Note 776 — Chapter IV

Cf. Morse’s Sermon, pp. 15–17. The allusion to a hostile attitude towards the clergy, with which the extract closes, led Morse to dwell at length upon the anticlerical spirit of the whole French system. Cf. ibid., pp. 17 et seq. Wherever that system operates, there, Morse asserts, the clergy are the first to feel its power and to become the victims of its sanguinary revolutionizing spirit. Here in the United States this same malignant spirit is visibly at work. And all that the clergy have done to provoke this deadly hostility may be summed up in the phrase, “they have preached politics.” (Ibid., p. 18). They are now “censured and abused, and represented as an expense, useless, nay even, noxious body of men” for doing what “only twenty years ago they were called upon to perform as a duty.” (Ibid., p. 19). No clergyman of the Standing Order could possibly have felt keener resentment on account of the growing antagonism to that group of men than Jedediah Morse. His state of mind is a bit more clearly revealed by the contents of the following note by which the printed sermon was accompanied. This note, it should first be explained, was called out by the fact that a bill had been presented in a recent session of the Massachusetts legislature, providing for the suspension of the obligation to support the clergy of the Standing Order in all cases where it was possible for individuals to produce certificates, showing that they were otherwise contributing to the support of public worship. “Had this Bill passed into a law, it is easy to see that it would have justified and protected (as was no doubt the intention of the Bill, though by no means of all who may have voted for it) the disaffected, the irreligious, and the despisers of public worship and of the Christian Sabbath, in every town and parish, in withdrawing that support of the Christian ministry which the laws now oblige them to give.” (Note D, p. 49 of the Fast Sermon).