Christian Citizenship and Honest Legislation

Go ogle CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP AND HONEST LEGISLATION. S E E M N DELIVERED BEFORE HIS EXCELLENCY HENRY eJ. a^RDISTER, H I S H O N O R - HENRY W. BENCHLEY, THE HONORABLE COUNCIL, LEGISLATURE OF MASSACHUSETTS, AT THE ANNUAL ELECTION, WEDNESDAY, Jan. 6, 1858. By F. D. HUNTINGTON, D. D., PEEACHER TO THE UNIVERSITY AT CAMBRIDGE. BOSTON: WILLIAM WHITE, PRINTER TO THE STATE. 1858. Hosted by Hosted by House of Kepresentatives, Jan. 12, 1858. Ordered, That four thousand copies of the Election Sermon, deli ered by Kev. F. D. Huntington, D. D., before the Executive and tl two Branches of the Legislature, be printed for the use of the Legislate WILLIAM STOWE, Clerk. Hosted byLjOOQle That part of the Sermon, included under the second head, was not spoken at the delivery. Hosted byLjOOQle SEEMON. Luke vii. 5. For he loveth our nation, and lie hath built us a synagogue. The two thoughts are joined, not accidentally, not artificially, but by a natural law. In the habit of the Hebrew mind, which was speaking, — in the character of the public-spirited officer for whom that praise and that plea were spoken, — those ideas lived harmoniously together, a bond of organic unity between them, and each more vital for the other. By the march you have just made from the State House to this sanctuary, you have given another deliberate confession, and offered one more public symbol, that they were both true, and that their mutual relation is a truth also. The love of country and reverence for God : their conjunction here Was no rhetorical device, nor local J udaistic sentiment, but a permanent, philosophical, unchangeable reality. It was not a fact then for the first time, or the last. No matter though the centurion was a citizen only by adoption. The association was just as vivid, for that, between the people's good and the worship of the Most High. It is not the rule, but it happens, — it happened then, — that the foreigner, by the very freshness with which the genius of an advanced economy salutes him, and by its contrast with oppressive institutions that he has outgrown, enters farther into its real meaning than the sluggish and sordid native. Probably the centurion was more profoundly imbued with the central life of the Hebrew system than many of the straitest of the Pharisees. It seems he was discontented with Paganism, and found his aspirations encouraged and his affections attracted, by the sublime monotheism of Moses ; it seems he loved a slave, and was so catholic as to bestow his liberality on a nation of which he was not born ; it seems he was so modest and reverent as to shrink from letting the Lord of life come under his roof These are not slight nor provincial virtues, in any age or land, certainly not too common in our own. Nor ought it to surprise us to find, in a nature so lofty and comprehensive, a practical faith that patriotism and religion, — the State House and the synagogue, — belong together.

We can go farther yet. Down at their lowest roots and life-springs, these principles not only interlock, but become essentially one and the same. Patriotism, that is, when it is a principle, and not a mere blind instinct of the blood, is an outgrowth and a part of the faith and honor of the Almighty. Analyze it, and you will see it so. For patriotism is only disinterested devotion to the justice, the power, the protection, the right, embodied, after a certain fashion and degree, in the State and its subjects. It is not attachment to the parchment of a constitution, to the letter of an instrument, to the visible insignia of authority, to a strip of painted cloth at a mast-head, to a mass of legal precedents and traditions, nor always to the person of the sovereign. It is not a personal interest in the people of the nation, for the most of one's fellow-citizens are unknown, and the few that are met may awaken no special regard. Instituted ideas, — as justice, power, protection, — organized into a national government, and lifted up for the defence of the country, are what inspire an intelligent loyalty, and the same ideas have their perfect embodiment in the person of God. On the other hand, religion, veneration for the Creator, involves a consistent regard for the welfare of great bodies of his family. By the laws of the human nature he has fashioned, this will mount to enthusiasm, as our relations to any one body grow intimate, or look back to an antiquity, or own a history of common sufferings. Less elevated elements may intermix. But whichever you take first, — the feeling for the State, or for the God of States, — the other clings to it, and comes logically with it. So the State, through you, its temporary representatives and civil ministers, bends here to-day before the Euler of rulers. Legislation comes to the Church, not primarily to hear a sermon from a man, but to Hosted byLjOOQle adore the Supreme Lawgiver, and to supplicate light. Our Fathers, best builders of empire, on the whole, that the world has seen since the Great Emancipator of Israel compacted a Commonwealth of fugitives, of which Jehovah was the head, — our Fathers, taking tha t for their model, when they ordained this ceremony of election worship, believed in it. With them the ceremony was a faith. If it ever sinks into a mere routine, — the ghastly effigy of a departed sincerity, — it will be because some generation has not honesty and courage to drop the form with the life, but is willing to keep credit with superstition by continuing, for considerations of policy, a sanctimonious pageant out of which the soul has ebbed away. For, saying nothing either of religion or of patriotism, it is only when man is emptied of his manliness, that he consents to go through a solemn performance that is emptied of its heart. And, let it be added just here, when there are cant and make-believe at Church, it will not be strange if presently there are fraud and falsehood at the State House ; for it can scarcely be expected with reason that men who undertake a deception on the Omniscient, and act a part before themselves, will be restrained from overreaching one another, and cheating the people.