Excerpt from A Sermon, on Occasion of the Late Fire, in the City of New York

This is the language which I address to you, my brethren, on the unprecedented calamity of the past week, unprecedented, certainly, in this country. It has been compared with similar events in history, but as we cannot desire to exaggerate the evil which has befallen us, it may be proper here to state how entirely it falls short of those calamitous visitations of Providence. The four hundred streets, thirteen thousand houses, and eighty-nine churches of London, which were burnt in 1666, and the seventeen, almost eighteen thousand buildings burnt in Moscow, in 1812, left but a small portion of those cities remaining. The conflagration here has left us still a vigorous and wealthy city, with a spring of courage and elasticity strong enough to sustain it. Still it is a calamity from which, doubtless, it will take the city several years to recover itself, and it is a calamity, too, which does not press upon the ostensible and immediate sufferers alone, but which must be felt, more or less, by every citizen among us. At such a time, I think it is proper that our meditations in the sanctuary should bear some express reference to what is occupying so many minds, and is of such wide-spread and permanent consequence.

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