It has been in connexion with the maintenance of this principle, first proclaimed by an Apostle of Christ eighteen hundred years ago, that all the civil liberty now in the world has sprung up. It is to the fearless assertion of this principle by our forefathers, that we owe it that the representatives of a free people are assembled here this day to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, to seek to Him for wisdom in their deliberations, and to acknowledge the subordination of all human governments to that which is divine. Permit me then, as appropriate to the present occasion, to call the attention of this audience, 1st. To the grounds on which all men are bound to adhere to the principle stated in the text; and 2d. To the consequences of such adherence, on the part, both of subjects, and of rulers. * * * * * I observe, then, that we ought to obey God rather than men, because human governments are comparatively so limited and negative in their bearing upon the great purposes, first, of individual, and second, of social existence. The purposes for which man was made, must evidently involve in their accomplishment, both his duty and his happiness; and nothing can be his duty which would contravene those purposes. Among them, as already intimated, the highest is the moral perfection of the individual; for as it is by his moral nature that man is distinguished from the inferior animals, so it is only in the perfection of that nature, that his perfection, as man, can consist. As absolute perfection can belong only to God, that of man must be relative, that is, it must consist in the proper adjustment of relations, and especially in the relation of his voluntary actions to the end for which God designed him. This is our idea of perfection, when we affirm it of the works of man. It involves, mainly, such a relation of parts as is necessary to the perfect accomplishment of the end in view. A watch is perfect when it is so constructed that its motions exactly correspond in their little revolutions with those of the sun in the heavens; and man is perfect when his will corresponds in its little circle of movement with the will of God in heaven. This correspondence, however, is not to be produced by the laws of an unconscious mechanism, but by a voluntary, a cheerful, a filial co-operation. It is this power of controlling his faculties with reference to an ultimate end, of accepting or rejecting the purpose of his being, as indicated by God in the very structure of his powers, and proclaimed in his word, that contradistinguishes man from every inferior being, and gives scope for what is properly termed, character. Inferior beings have qualities by which they are distinguished, they have characteristics, but not _character_, which always involves a moral element. A brute does not govern its own instincts, it is governed by them. A tree is the product of an agency