A Sermon Preached Before the Honorable House of Representatives

Mr. GORDON's SERMON PREACHED before the House of REPRESENTATIVES, JULY 19th, 1775.

Attest.

Samuel Freeman, Clerk.

AN ELECTION-SERMON.

I HAVE no other apology to offer, for my venturing to appear here upon the present occasion, nor do I desire a better, than what arises from the concern which the late honourable Provincial Congress had in promoting it. I am conscious they could not chuse me to this service, in preference to my reverend fathers and brethren in the ministry, from an apprehension of superior abilities; but that it was owing to a special connexion with them, and their persuasion that I had a zeal, for the cause of liberty, the Continent in general, and the welfare of this Colony in particular, answerable to their own most ardent wishes. I shall endeavour to support the justness of that persuasion, by exercising a faithfulness that would have suited the earliest days of the Country's settlement; and shall flatter myself with the most candid allowances from so respectable an audience, as oft as my knowledge is surpassed by zeal, considering that the last should predominate, now that the times call for vigorous unabating exertions.

p. 6The text, upon which I shall ground what I have Further to say, you have in these words of the prophet Jeremiah, recorded in the 30th chap. 20, 21. ver. Their children also shall be as aforetime, and their congregation shall be established before me, and I will punish all that oppress them; and their nobles shall be of themselves—the sentence is not perfected without the addition of—and their governor shall proceed from the midst of them—but the wisdom of the Continental Congress, in which we cheerfully confide, hath restrained me from making it a part of the text. In an abler hand, and some ◊itter time, it may of itself, single and alone, suffice for a complete text, Amen. So let it be.

SIN having entred the world, depraved mankind, and given a pernicious bias to every human heart, the best constitutions, whether civil or sacred, do after a while degenerate, the spirit of them departs, they retain only their outward forms, and by degrees lose even those. That millenian state, in which many believe, could not continue vigorous and flourishing, through the period of a thousand years, without the constant miraculous interposition of divine power, in restraining and keeping down the corrupt disposition of mortal men.

p. 6The Jewish establishment, both in church and state, was the ordinance of heaven given in an uncommon manner, and, at the time, the best in the whole world; but it was soon corrupted, and at length so enormously, that the patience of God would not spare the people. The Jews were exercised with heavy divine judgments for their p. 7various transgressions in civil and sacred matters, and at last carried away captive to a distant country. However, it was not their destruction, but reformation that the Lord Jehovah intended; and therefore, to encourage their repentance, by letting them see that their case was not desperate, and keep them from fainting under their sore trials, the prophet Jeremiah is commissioned to deliver to them the following gracious soul-reviving message, viz. "Thus saith the Lord, behold, I will bring again the captivity of Jacob's tents, and have mercy on his dwelling places: and the city shall be builded upon her own heap—her former foundation—and the palace shall remain after the manner thereof. And out of them shall proceed thanksgiving, and the voice of them that make merry: and I will multiply them, and they shall not be few: I will also glorify them, and they shall not be small. Their children also shall be as aforetime, and their congregation or assembly (for they are synonimous terms) shall be established before me, and I will punish all that oppress them: and their nobles—leading men of rank, the intermediate persons between the assembly and first magistrate in the land—shall be of themselves; and their governor shall proceed from the midst of them, and I will cause him to draw near, and he shall approach unto me: for who is this that engaged his heart to approach unto me, saith the Lord? And ye shall be my people, and I will be your God." Here it's promised the Jews, by Him, whose veracity might be relied on and whose power could accomplish the even◊, tha◊ their affairs should be brou◊ht back to their original state, that they should possess p. 8their old form of goverment, and that they should have the satisfaction of seeing those punished, who had instrumentally occasioned their calamities, for that the Lord himself would punish them.

p. 8A people, when under national judgments or the iron rod of oppression, cannot help looking back to those times, when the constitution was in a prosperous and healthy condition—nor having an attachment to those modes of government, to which they had been long habituated, and which they had experienced to be peculiarly favourable to the common rights of human nature, and to have secured them a greater share of the same, than is enjoyed by mankind in general. And when they are encouraged by a divine promise, to look back to them as what they shall be re-possessed of, they must feel the most pleasing emotions, next to those arising from actual enjoyment.

The Jews are told in our text, that their children should be as aforetime. The word children doth not necessarily refer to minors, being frequently used in a much larger sense: Thus the children of Benjamin means the tribe of Benjamin—the children of Israel and the children of Judah, the people of Israel and the people of Judah. Their children may therefore intend the body of the Jewish nation; and their being as aforetime. their enjoying that former freedom and prosperity with which they were acquainted in the best days of their political existence.

The best times that the Jewish people ever knew were, I apprehend, those of the judges; before p. 9their taste for grandeur, and foolish fondness for being like neighbouring states, made them weary of their plain, simple modes and manners, and put them upon chusing a royal government. During the period of the judges, they were once and again, for their iniquities, given into the hand of oppressors: but when their vices did not bring them under the divine judgments, they were in the full enjoyment of liberty. Every man's house was his castle—every man's property was his own—he exercised a supreme authority under, and over his own vine, and his own fig-tree; and, wherein he trespassed not upon the rights of his fellow creatures, nor interfered with the Mosaic establishment, did that which was right in his own eyes, without being subject to the controul even of a crowned head, much less of crown officers; for in those days there was no king in Israel. He could plant or pluck up; could build or destroy; could go here and there; could exercise dominion over the fishes of the sea, no less than over the beasts of the field; and could trade where and in what he would.