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xxxiii. 12.—"Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance."

Last Wednesday was the anniversary of our national independence: and I feel that, as a Christian pastor, I should not let this event pass by, without calling special attention to it from the pulpit. For I am not one of those in whose mind religion is so far divorced from national and governmental affairs, that it becomes wrong for a minister to speak about any thing that is political in its bearings. On the contrary, my belief is that Christianity should permeate all the relations, and all the institutions of society; and hence that there is no true, faithful, exercise of the Christian ministry, unless that ministry causes the faith to touch everywhere with an illuminating, life-giving energy. Folitical partisanship in the ministry is unseemly, distracting, and unspiritualizing in its influences and tendencies: but that there is any thing in the State, or in the general principles