The Rights of Man in America Author:Theodore Parker Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE STATE OF THE NATION Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people. proverbs jj,, 34 We come together to-day, by the gov... more »ernor's proclamation, to give thanks to God for our welfare, not merely for our happiness as individuals or as families, but for our welfare as a people. How can we better improve this opportunity, than by looking a little into the condition of the people? And accordingly I invite your attention to a sermon of the State of this Nation. I shall try to speak of the condition of the nation itself, then of the causes of that condition, and, in the third place, of the Dangers that threaten, or are alleged to threaten, the nation. First, of our condition. Look about you in Boston. Here are a hundred and forty thousand souls, living in peace and in comparative prosperity. I think, without doing injustice to the other side of the water, there is no city in the Old World, of this population, with so much intelligence, activity, morality, order, comfort, and general welfare, and, at the same time, with so little of the opposite of all these. I know the faults of Boston, and I would not disguise them; the poverty, unnatural poverty, which shivers in the cellar; the unnatural wealth which bloats in the parlor; the sin which is hid in the corners of the jail; and the more dangerous sin which sets up Christianity for a pretense; the sophistry which lightens in thenewspapers, and thunders in the pulpit — I know all these things, and do not pretend to disguise them; and still I think no city of the Old World, of the same population, has so much which good men prize, and so little which good men deplore. See the increase of material wealth; the buildings for trade and for homes; the shops and ships. This year Boston will add to her p...« less