A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Daniel Webster: Preached at the Melodeon, October 31, 1852

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B. B. Mussey & Company, 1853 - History - 108 pages
An uncomplimentary memorial emphasizing negative aspects of Webster's Seventh of March speech and criticizing certain personal qualities and habits.

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Page 50 - Christian states, in whose hearts there dwell no sentiments of humanity or of justice, and over whom neither the fear of God nor the fear of man exercises a control. In the sight of our law, the African slave-trader is a pirate and a felon ; and in the sight of Heaven, an offender ' far beyond the ordinary depth of human guilt.
Page 27 - Let our conceptions be enlarged to the circle of our duties. Let us extend our ideas over the whole of the vast field in which we are called to act. Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. And by the blessing of God may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of wisdom, of peace, and of liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration, forever.
Page 26 - Lastly, our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be trusted on any other foundation than religious principle, nor any government be secure which is not supported by moral habits.
Page 50 - I hear the sound of the hammer — I see the smoke of the furnaces where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who, by stealth, and at midnight, labour in this work of hell, foul and dark, as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture.
Page 101 - But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.
Page 70 - Pure Religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.
Page 51 - I believe it is entirely willing, to fulfil all existing engagements and all existing duties, to uphold and defend the Constitution as it is established, with whatever regrets about some provisions which it does actually contain. But to coerce it into silence, to endeavor to restrain its free expression, to seek to compress and confine it, warm as it is, and more heated as such endeavors would inevitably render it, — should this be attempted, I know nothing, even in the Constitution or in the Union...
Page 58 - This high constitutional privilege, I shall defend and exercise, within this House, and without this House, and in all places ; in time of war, in time of peace, and at all times.
Page 58 - Important as I deem it to discuss, on all proper occasions, the policy of the measures at present pursued, it is still more important to maintain the right of such discussion, in its full and just extent. Sentiments lately sprung up, and now growing fashionable, make it necessary to be explicit on this point. The more I perceive a disposition to check the freedom of inquiry by extravagant and unconstitutional pretences, the firmer shall be the tone in which I shall assert, and the freer the manner...
Page 31 - United States, as well as for purposes of domestic regulation. We spurn the idea that the free, sovereign, and independent state of Massachusetts is reduced to a mere municipal corporation, without power to protect its people, or to defend them from oppression, from whatever quarter it comes.

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