Note 223 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

This address may be found in the Independent Chronicle of July 4, 1799, and the Newburyport Herald of June 28, 1799. A further comment, of more than average significance, on the unparalleled degeneracy of the times may be found in the sermon preached by the Reverend William Harris, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, before the annual convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, held in Boston, May 28, 1799. Cf. A Sermon delivered at Trinity Church, in Boston. … By William Harris, rector of St. Michael’s Church, Marblehead, Boston, 1799. A decade and a half later Lyman Beecher preached his famous sermon on “Building Waste Places.” The impression which lingered in his mind concerning the period under survey is worthy of consideration. After having discussed the unhappy condition of religious life in the churches of New England during the first half of the eighteenth century, he said: “A later cause of decline and desolation has been the insidious influence of infidel philosophy. The mystery of iniquity had in Europe been operating for a long time. The unclean spirits had commenced their mission to the kings of the earth to gather them together to the battle of the great day of God Almighty. But when that mighty convulsion [Foot-note: The French Revolution] took place, that a second-time burst open the bottomless pit, and spread darkness and dismay over Europe, every gale brought to our shores contagion and death. Thousands at once breathed the tainted air and felt the fever kindle in the brain. A paroxysm of moral madness and terrific innovation ensued. In the frenzy of perverted vision every foe appeared a friend, and every friend a foe. No maxims were deemed too wise to be abandoned, none too horrid to be adopted; no foundations too deep laid to be torn up, and no superstructure too venerable to be torn down, that another, such as in Europe they were building with bones and blood, might be built…. The polluted page of infidelity everywhere met the eye while its sneers and blasphemies assailed the ear…. The result was a brood of infidels, heretics, and profligates—a generation prepared to be carried about, as they have been, by every wind of doctrine, and to assail, as they have done, our most sacred institutions.” Cf. Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, etc., vol. i, pp. 239, 240.