A Sermon Delivered before His Excellency Levi Lincoln, Governor, His Honor Thomas L. Winthrop, Lieutenant Governor

Your Excellency, and the gentlemen associated with you in the government, will receive our respectful salutations. Entering, as you do this day, on a new political year, it is unnecessary for me, perhaps it would be accounted officiousness, to remind you of the expectations of your constituents. They point you to the example of your illustrious predecessors, to a Hancock, a Bowdoin, and the Adamses of other days; they refer you to the Constitution, that charter of our rights and liberties which must never be violated, or touched but with reverence; they appeal to your consciences, which are as the echo of the divine mind. They also put under your protection and patronage their literary, moral and religious institutions, with a solemn injunction that you should be faithful to this charge. Sad presage will it be of coming evil, should prosperity ever make the people of this country blind or indifferent to the sources, whence that prosperity has been derived.

It is a melancholy reflection, that we can have no certainty of the continuance of any earthly blessing. Governments, even the best governments often contain in them the seeds of decay and death. It is by no means impossible, that our own may ere long be numbered among the republics, that have been. Let us then learn to put our trust in Him by whom nations rise and fall; and as we have no abiding city here, anxiously look for one hereafter which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.