they were indebted for
nothing. The country was the gift of heaven, and God alone is their Lord
and Sovereign.

The time, sir, will come when you, in a melancholy hour, shall reckon up
your miseries by your murders in America. Life, with you, begins to wear
a clouded aspect. The vision of pleasurable delusion is wearing away,
and changing to the barren wild of age and sorrow. The poor reflection
of having served your king will yield you no consolation in your
parting moments. He will crumble to the same undistinguished ashes with
yourself, and have sins enough of his own to answer for. It is not the
farcical benedictions of a bishop, nor the cringing hypocrisy of a court
of chaplains, nor the formality of an act of Parliament, that can change
guilt into innocence, or make the punishment one pang the less. You may,
perhaps, be unwilling to be serious, but this destruction of the goods
of Providence, this havoc of the human race, and this sowing the world
with mischief, must be accounted for to him who made and governs it.
To us they are only present sufferings, but to him they are deep
rebellions.

If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of wilful and
offensive war. Most other sins are circumscribed within narrow limits,
that is, the power of one man cannot give them a very general extension,
and many kinds of sins have only a mental existence from which no
infection arises; but he who is the author of a war, lets loose the
whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
We leave it to England and Indians to boast of these honors; we feel no
thirst for such savage glory; a nobler flame, a purer spirit animates
America. She has taken up the sword of virtuous defence; she has bravely
put herself between Tyranny and Freedom, between a curse and a blessing,
determined to expel the one and protect the other.

It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. And if there was
ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is
now engaged. She invaded no land of yours. She hired no mercenaries to
burn your towns, nor Indians to massacre their inhabitants. She
wanted nothing from you, and was indebted for nothing to you: and thus
circumstanced, her defence is honorable and her prosperity is certain.

Yet it is not on the justice only, but likewise on the importance of
this cause that I ground my seeming enthusiastical confidence of our
success. The vast extension