Excerpt from A Sermon: On Occasion of the Late Calamity at Washington

The following discourse was delivered the Sunday after tidings were received of the sudden death, by the bursting of a gun on board the Steam Frigate Princeton, of the Secretary of State, the Hon. Abel P. Upshur, the Secretary at War, the Hon. Thomas W. Gilmer, the Hon. Yirgil Maxcy, late American Minister at the Hague, Commodore Kennon, and the Hon. David Gardiner, lately a member of the Senate of the State of New York.

I need not say that in the course of remark to which I have been led in this sermon, no reflection is designed upon the distinguished members of the Government, who have fallen victims to this terrible disaster. If I had thought that their characters rendered them liable to moral censure, as political or private men, I should not have preached this sermon. It gives me great pleasure to record the testimonies which I hear on every hand, to their unblemished worth.

Nor is it to be inferred from what I have written, that I regard our own Government as worse than others-worse than the best of those which exist in other countries. It was not my business in this discourse, to draw any parallel of this nature. I conceive that political affairs everywhere, are separated to a lamentable extent from that conscience and sense of the divine authority which ought to govern them.

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