"When the children of the Pilgrims forget that Being who was the Pilgrims guide and deliverer"--should they ever be so faulty and unfortunate--when the descendants of the Puritans cease to acknowledge, and obey, and love that Being, for whose service the Puritans forsook all that men chiefly love, enduring scorn and reproach, exile and poverty, and finding at last a superabundant reward; when the sons of a religious and holy ancestry fall away from its high communion, and join themselves to the assemblies of the profane, they have forfeited the dear blessings of their inheritance; and they deserve to be cast out from this fair land, without even a wilderness for their refuge. No! let us still keep the ark of God in the midst of us; let us adopt the prayer of the wise monarch of Israel: "The Lord our God be with us, as he was with our fathers; let him not leave us nor forsake us; that he may incline our hearts unto him, to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, which he commanded our fathers." Such a regard for God--his laws--his institutions, and his service, is obligatory upon the present generation, aside from those blessings which may be justly anticipated as the reward of such reverence and obedience. It is due to the memory of the Pilgrim Fathers. Never can we so worthily and appropriately honor them, as to cherish the pious sentiments which they cherished, and perpetuate the civil and religious institutions which they founded.--It is due to the generation of our Revolutionary era, which, impressed with a sense of the value of the inheritance transmitted to them, periled life and fortune that they might transmit that inheritance in all its fullness and in all its richness to their posterity. We are the children of patriot heroes, who prayed and then fought, and fought and then prayed.--It is due to ourselves, as we would secure the admiration and gratitude of the generations which are to follow us.--It is due to those generations which, by the blessing of God, are to spread over and occupy the vast territory which now constitutes the American republic.