 how is everybody today excellent excellent welcome here I am Phyllis Drury I am the president of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum Board and so that's why I get to stand up here and welcome you to our little museum you'll see some things are in sort of disarray because last night we had a very exciting harvest dinner which some of you were at and I think it was a very good program for everybody's people seem to enjoy it and we had a lot of people here so that was good to see people out and playing games as well as having good food so we think all that came and and hope that maybe if we do it again next year more people so what's going on today today we are fortunate enough to have Paul Gillis a historian of Vermont legal history a co-founder of the Vermont Judicial Judical right no judicial sorry it's my age historical society and the Vermont Institute for government a former Vermont Deputy Secretary of State he is presently the moderator of the town of Berlin and a partner in the Montpelieu law firm Tarrant Gillis Merriman and Richardson Paul has published numerous books and articles including uncommon law ancient roads and other ruminations on Vermont legal history published in 213 by the Vermont Historical Society some of you may remember Paul from his two previous appearances at the Homestead all rise standing up to Vermont judicial history and January of 2014 and Vermont's least lands of January of 2017 please join me in welcoming Paul thank you and thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk about something that's been compelling in my life the last six months I finished history of the courts of Vermont and it's now somewhere deep in the editing process and I felt as though I needed to go on to something entirely different I've been writing about legal history in Vermont legal history for 30 years and I thought we should try cleansing the palette trying something different and it are all along people that I've talked to have known about this source this elections election sermons set there's there was 60 61 sermons given between 1778 and 1834 then they stopped and 18 years later they tried it again for three four years it was a one-hour sermon often given it would be given to the governor lieutenant governor council legislature and all the ministers that could come from the state and it would be you'd most of the ministers would know a year in advance so this would be a big deal they would be working on this would be the most important sermon that they ever gave in the most public place in front of all these other ministers who couldn't help I suppose but judge them so we have this very ripe and by the way most of these sermons are available online so you can read them yourselves but before I get into that subject because we're here in Ethan's home I thought I should at least put into context where Ethan is coming from Ethan would if his spirit is around today he would be driving us out of here because he didn't like churches and ministers he was against those but he was a deist and that's you can buy his reason the only Oracle of man in there I recommend it it's not well written and it's kind of goofy in places but he was he says in that book that he has never read anything else this is his own idea it came out of nowhere and I think it's important because actually some of the sermons talk about deism but deism is not atheism the way they call it to be so the deist deism is a is a religion they deists deists read the Bible although they didn't believe it to be divinely inspired they have nothing to do with miracles Jesus was not divine and there was no Trinity no such thing as miracles these deists worshipped God and in worship found a moral basis for a living in reason now this did not go over well with some of the traditionalists Timothy Dwight of Yale called it contemptible plagiarism a very hackneyed worn out half rotten dogma of the English deistical writers he said reason was the first formal publication the US openly directed against the Christian religion Ben Franklin George Washington Thomas Jefferson they were all deists and of course Ethan was the most notorious he in that book if you read it he troubled by Noah's Ark he doesn't buy that he thinks that Sunday should be Saturday should be Sunday and Sunday should not be the Holy Day and he said in that book I am no Christian except mere baptism make me one now he was raised in a family where they read the Bible every day and he learned the Bible and the and the phrases of it and what's most notable about Ethan Allen is that he had this remarkable way of saying things that were sort of an aphoristic statement so one of the more famous lines to the Attorney General of New York after he loses the big case he says the gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills and the Attorney General says what what's that mean and he says you come up and I'll show you what I mean that's straight out of the book of Kings now in the 1816 Reverend Samuel Austin one of our election seminar sermon folks who was also the president UVM at the time called deism earthy sensual and devilish making a combined and formidable effort to overturn Christianity and to substitute in its place the worship of reason or rather to support an unqualified atheism and in 1817 Reverend Panayas Peck said for religion to have a universal influence it must be free of idolatry it must reject efforts to overturn Christianity and to substitute in its place the worship of reason and there are others now one way to look at this subject I think and I can't help but say that this concept of reason as opposed to the traditional Christian Protestant Christian view of things is necessarily reflected in the sermons themselves in fact you could look at the sermons in many cases as an attempt to apply reason to justify the Christian religion now so you have this so now I have gone to see I was just playing around on the net this morning and I found a headline that said that of all the states Vermont has the worst church attendance in the country it's 17% show up regularly and then I found another which said that the well they were checking to see what people thought so 41% of Vermonters are absolutely certain of a belief in God 26% are fairly certain and 21% don't now that's not a deist or or the traditional Protestants and as far as going to heaven 47% say they're likely to go I think I've got that wrong 56% believe in heaven 37% don't 38% believe in hell and 53% don't so there's a kind of favoritism there so now today we think of the process of the federal Constitution separating church and state we have the same thing in the in the Vermont Constitution and yet in early Vermont we had a system which was unusually un-economical ecumenical so in order for you to serve in the Legislature you had to take an oath that said you believe in one God the creator of governor the governor and of the universe the rewarder of good and the Punisher of the wicked and you'd acknowledge that the scriptures of the Old and New Testament were given by divine inspiration and you had to own and profess the Protestant religion and then beginning in 1791 with a article in the Constitution that says we should separate church and state we declared that all people in a town must pay for the first settled minister and the church despite what they felt so they were obliged to support the ministry at that point that and this stayed in effect until 1807 and during the course of these sermons that we're reading this comes up frequently the Congregationalists like this law because most of the churches are Congregationalists of Vermont and they're the beneficiaries of this and the Baptists hate it and they they think it's wrong but the overriding theme of these sermons is this relationship between religion and government some of these sermons are not what you would call barn burners but some of them are really quite wonderful in the way they look at things and so I thought maybe I could take some time to just go over some of it with you now the one of the things that is important to remember here is that none of the ministers wanted to step into the subject of being lobbyists they thought it was a little out of their place so but what were they to talk about well they were going to talk about the frequent themes are you folks who are serving in these offices are examples of good Christian life and if you mess up the government will topple there's an unusual amount of tolerance for other religions except not if you're Catholic Catholics are regarded as un-Christian somehow and they can take their their hits in this process I just want to start just to lay this out because even though we have 61 sermons we have 59 ministers because two of them gave the minute the sermon twice but even before that in the Constitutional Convention in July of 1777 the Reverend Aaron Hutchinson gave a sermon before they started working on the Constitution and it said this now one of the things I do here is I'm reading the sermons and then I'm also learning about the the ministers themselves and of Hutchinson it was said that it was believed by those who knew him in Massachusetts in Vermont that if the New Testament had been lost he could have been restored it from memory in the original Greek these ministers are the most educated people we have in most these towns all but more than half of them have gone to college and some of them have gone to and over seminary Hutchinson is here we are it's July of 1777 Burgoyne is bringing his troops down the up the lake I guess you have to say because he's coming to the south and the the whole state is a war zone and he speaks from his heart he says I know the heart of the oppressed for I myself have been severely scourged by that iron rod my life has been threatened and endangered for no other cause but sacrificing my merits and risking my honor in life in defense of my injured oppressed country nothing gives me greater pleasure than to be happily instrumental to undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke of injustice and oppression so we have a variety of different individuals in these ministers one of my most one of the most interesting I think is Azariah Chandler who is the minister in weightsfield now he is one of three of these ministers who received notice that he was to give the election sermon the night before now this would have put me into a sort of panic but he was an unusual man he was a rough character he believed in the hard life he in the winter time he would go out and cut a hole in the ice in the pond and and immerse himself in it so that he could feel this pain he would routinely go barefoot he slept on the ground in the grass any time of the year and when he was in college he had he went to UVM and when he arrived at the class he didn't have any shoes on and they said hey you have to have shoes so the next day he went out and brought his shoes in over his shoulder and they said you can see the kind of mind is now you have to have your shoes on your feet so the next day he came in and he had tied his shoes on top of his feet so he's barefoot all the time his wife said I can't make him where you know so he gets up the morning of this sermon in weightsfield he walks the 20 miles barefoot to Montpelier where he's giving this sermon and he walks into the hotel which was probably the pavilion hotel at the time and everyone laughs hysterically at him they give him a hard time he by the way he explains this in his own writings by saying that he suspected he had been born barefoot but they think of him as just this you know this room I think and his first lines recognizing that the man who was supposed to be there was the president of UVM and it becomes sick this voice comes out of this barefoot crude man most deeply my beloved friends do I participate in your regret for the afflictive dispensation which has deprived you of your expected labors of abler hands and has drawn me from an obscurity equally appropriate and beloved to officiate on so public and so interesting an occasion I didn't want I I'm giving voice to these sermons for the first time in more than 200 years and I have come to cherish the language and cherish the individuals enough so that I imagine that at some point I'm going to try to persuade the friends of the state house to have a an evening of like a farmer's night where we could get the leading pastors of Vermont to give pieces of these sermons so that we could actually hear them but here is Chandler in later talking about nations where superstition reigns whose faith teaches them to expect more from the mass the crucifix the absolution of the priest or the intercession of a dead saint I think he's talking about the Catholics then from internal purity and practical godliness whose earliest maxims teach them to yield their bodies to the monarchs will and their souls to the guidance upon typical infallibility where a villainy is so common and integrity so rare that's scarcely an individual but what would in a moment acquire intelligence to understand or virtue courage unanimity or even conscience to maintain their rights as I said I only have we only have 51 of the sermons three or four of them were never published the rest were published and yet they've disappeared from the face of the earth and it's one of the striking things about this study is what they say about us after we're gone now these are mostly well they're all men they're all ministers most of them have been are in a church for 30 or 40 years they've spent their time giving sermons you know they something to give two sermons a week at least one of the ministers calculated at the end of his life he had given 8,000 sermons in his time and he also counted up the number of funerals and weddings and baptisms and services that he had held so these are professionals these are people who are used to giving a sermon now a sermon for all of these sermons almost every one of them follows a set plan election sermons have been given in Connecticut in Massachusetts for 150 years before we started doing it and one of the questions was well how did we ever start to do it it turned out that one of our original founders Thomas didn't then serve for seven years in the in the Connecticut Legislature and would have sat through seven election sermons so the first time we have a sermon opportunity which is 1778 in March we have the Reverend Peter Powers who's who comes from hmm I can't remember where he comes from he has an interesting background in that he he was asked at one time by the abnaki Indians were in the area if it would be all right if they killed one of their own in the courthouse and whether that was in God's will this is a man named Tumuluk his parents were and you'll know these names Joe and Molly famous for giving names of pawns over in the Marshfield area and he had killed a man and been forgiven because he was he had killed his girlfriend he was trying to kill her suitor and he missed and so they said that was okay that was strike one and then he went to kill someone else and there was some other reason for giving but the third time he did it was just too much so they said well we're going to have to have our little tribal council and we're going to have tried and they found that he was guilty and that he should be punished by it being executed but they felt uncomfortable living in Vermont a subject of they were part of this community so they went to the judges in Newbury of the of the Orange County court and they said would this be all right and they said well it's your law sure you can use the lobby and then they went to powers and they said is this okay is it and he took an evening and he prayed on it and he said he thought that was right too so the where it worked was the father of the man he had killed put a bullet in his head and he was buried on the lawn outside of that courthouse and about 20 years ago when they were repairing or redoing the landscaping they plowed his body up so that this has actually been referred but Peter Powers was more than just that and just to give you an idea what do they look like his dress on the Sabbath was a curse cursey mirror coat with breeches and stockings a three cornered hat a fleece like wig a white band and white silk gloves but he wasn't a proud man a man named way while bringing Reverend Peter Powers goods from Charleston to Newbury broke through the ice while reaching the on Pompano sec and said that is a cursed hole and this was reported to the Reverend who admonished him demanding that he repent why said Mr. Way did not the Lord curse the earth for man sin yes said powers well replied way do you think that little devilish on Pompano sec was an exception Mr. Powers turned away and exclaimed oh mr. Way mr. Way I stand in fear of you he says we have but little encouragement from visibility at present he's this is again war is imminent all things outward look dark it is a dark day on account of an unnatural war darker on account of the great wickedness of the country alas the drunkenness profanity uncleanness and Sabbath breaking through the land oh what a lamentable decay of vital pie it's piety family religion and government how seldom do we find any inquiring the way to Zion the spirit of conviction and conversion seems apparently to have left the country almost universally the wise virgins are slumbering and sleeping with the foolish some such an impenetrable hardness of heart prevails that no judgments of heaven seem to make any impression on the wicked but every day they grow more obdurate and insensible so now he's established the basic themes that we will hear again and again through these sermons which is we have a moral corruption because of our depravity it's seen by Sabbath breaking blasphemy not taking the oath of office and more importantly the oaths for truthfulness in a court seriously and these are the things that he these these are the things that he is really lobbying to ensure that the legislature takes seriously and it isn't taking seriously because there is there is no enforcement of these things oh by the way in case anybody is worried about breaking the Sabbath laws it was 1894 that they allowed us to travel here when it was prohibited before that and also that there was a in actually between 1801 and 1841 it was against the law of Vermont to have any fun that is no plays no dances no public events of any sort other than the sermon other than the church and it's extremely important to think of this the sermon today it's something that we have in a church service but in early Vermont it was the thing it was the main reason that you would the only time of the week when everyone would sit down and you would actually listen and some of the some of the ministers have said it was the most remarkable opportunity to educate and to bring forward some of the principal ideas that they had in 1780 a new minister comes to Bennington David Avery he brings a slave they think hey just three years ago we abolished slavery here you can't have a slave the person he raised that problem with was excommunicated because of taking that object but he only lasts at three years and there was a major problem in the church they finally got rid of him and when asked to explain why they got rid of him one of the things they said was that the real source of the controversy was that Reverend Avery walked a church holding his wife's hand and that showed he lacked humility Governor Tichner said of him he this is more serious I suppose he exalts his official prerogatives lays all the blame upon the opposition loftily pities their weaknesses and rebukes their wrongdoing in as much as they received the word at his lips with no more meekness which is the most galling of all derides their separate origin we have Joseph Bullen who comes to Westminster and he is the problem with in most cases these ministers either he lasts forever or they don't last very long so in the case of Bullen his usefulness while in Westminster was much impaired by his devotion to money getting he kept a store manufactured potash speculated in land and was considered quite shrewd at the bargain it's Bullen who in excommunicating a man named Azariah Wright who was shot a bear on Sunday and the report of the gun has been heard at church in the middle of the sermon they have a little hearing and they say you got to go and Wright who was a revolutionary hero and a pretty rough character anyway attends the next session of the church where the Reverend is about to read the excommunication order and he brings his rifle and he points it right at the head of the minister and this is a moment of chilling stillness and then Reverend Bullen hands the paperwork to John Sessions the first deacon and the gun then moves over to deacons head and deacon deacon Sessions ready with any kind of situation in church says quoting St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians all things are legal but not all things are expedient and hands it back to the minister after which everyone flees and Azariah stays a member of the church now one of the people I have met in my journey who I come to respect more than any other is Reverend Asa Burton of Thatford and he was there 40 years he was a force of religious importance in the state and he there's also a lot more written about him he for instance he wrote his conversion story which I thought was inspiring in one of his journals at times very suddenly everything around me shown with particular brightness and serene glory it seemed to penetrate through my soul and fill that with light then my mind felt serene and calm as the morning without any agitation or distress my heart seemed to melt within me and tears would flow plentifully but silently down my cheeks I experienced inward sweetness and joy too great for utterance so he was like a star he had been to Yale he had studied with the great theologians and he had great opportunities in Connecticut he was heading for Connecticut but they said would you just stop by Thatford for just one sermon this was common that they would move around and there what he found there was not inspiring he later wrote they appeared to me to be very litigious quarrelsome intemperate immoral clownish and vulgar and in view of towns around they stood lowest in public estimation but he was told that this would leave him more room to be successful if he pitched where Satan's camp was and he decided to stay and he was successful he trained over 60 men for the minister including the minister that whose house is down the street from my house in Berlin James Hobart he also was successful in welcoming 150 new souls to his church in just one year they his biographer said he was not a great orator but his great reasoning power and the clearness with which he presented his subject to the minds of the hearers made a deep and lasting impression he had a strong view against Methodism abhorred dancing and has a special ability to draw the young from vain amusements he also said that the how important good family government was as the basis for sound civil government by that means children are fitted by their parents to be orderly and unruly subjects of government he promoted the development of schools where the operation of selfishness may be restrained and preachers to lead the way to a better world and even found something nice to say about taxes taxes and heavy taxes too I may say are of great service to the public wealth not only but as by them government is supported but they oblige us to be industrious and frugal we have Lyman Potter 1787 from Norwich he has again this is I you go into the literature you find all the things you can find about this in in books and pamphlets and newspapers and this is what we remember of him is in the history of Norwich it says in his pulpit efforts he does not appear to have been especially happy his delivery being marred by a slight impediment in speech and by a harsh shrill voice he preached long sermons made long prayers and use many long metric hymns in his services he dressed in the clerical garb of the day with loose and flowing coat skirts powdered hair and wore a three-cornered cocked hat of the continental pattern being a man of large size and commanding appearance he was the object of considerable awe but he too spent too much time farming and then fell into some problems there it's interesting that many of these men are described as large or portly and in fact the one minister who is thin this young woman meets him and says how can you be a minister when you're so skinny so they've come to expect this we have Samuel Shuttlesworth of Windsor who wrote in a letter to a friend oh this so a friend someone of the pastor reminds remembers him Lois Leverett who wrote a letter to a friend saying that she detested the Reverend Samuel Shuttle worth who delighted in hurting his wife's feelings in public but she knew such gossip to be wrong and considered the poor impression it might make on her friend to say so so now we've got the minister who was in trouble for walking to church with holding his wife's hand and the other one who makes who makes his wife a mockery in public we have Samuel Williams Samuel Williams is what is probably the most important person in terms of the contributions to Vermont he was the first real historian of Vermont he wrote a history of Vermont in 1794 he co-founded the Rutland Herald he was the leading scientist of Vermont and was sent on special missions to the north to set the boundaries of the state and in up to this point I have thought he was if we were going to put ten faces up there that made Vermont he would be one of them but only in the reading on it was also a congregational minister in Rutland and he gave the election sermon in 1790 94 but it turns out that you look into his history he became in 1780 he went to Harvard in 1780 became Hollis professor of mathematics and natural philosophy and was about to assume the presidency of Harvard College but then left under a cloud in 1788 that is just six years before he became the election sermon man a later Bradford minister stated I have heard it called forgery which led to his instant resignation and he went away from the metropolitan metropolis of culture and refinement from the society where he had been so honored to the then new and back woods town of Rutland he had great learning and ability but there was this sad episode in his life which destroyed the fame of a life that promised so much but he came to Vermont and what happens when people come to Vermont from a sad experience somewhere else they flourish he became it was the second act and he was allowed to become one of our major characters always probably fearing something would reveal this I suppose but listen to his voice this is he's he's telling this the legislators his role the the business of the pulpit is not to direct our civil rulers what measures they are to pursue in public affairs but to suggest those moral and religious considerations which are of the highest authority and obligation and lie upon them with peculiar weight and then he introduces a subject which is common throughout which is faction party under Thomas Chittenden we were one party and after that it became republicans and and federalists interestingly enough religions followed politics the the Episcopalians and the Unitarians tended to become Tories or I mean but federalists and the Methodists and the Baptist tended to become republicans and it was a kind of a secular and religious separation of people and if you see this tension all the way through the early years from 1778 to about the 1820s and then all of a sudden religion gets interested in social issues like slavery abolition of slavery like temperance like Sabbath breaking that sort of thing and these movements are non-denominational and they bring the Protestant sex at least together in a way which allows them to take concrete action so we have prohibition in 1852 after a long struggle where abolitionists long before the rest of the country there was a South Carolina legislature was so upset with our abolitionism that they had a resolution to the president of the United States that they should hire 10,000 Irish workers to dig a trench around the state of Vermont floated out to sea and drown it which if my geography is right means that so would Maine and some of Quebec go as well but so we have I'm conscious of taking more time than I should since I read somewhere about a sermon that no souls are saved after 20 minutes but bear with me because there's some really wonderful things here this is a man named Thomas Merrill who stands out as the least tolerant of the the ministers he said it sounds like he's going that way but he says religion religion cools the fire of ambition in a successful man to give him a serenity of mind in the midst of the whirl of business to teach him the instability of earthly things the frailty of his own frame the vanity of world enjoyments and the importance of laying up a treasure where moth and rust doth not corrupt it pours oil and bomb in the wounds of those who are brought down by the arrows of misfortune it checks the ardor and impetuosity of the youth counsels cautions and vices and leads him in the path of reputation and usefulness to the goal where he receives these laurels but he openly criticized the religion of the Quran for arming its followers with the impediments of torture and bloodshed to exterminate all who will not implicitly embrace it no one listening would have missed his message about godliness in its role in governing the nation and he speaks in but his sermon has vital images at the beginning this moth and rust doth corrupt but somehow at the end of his sermon it becomes and i think what what what ministers at this time have done is that they have internalized the the kinds of things they'll say in a sermon so they very well might be extemporaneous at some point the someone i was looking for was elijah lineman of brookfield a good but not a great man said his biographer the fault was that his government in his family was too much like elies and he lived to see the fruit of this fault in a bad life in the end of a dear son i don't know any more about that than that but he was loved everyone felt that father lineman was his or her friend the children felt so he bent over the sick bed with deep compassion he took little children in his arms and laid his hand on them and prayed he visited all the district schools twice a term he closed these visits with a catechism and a prayer he was not a great preacher but he was so kind and tender that everybody loved to hear him his sermon was had more heads than any creature has a right to usually ended his four noon discourse with the remainder of this subject would leave of providence will be attended to in the afternoon and the pulpit at brookfield was very high and deacon kelog sat so near the base that he had to look up at the preacher at more than a 40 degree angle with his lower jaw dropped he swallowed at the end of each section of the sermon and young people said he was swallowing the preaching and so he was uh elijah had a reputation locally as a as a mediator settling suits that would otherwise have been taken to court and at the end of one successful session in Rochester he said we have got the fire most out but you may find some sparks now and then and if you do run for a bucket of water and quench it as soon as possible um phineas peck 1817 the first to be openly critical of the uh catholic religion um and uh this is the one i was thinking of uh he says uh if our charities are not exhausted if our sympathies are not paralyzed if our affections are not colder than frozen poles we hope the pulpit and press will groan for the miseries of the oppressed the trumpet ought to sound long and loud until the continent shall tremble and free herself of her sooty burden that's a racist concept by the way until all shall cry out let them colonize help them to colonize we will colonize them we will by the blessing of god colonize protect and bless them until the king of nations shall grant them national privileges and then he sees the future of the world as protestantism takes over the world the cruel arm of the catholic church superstition would be broken the inquisitions of spain and portugal will be overthrown violence will be heard no more nor would the influence of this unity stop there the persians who worship fire would feel the fire of the holy ghost the mohabitans who propagate their false religion with a sword pierced with the two-edged sword of the gospel would renounce their delusions and fall down and worship the son of god the religion of the grand lama in tartary would give place to the worship of the true god juggernaut in hindistan to which the human service sacrifices are offered would be hewed in pieces and even their spiritual sacrifices would be offered to the god of heaven um as i say most of these sermons have been a little bit more tolerant of other religions but um it ended in 1834 for several reasons which have been explained one of which was that by the time we got to 1834 ministers had thrown off that resistance to giving political opinions and we're starting to talk about these subjects which while many in the audience agreed seemed out of place in a way but the main reason according at least to Leonard Deming who writes a postscript to this process at that time is that the state had to buy dinners for all the ministers that came to these sessions and they thought that wasn't a useful amount of spend expenditure so they ended it there and uh and Deming somewhat callously says that he didn't notice there was any difference in the way that the the legislature acted without an election sermon today we don't have election sermons we have chaplains chaplains who appear regularly if they don't then a legislator appears and they start the day with a prayer in the senate and the house and there's a statute that says they should be paid five dollars for their services that day we have um and but if we go back to the where these statistics that i was telling you about and i i think what we've got now is that if you think about the beginning we had congregationalists as the majority religion in the state and and it was said that fifty six fifty four percent of the people in vermont were congregationalists at the time mostly on the eastern side of the state which also happened to be where uh the the last outposts of toriism with the people that resisted the independence of vermont the western side was said to be with methodists and baptists was to be a little bit unruly congregationalists were were conservatives and i think it's also interesting to see how often a minister of a particular faith becomes a minister of another faith many of them change their mind or their churches change and they kick them out more than a third of this of them end their careers by becoming missionaries they go to south carolina and georgia to treat with the to supply religion to the indians who have been moved around and one is actually sent to hana lulu to try to expand the religion at that time but uh sadly enough some of them suffered more than that william s perkins the episcopalian minister in arlington was the founder of the first episcopal church there and it was very successful and he went to montpelier and gave the election sermon and when he got back he was accused of evangelical leanings and the bishop of vermont bishop hopkins came to arlington and had a trial and dismissed him from the ministry because of what he had said except that he did have a little caveat that if he could you know repent that everything would be all right so an hour later he produced a letter which satisfied everyone he was restored to his ministry at that time others have uh one one minister went really bad and became a lawyer uh several and seeing as though you don't retire as a minister though they always would they would be thrown out in some way they would be the church would get rid of them there was a there was a lot of fighting over how much they were paid early on we didn't have money so we were to pay him in wood and and wheat and you know goods but people after a while forgot doing that so that we have a minister who's going to come to your house and pray with you because he wants to have dinner and it it becomes difficult and again this we have a chandler walking from waitfield the minister in my town james hobart at the end of his 40 years as the pastor for the congregational church said he was tired and he wanted to retire and they had a town meeting where they were going to see if they could sort of give him his pension and it was so angry and so distraught that they the moderator my predecessor uh adjourned the meeting without any action being taken and he didn't get anything so he proceeded to become an itinerant minister and he would walk from berlin to plain field he would walk sometimes walk 100 miles at a time and go to church to church and take as and could you could i take your sunday service sometimes the ministers would have five or six churches and they would have to move around uh even if they were close enough in that day to do it they're they are remarkable men they're all men they're remarkable sermons and i'm feel really proud of having the opportunity to to read them i have to say that the experience of reading them is not it takes some getting used to so i find myself i'm not giving due respect to the ministers if i'm not listening to them and if i get the feeling like i'm lost i have to stop for a day and sort of clear my head in a way but what i've seen but the opportunity here is greater than just a history of election sermons the the opportunity is to tell the history of vermont for the first 60 years because of what they say about the issues of the day in their sermons and while i was really looking for a development or an evolution of religious thought i was really surprised that they all seemed pretty much the same other than the episcopalians that seem to want to talk seriously about why a bishop is more important than election of the minister by the by the congregation but largely there is no miracles very little depravity you know in all this sort of Calvinist burden i've extended my reach to read some of the early sermons of george whitefield and those sermons are filled with wrath and you know jonathan edwards with with sinners in the hands of an angry god so the audience would break down and and weep and and this would be the biggest event of their life this didn't happen in the legislature the legislature was a little too starchy there's a little less of that but imagine an hour i mean in many years they would have the militia of the town meet the governor outside as he came into town and they would come in they would be cannons shot off and guns and then they would then they would go to the legislature and they would elect the speaker and swear in all the legislators and then they would stand up and listen to a sermon for an hour now that's different kind of folks than i'm thinking of today i didn't make you stand for this lecture and this isn't a sermon but today i think i saw that three percent of Vermonters consider themselves congregationalists and twenty some percent are Catholics and and i've seen figures unsubstantiated that 40 percent are deists so maybe ethan didn't really lose his way after all thank you it's a starchy subject but if you have questions i'm happy to try to answer them yes i have a couple of comments i served for many years at first congregational in in burlington we started in 1805 yeah um two ministers by two different committees neither one of them knowing the other one existed recalled to interview for the position of first pastor one was from Yale and Yale was the stronghold of the congregation was the other one was Harvard and Harvard deists slash unitarian so the two of them came and they had there was only one place for them to stay and in the uh the home of the uh whoever it was in the church that they called them and the two guys got along really well but the congregations went and so they separated so one one became congregational and the other one became unitarian and the unitarian church started five years later than the ucc but but that is just a lovely piece of history but i had read that the minister that became the congregation of the first minute was paid 450 dollars cash a year which compared to some of those small towns was was incredible and he was president of the university at this time yeah that's right there were three two university presidents university vermont presidents and three middlebury presidents who who spoke and uh my old friend asa burton he kept they kept asking him back but he he only did it twice but uh it's it's an interesting group of people that it's interesting i was concerned that in reading these sermons that i would be at sea so i decided i would start reading them from the newest backwards so that i would at least have a chance to get into the flavor of it but um i can't say that that i saw that much difference i think some of the better ones were the were the earlier ones in a way but so you this is what is this going to be a book of pamphlet i don't know what it is i'm i'm still wrestling with it but i've still got 20 to do thoroughly and uh i can't wait so thanks very much