A SERMON PREACHED IN CHRIST CHURCH, HARTFORD, JANUARY 29th, 1865; IN COMMEMORATION OF THE RT. REV. THOMAS CHURCH BROWNELL, D. D., LL. D., THIRD BISHOP OF CONNECTICUT, AND PRESIDING BISHOP OF THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES. BY HIS ASSISTANT AND SUCCESSOR. PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE VESTRY OF CHRIST CHURCH. HARTFORD: BROWN & GROSS. 1865. SERMON. PROVERBS, xi: 11. BY THE BLESSING OF THE UPRIGHT THE CITY IS EXALTED. It is a law of the Divine government of the world, that the temporal blessings granted to the righteous, and the temporal punishments sent upon the wicked, are shared in by others than the individuals specially concerned. We realize this perhaps, more distinctly, and it comes home to us more solemnly, in the latter case than in the former. For so it is, that the punishments of the Almighty always impress us more than his mercies. The occasional thunder-bolt awes us as the daily sunlight does not; the sweeping storm we wonder at as we do not at the gentle rain and dew; death is more solemn to us than the continued life. We feel God's hand in the first-named of all these things, we are apt to forget it in the last. And yet the progress of the world gives us as many proofs that the blessings given to the righteous are shared in by others than themselves, as that the punishments sent to the wicked extend beyond those on whom, especially, they come. And God's word is as full of instances illustrating the one truth, as it is of those illustrating the other. For if we find in Jerusalem, Samaria, Babylon and Egypt, the innocent suffering with, and because of the guilty, so too we find not Lot alone, but his family with him, rescued from the city of the plain; not Joseph only, but his brethren also, and even his Egyptian lord, blessed and prospered; not Elijah only, but the family of the widow of Sarepta, miraculously supported through the famine: not St. Paul alone, but "all in the ship, two hundred, three score and sixteen souls," preserved from wreck and destruction.[A] [Footnote A: Bishop Heber.]