A Sermon Delivered Before His Excellency George N. Briggs, Governor

PUTNAM A Sermon. REV. GEORGE PUTNAM'S 1846. DELIVERED HE FORE HIS EXCELLENCY GEORGE N. BRIGGS, GOVERNOR, HIS HONOR JOHN REED, LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR, THE HONORABLE COUNCIL, AI»D THE LEGISLATURE OF MASSACHUSETTS, THE ANNUAL ELECTION, WEDNESDAY, JAN. 7, 1846. BY GEORGE PUTNAM, Minister of the First Church in Roxbury. Boston: DUTTON AND WENTWORTH, PRINTERS TO THB STATE, 1846. LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CA COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, January 8, 1846. Ordered, That Messrs. Page of New Bedford, Seaver of Boston, and Jones of Roxbury, be a Committee to present the thanks of the House of Representatives to the Rev. GEORGE PUTNAM, D. D., for the Discourse yesterday delivered by him before the Government of the Commonwealth, and to request a copy thereof for the press. CHAS. W. STOREY, Clerk. SERMON. CXIX Psalm, 46. I WILL SPEAK OF THY TESTIMONIES ALSO BEFORE KINGS, AND WILL NOT BE ASHAMED. THE Legislators and highest Magistrates of the State have come up to the Sanctuary, as their predecessors have done yearly for more than two centuries, to own the sovereignty of the righteous God, and to seek his blessing and guidance for themselves and for the people whose public interests have been entrusted to them. It is an appropriate observance ; and we trust that so goodly a spectacle in outward appearance expresses the intent of the heart. It is the Commonwealth, *as represented by its civil functionaries, acknowledging its religious dependence and obligations. The occasion furnishes its own topic ; one which, in some of its aspects and applications, 1 suppose has been accepted by all my predecessors in this service, and which I have no ambition to change for any more novel but less appropriate one. That topic is, — The connexion between the Religious and the Secular Interests of the Commonwealth. In considering this connexion, there is no occasion to raise the old distracted question of Church and State. That question we are happily rid of. It has vexed the nations of Christendom since the time of Constantine, and, under other names, before that time. Through many centuries, it has provoked almost continuous wars, and drenched the earth in blood. It has bred revolutions and changed dynasties. It has been the matter of chief concern to statesmen and ecclesiastics alike ; a chief subject of cabal in courts, and of agitation among the masses of mankind. It has brought princes to the block, and peopled wildernesses with exiles. And the question is not at rest now. It is still mixed up with all the politics of the Old World. There is hardly a government in Europe that is not at this moment sorely perplexed by it, hardly a community that is not more or less violently convulsed by it, hardly an empire whose political destiny may not be said to be involved in the issues of it. But that question of Church and State does not trouble us. That problem has been fully solved here. The Church survives, and the State survives, but there is no political connexion between them. They are bound up together indissolubly in the heart of the people, but without collision or embarrassment. The Church receives no support from the State, and yet the Church prospers. The State imposes no religion, constrains no man's conscience, does not hold itself responsible for forms of faith or modes of worship, and yet the State stands more secure in its civil stability than if it did. In this Commonwealth, nothing remains to be settled respecting the relations of Church and State considered as institutions. There is no occasion to discuss them. But the connexion between religion and all the substantial interests of the body politic, claims consideration everywhere, and nowhere more than in Massachusetts. That connexion has been vital here, and is so still. Massachusetts was the child of Christianity. She was cradled in the stormtossed Mayflower, and was baptized in fire and flood, in danger, gloom and suffering at the Rock of Plymouth. I know not what other State on earth has been so distinctly founded in Christian faith and principle as ours. The origin of this Commonwealth was characterized, in a degree wholly unexampled, by heroic enterprise and endurance, undertaken and borne for conscience sake, in devout earnestness, in the strength of prayer, in the invincibility of faith, and in unreserved, unwavering and all-sacrificing devotion to the truth of Christ and the righteousness of God. Not a reckless spirit of adventure or of conquest, not the expectation of riches, luxury or renown, brought our fathers hither ; but at the cost of every thing which the worldly heart holds dear and desirable in outward things, they came, because with all their hearts they did believe in God and the Gospel, and would have a place wherein they might worship and live as they believed, though it were an ice-bound rock and a howling wilderness — would have such a place, and plant their children in it, or starve and perish in the attempt. There was character in this. No State has had such a Christian founding. There is the stamp of truest greatness on our origin. We have the privilege and responsibility of illustrious descent. If a people had power to choose or change their own ancestry, our Commonwealth, J think, should hold on to hers, against all the world, from the flood unto this hour.

The Christian spirit and faith of the founders have given a Christian tone to the Massachusetts mind through the whole period of her histor^ The people, as a people, have ever loved and honored the faith, the principles and the institutions of that Gospel, the love of which brought their fathers hither. Ours has been from the first as eminently a Christian State as the world ever saw. The original influence has never died out. Other elements have come in, many and fast, to overlay it, but it was vital and has mixed with and modified them all. …