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Plymouth Pulpit:

SERMONS

PREACHED IN

Plymouth Church, Brooklyn,

BY

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

FROM ELLINWOOD'S STENOGRAPHIC REPORTS.

VOLUME II.

March-September, 1874.

BOSTON:

The Pilgrim Press

CHICAGO.

COPYRIGHT IN 1875, BY

J. B. FORD & COMPANY

258608

CHARLES SUMNER.

“And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning: afterward thou shalt be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city."-ISAIAH i., 26.

The best gift of God to nations is the gift of upright men-especially upright men for magistrates, statesmen, and rulers. How bountiful soever the heavens may be; how rich the earth may be in harvests; though every wind of heaven waft prosperity to its ports, till the land is crowded with warehouses stuffed to repletion with treasure, that country is poor whose citizens are not noble, and that republic is poor which is not governed by noble men selected by its citizens.

The signs of decay in the life of a nation show themselves as soon as anywhere else in the character of the men who are called to govern it. When they seek their own ends, and not the public weal; when they abandon principles, and administer according to the personal interest of cliques and parties; when they forsake righteousness, and call upon greedy, insatiable selfishness for counsel; and when the laws and the whole framework of the government are but so many instruments of oppression and of wrong, then the nation cannot be far from decadence. When God means to do well by a nation that has backslidden, among the earliest tokens of his beneficent intent is the restoration of men of integrity and of honor-men who live for their fellows, and not for themselves.

SUNDAY EVENING, March 15, 1874. LESSON: Psa. xxili. HYMNS: (Plymouth Col. jection). Nos. 865, 982, 1.004.

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