“Those were days when the quick division of land, from the great blocks included in colonial patents granted for the formation of a new township, into numerous small farms, called far more frequently than now for the services of men who could run a line with precision and describe it in the proper terms of art. Within two years from his arrival at New Milford, he had fitted himself to engage in this business, and received from the General Assembly the appointment of a Surveyor of Lands for the County of New Haven; for New Milford was then a part of that county, Litchfield County not having been created until 1751. “This office of County Surveyor was a responsible one. Whoever held it took an oath, prescribed by statute, to discharge its duties ‘without Favour or Respect to Persons,’ and, if he had occasion to employ chainmen for his assistance, was to administer to each of them an oath, adjuring them ‘by the ever living God’ to keep and render a true account of whatever lines and measures they might take.[18] “That there is an ever living God, who is the supreme authority on earth as in heaven, has always been the faith of Connecticut, and shines through all her statute books. From 1640 down to the present hour it has been part of the solemn ceremonial--solemn to those who stop to think of what it is and what it means--of admission to the privileges of a freeman or elector, that every man shall with uplifted hand swear that with God’s help, whenever he shall be called to give his vote, he will give it as he shall judge will conduce to the best good of the commonwealth, without respect of persons or favor of any man. How many of us, on each election day, bethink ourselves of the high obligation to which we have thus pledged ourselves, and ask the help we have invoked to act our part as voters ‘without respect of persons or favor of any man’? “I doubt if Roger Sherman, as a County Surveyor, needed the weight of an official oath to bind him to his duty, but I doubt not that his sense of duty was bottomed on a sense of God, and that honesty and Christianity were to him, from boyhood on, one and inseparable. “He had joined the Stoughton church a few weeks before he came of age. It was a time, in the year 1742, in which were gathered in the fruits of religious awakening in New England. Our churches had lapsed into formalism; and dogmatic belief had been accorded a prominence which threw Christian conduct into the background. Seventeen hundred forty-two was a marked year in the course of the returning tide towards better things.