerce, mocks at that doom? It is a politician of those days. The voice of the prophet is uttered, and it seems to pass idly upon the wind. The eye of sense sees no effect. No clouds gather, no lightnings descend. But that voice was not in vain. The waters of desolation heard it in their distant caves, and never ceased to rise till they had whelmed palace and tower and temple in one undistinguished ruin. Even now that voice abides there, and hangs as a spirit of the air over that desolation, and the Arabian hears it, warning him not to pitch his tent there, and the wild beast of the desart and the owl and the satyr hear it, and come up and dwell and dance there. Look at Jerusalem. Who is he that stands upon mount Olivet and weeps as he looks upon the city, and assigns, as the cause of his tears, that he would often have gathered her children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but she would not? Ah! what political Jew would have thought of _that_! He would have turned his attention to the purposes of governors and the intrigues of courts. Into his estimate of the causes that might affect the prosperity of Jerusalem, the moral temper of the nation as indicated by its rejection of Jesus of Nazareth, would not have entered. And yet, it was from this rejection, even in the way of natural consequence, from the want of those moral qualities which only a regard to his teachings could have produced among them, that the destruction of the Jews resulted. Nothing else could have destroyed their fool-hardy confidence in God, or have allayed those fiendish passions which led contending factions to fill the streets of the city with dead bodies even in the midst of the siege. But they would not have his spirit; they would not have him to reign over them, and we know that from the moment the words dropped from his lips, "Your house is left unto you desolate," that was a doomed city, and no political skill could have deferred the horrors of a siege and of a final overthrow, such as was not from the beginning of the world, no, nor ever shall be. And not only from Babylon and Jerusalem, but from the grave of every nation buried in antiquity, from Nineveh, and Tyre, and Edom, and Egypt, there comes a voice calling upon rulers to be "just, ruling in the fear of God." The true cause of their destruction was the attitude which they assumed towards the will, and worship, and people of God.

It is from these moral causes, between which and the result there is no immediate, nor, to the superficial eye, perceptible connexion, that I fear most for the stability of our institutions. It is when the sun is shining most brightly, and the face of the sky shows, it may be, not a single cloud, that the elements of the tornado are ascending most rapidly; and it is when men are in prosperity and in fancied security that they become presumptuous, and that a disastrous train of causes is silently put in motion, as resistless as the tornado. Upon this point of security, the eye of the true statesman is fixed. It is here that he sees the danger and provides against it; while the mere politician knows nothing, and sees nothing, till he begins, when it is too late, to see the lightnings, and hear the thunders of embodied wrath.

Can, then, the rulers of this country, in disregard of the warnings of all past time, with a full understanding of the claims and of the controlling agency of the great moral principles of God's government, go on in obedience to men rather than God, and make laws in disregard, or defiance of his will? If so, then, from the reciprocal influence of rulers and people, our experiment of self-government would seem to be hopeless. Then _must_ God scourge this people as he has scourged others. Then are the untoward symptoms of the present time, but as the white spot that shows the leprosy. Then will the altar of liberty decay, and the fire upon it will go out, and there will be heard by those who watch in her temple, as of old in the desecrated temple of God, the voice of its presiding spirit saying, "Let us go hence," and that temple, towards which the eyes of the nations were turned with hope, shall become the haunt of every unclean thing, and shall only wait the hand of violence to leave not one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down. In view of such consequences, I cannot but feel that the solemn words of our Saviour are as applicable to Legislators and rulers in their public, as in their private capacity. "And I say unto you, my friends, be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him which after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell, yea I say unto you, Fear him."

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To His Excellency the Governor, these sentiments are addressed, as putting him in remembrance, as he stands upon the threshold of a new official year, of that which ought ever to be uppermost in the mind of the Chief Magistrate of a Christian people, of the paramount authority of God, and of the necessity there is that all human legislation should coincide with the principles of his government. It is a great and a sacred trust which the people of this Commonwealth commit to their Chief Magistrate, and they expect it will be used in the fear of God, and for the good of this whole people. That trust is in tried hands, and we rejoice in the belief that it is safely deposited. Especially, may I be permitted to say, does it give me pleasure to welcome to the chair of state one in whose civic wreath literary honors are entwined, and who can forget the toils and lay aside the dignities of office, to cheer the young scholar on his way. Long may our literary institutions continue to raise up those who shall add to the dignity of office, the grace of learning, and the sanctity of private virtue; and who, while they devote their labors more particularly to the good of their own State, shall be regarded as belonging to the Union and to the world.