On the occasion of the general fast, May 4, 1797, at West Springfield, Massachusetts, the Reverend Joseph Lathrop preached a sermon to which he gave the expressive title, God’s Challenge to Infidels to Defend Their Cause.[213] The inspiration of the discourse was drawn from the conviction that “this is a day when infidelity appears with unusual boldness, and advances with threatening progress, to the hazard of our national freedom and happiness, as well as to the danger of our future salvation.”[214] According to this interpreter of the signs of the times, the dissemination of infidelity was to be regarded as the outstanding fact in the life of America, as well as in the life of the world.
An unusually lugubrious view of the situation was that taken by the Reverend Nathan Strong, in the sermon which he preached, April 6, 1798, on the occasion of the Connecticut state fast. In the eyes of this modern Jeremiah, the situation was desperate almost beyond remedy:
There are dark and ominous appearances. I do not mean the wrath and threatening of any foreign nations whatever, for if we please God and procure him on our side, we may bless his providence, and hear human threatenings without emotion. But the dark omens are to be found at home. In our hearts, in our homes, in our practice, and in a licentious spirit disposed to break down civil and religious order. In affecting to depend on reason in the things of religion, more than the word of God; so as to reject all evangelical holiness, faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the ministrations of the spirit in the heart. In substituting anarchy and licentiousness, in the room of rational and just liberty. In supposing that freedom consists in men’s doing what is right in their own eyes; even though their eyes look through the mist of wicked ambition and lust. Here is our real danger, and these are the omens that augur ill to us.[215]
Far less subjective in its analysis was the sermon which the now celebrated minister of Medford, the Reverend David Osgood, preached not many days later, on the occasion of the national fast.[216] Once more the eyes of his hearers were invited to contemplate the horrible spectacle abroad. It had now become certain that the legislators of France had abolished the Christian religion. Preposterous indeed was the idea of those who supposed that they were engaged in anything so beneficent as “stripping the whore of Babylon, pulling down the man of sin, destroying popery,”[217] and making way for the introduction of the millennium. That which they had set their hearts upon was to bring it to pass that Christ and His religion should no longer be remembered upon the earth. The French republicans were so many infernals who had broken loose from the pit below.[218] Their profession of principles of liberty and philanthropy were deceptive in the highest degree. They sought to fraternize with other nations merely to seduce them. Their emissaries employed the arts of intrigue and corruption, they were charged to stir up factions, seditions, rebellions, so as to disorganize established governments and make them more readily the prey of the infamous French government.[219]
That these were not the pulpit utterances of men of peculiarly morbid dispositions, who stood apart from the main currents of thought and life in their day, would seem to be proved by the following instances of formal declarations issued by associations of churches.
On the 17th of May, 1798, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, then in session in the city of Philadelphia, issued an address to the members of its various congregations scattered throughout the country, urging attention to the extraordinarily gloomy aspect of affairs. The situation was interpreted as follows:
The aspect of divine providence, and the extraordinary situation of the world, at the present time, indicate that a solemn admonition, by the ministers of religion and other church officers in General Assembly convened, has become our indispensable duty. When formidable innovations and convulsions in Europe threaten destruction to morals and religion; when scenes of devastation and bloodshed, unexampled in the history of modern nations, have convulsed the world; and when our own country is threatened with similar calamities, insensibility in us would be stupidity; silence would be criminal. The watchmen on Zion’s walls are bound by their commission to sound a general alarm, at the approach of danger. We therefore desire to direct your awakened attention, towards that bursting stream, which threatens to sweep before it the religious principles, institutions, and morals of our people. We are filled with a deep concern and an awful dread, whilst we announce it as our real conviction, that the eternal God has a controversy with our nation, and is about to visit us in his sore displeasure. A solemn crisis has arrived, in which we are called to the most serious contemplation of the moral causes which have produced it, and the measures which it becomes us to pursue.[220]
As to the “moral causes” referred to, the address proceeds to define them as “a general defection from God and corruption of the public principles and morals,” the evidences whereof are such as a general dereliction of religious principle and practice, a departure from the faith and simple purity of manners for which the fathers were remarkable, a visible and prevailing impiety, contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and “an abounding infidelity.”[221]
The same year, on May 31, the Congregational clergy of Massachusetts, assembled in annual convention, “without a dissenting vote” adopted an address to their churches, wherein they expressed their deep sorrow and concern on account of “those atheistical, licentious and disorganizing principles which have been avowed and zealously propagated by the philosophers and politicians of France; which have produced the greatest crimes and miseries in that unhappy country, and like a mortal pestilence are diffusing their baneful influence even to distant nations.”[222] A year later the same body of clergy, again assembled in their annual convention, formulated and later published an address similar in tone, but strongly emphasizing the American aspects of the case. The growing disbelief and contempt of the Gospel are loudly lamented; the lack of exemplary piety and morality even among the members of churches, and the dissipation, irreligion, and licentiousness prevalent among the youth of the day, are accounted to be of so much weight as to constitute a national apostasy. “The voice of God to us in these events,” continues the address, “is emphatically this: Come out of the infidel, antichristian world, my people; that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”[223]