(2) SERMON, PREACHED IN WORCESTER, ON SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1854. BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, Minister of the Worcester Free Church. REPRINTED, BY REQUEST, FROM THE WORCESTER DAILY SPY. BOSTON: JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY. 2 A SERMON, PREACHED IN WORCESTER, ON SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1854. BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, Minister of the Worcester Free Church. REPRINTED, BY REQUEST, FROM THE WORCESTER DAILY SPY. BOSTON: JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY. SERMON. Shall the iron break the Northern iron and the steel? JEREMIAH XV. 12. You have imagined my subject beforehand, for there is but one subject on which I could preach, or you could listen, today. Yet, how hard it is to say one word of that. You do not ask, at a funeral, that the bereaved mourners themselves should speak, but you call in one a little farther removed, to utter words of comfort, if comfort there be. But to-day is, or should be, to every congregation in Massachusetts, a day of funeral service we are all mourners and what is there for me to say? Yet, even in this gloom, the faculty of wonder is left; as at funerals, men ask in a low tone, around the coffin, what was the disease that smote this fair form, and are we safe from the infection? So we now ask, what is lost, and how have we lost it, and what have we left? Is it all gone, (men say,) that old New England heroism and enthusiasm? Is there any disinterested love of Freedom left in Massachusetts ? And then they think with joy, (as I do,) that, at least, Freedom did not die without a struggle, and that it took thousands of armed men to lay her in the grave at last. |