BA HARVARD 61*24 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by GOULD AND LINCOLN, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. PREFACE. THE true alliance between Politics and Religion is the lesson inculcated in this volume of Sermons, and apparent in its title, "THE PULPIT OF THE REVOLUTION." It is the voice of the Fathers of the Republic, enforced by their example. They invoked God in their civil assemblies, called upon their chosen teachers of religion for counsel from the Bible, and recognized its precepts as the law of their public conduct. The Fathers did not divorce politics and religion, but they denounced the separation as ungodly. They prepared for the struggle, and went into battle, not as soldiers of fortune, but, like Cromwell and the soldiers of the Commonwealth, with the Word of God in their hearts, and trusting in him. This was the secret of that moral energy which sustained the Republic in its material weakness against superior numbers, and discipline, and all the power of England. To these Sermons responses from the Pulpit the State affixed its imprimatur, and thus they were handed down to future generations with a two-fold claim to respect. the The Union of the colonies was a condition precedent to American Nationality. One nationality, and that of a Protestant people, was essential to constitutional liberty in America. If the colonies had become separate independencies at different times, America would have but repeated the history of European divisions and wars. The combination and balance of forces necessary to the grand result seems to have been calculated with the nicety of a formula. France, the champion of the Papal system of intellectual and political slavery and despotism, and England, the assertor of enlightened freedom, competed for the dominion of America. The red cross of St. George shielded the brotherhood of English Protestants from the extermination meditated by Papal France, whose military cordon reached along our northern and western frontiers, and thus insured to England the fealty of her Atlantic colonies, till, "in the fulness of time," France, by the treaty of 1763, relinquished Canada. Then the colonies, relieved from the hostile pressure, became restless under the restraints of dependency, and England was the only power whose strength and common relation to them could at once endanger the liberty of all, impel them to a league of domestic amity, and bind them in fraternal resistance to a common enemy. But a brief contest would have left danger of colonial disintegration; and the stupid obstinacy of George III. was necessary to prolong the war in order to blend the colonists, by communion under a national flag, in national feeling, and by general intercourse, common interests, and common sufferings. So God formed the fair Temple of American Liberty. In his Election Sermon of 1783, republished in this volume, President Stiles says, with sublime eloquence, that Jefferson "POURED THE SOUL OF THE CONTINENT INTO THE MONUMENTAL ACT OF INDEPENDENCE." The SOUL of the Revolution is embodied in documents like these, rather than in the statistics of sieges and battles, which were the fruits of their inspiration, and, under God, the vindication of their truth. The second Discourse in this volume is on the Repeal of the |