While there were many free thinkers or Deists among the intellectual leaders of the Revolution, the masses of the colonists were intensely religious, and an argument from Scripture carried more weight with them than any other. Education was limited at that period in the colonies; there were not many newspapers, they were rarely issued more than once a week, and the number of subscribers was but few. The pulpit had their place, and the pastors in their sermons dealt with politics not less than with religion. Sermons were for the people the principal sources of general instruction. These pastors, in the way of history, knew above all that of the Jewish people, and they were the first to bring before their audiences the ideals of the old Hebrew commonwealth. Rev. Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66), whose discourse, in 1750, against unlimited submission was characterized as “the morning gun of the Revolution,” declared in a later oration on the “Repeal of the Stamp Act” which he delivered in Boston on May 23, 1766: “God gave Israel a king in His anger because they had not sense and virtue enough to like a free commonwealth, and to have Himself for their King――where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty――and if any miserable people on the continent or isles of Europe be driven in their extremity to seek a safe retreat from slavery in some far distant clime――O let them find one in America.” Rev. Samuel Langdon (1723–97), President of Harvard College, delivered an election sermon before the “Honorable Congress of Massachusetts Bay” on the 31st of May, 1775, taking as his text the passage in Isaiah 1. 26, “And I will restore thy judges as at first,” in which he said: “The Jewish government, according to the original constitution, which was divinely established, if considered only in a civil view, was a perfect republic. And let them who cry up the divine right of Kings consider, that the form of government which had a proper claim to a divine establishment was so far from including the idea of a King, that it was a high crime for Israel to ask to be in this respect like other nations, and when they were thus gratified, it was rather as a just punishment for their folly.... The civil polity of Israel is doubtless an excellent general model, allowing for some peculiarities: at least some principal laws and orders of it may be copied in more modern establishments.” Almost everybody at that time knew by heart the admonitions of Samuel to the children of Israel, describing the manner in which a King would rule over them.