see some things are in sort of disarray because last night we had a very exciting harvest dinner with some work you were add and i think it was a very good program for everybody people seem to enjoy it and we had a lot of people here so that was good to see people out playing games as well and having good food so we think all that came in and hope that maybe if we do it again next year for people w judicial judical right no traditional sorry in my age because oracle society and the vermont institute for government of former vermont deputy secretary of state he is ancient roads and other ruminations vermont legal history published in two hundred thirteen by the for money historical society some of you may remember paul from his two previous appearances at the homestead and thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk about something that's been compelling in my life the last six months i've finished a history of the courts of vermont and it's now somewhere deep in the editing process and i felt as though i needed to go on to something entirely different i've been writing about legal history in vermont legal history for thirty years and i thought i always try cleansing the palate trying something different and it all along people that i've talked to have known about this sort of this election's election sermon set theirs there was sixty sixty sixty one sermons given between seventy and seventy eight and eighteen thirty four then they stopped and eighteen years later they tried it again for three four years it was a one hour sermon often given it would be given to the governor lieutenant governor council legislature and all the ministers that could come from the state and it would be most of the ministers would know in a year in advance so this would be a big deal they would be working on this would be the most important sermon that they ever gave in the most public place in front of all these other ministers who couldn't help i suppose but judge them so we have this very right and by the way most of the sermons are available online so you can read them yourself but before i get into that subject because we're here in ethan's home i thought i said at least put into context where if it is coming from ethan would if his spirit is around today he would be driving us out of here because he didn't like churches and ministers he was against those but he was a deist and that you can buy his reason the only oracle of man in there i recommend it it's not well written and it's kind of goofy in places but he was he says in that book that he has never read anything else this is his own idea it came out of nowhere and i think it's important because actually some of the sermons talk about the ism but deism is not atheism the way they call it to be so the ism is a is a religion they were deists read the bible although they didn't believe it was to be divinely inspired they have nothing to do with miracles jesus was not divine and there was no trinity no such thing as miracles these b s to worship god and in worship found a moral basis for leave living in reason now this did not go over well with some of the traditional timothy dwight of yale called it contemptible plagiarism a very hackneyed worn out half rotten dogma of the english b s tickles writers you said reason was the first formal publication in the us openly directed against the christian religion ben franklin george washington thomas jefferson they were all deists and of course ethan was the most notorious he in that book if you read it he is troubled by doesn't buy that he thinks the sunday should be saturday should be sunday and sunday should not be the holy day and he said in that book i am no christian except mere baptism make me one here now he was raised in a family where they read the bible every day and he learned the bible and and the phrases of it and went what's most notable about ethan allen is that he had this remarkable way of saying things that were sort of an aphoristic statement so one of the more famous lines to the attorney general of new york after he loses the big case he says the gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills and the attorney general says well what's that mean and he says come up and all show you what i mean that's straight out of the book of kings now in the eight hundred sixteen reverend samuel austin one of our election seminar sermon folks was also the president you v m of the time called deism earthy sensual and devilish making a combined in formidable effort to overturn christianity and to substitute  place the worship of reason or rather to support an unqualified atheism and in eight hundred seventeen reverend peck said for religion to have a universal influence it must be  reject efforts to overturn christianity and to substitute in its place the worship of reason and there are others now one way to look at this subject i think and i can't help but say that this concept of reason as opposed to the traditional christian protestant christian christian view of things is necessarily reflected in the sermons themselves in fact you could look at the sermons in many cases as an attempt to apply reason to justify the christian religion so you have this so now i've gone to see i was just playing around on the net this morning and i found a headline that said that of all the states vermont has the worst church attendance in the country it's seventeen percent show up regularly and then i found another of which said that  e they were to checking to see what people thought so forty one percent of our monitors are absolutely certain of a belief in god twenty six percent are fairly certain and twenty one percent don't know that's not a  or or the traditional protestants and as far as going to heaven forty seven percent say they are likely to go get their own fifty six percent believe in heaven thirty seven percent don't thirty eight percent believe in hell and fifty three percent don't so there's a kind of favoritism there and now today we think of the process of the federal constitution separating church and state we have the same thing in the in the vermont constitution and yet in early vermont we had a system which was unusually until economical  minutes so in order for you to serve in the legislature you had to take an oath that said you believe in one god the creator of governor the governor of the universe the rewarder of good and the punisher of the wicked and you doug knowledge that the scriptures of the and new testament were given by divine inspiration and you had to own and profess the protestant religion and then beginning in seventeen ninety one with us that article in the constitution it says we should separate church and state we declared that all people in a town must pay for the first settled minister and the church despite what they felt so they were obliged to support the ministry at that point that this stayed in effect until eighteen  seven and during the course of these sermons that were reading this comes up frequently the congregationalists like this rule all because most of the churches are congregationalist ramadhan there the beneficiaries of this in the baptists hate it and they they think it's wrong but the overriding theme of these sermons is this relationship between religion and government some of these sermons are not what you would call barnburner is but some of them are really quite wonderful in the way they look at things and so i thought maybe i could take some time to just go over some of it with you now the one of the things  that is important to remember here is that none of this ministers wanted to step into the subject to being lobbyists they thought it was a little out of their place so what were they to talk about well they were going to talk about the frequent thirty mins are you folks who are serving in this these offices are examples of good christian life and if you mess up the government will topple there's an unusual amount of tolerance for other religions except not if you're catholic catholics are regarded as un christian somehow and they can they can take their their hits in this process want to start just to lay this out because even though we have sixty one sermons we have fifty nine ministers because two of them gave the minute the sermon twice but even before that in the constitutional convention in july of seven hundred seventy seven the reverend aaron hutchinson gave a sermon before they started working on the constitution and it said this is now one of the things i do here is i'm reading the sermons and then i'm also learning about the the minister themselves and of hutchinson it was said that it was believed by those who knew him in massachusetts and vermont that if the new testament had been lost he could have been restored it from memory in the original greek these ministers are the most educated people we have in most of these towns all but more than half of them have gone to college and some of them gone to andover seminary hutchinson is here we are july of seven hundred seventy seven bringing his troops down the up the lake i guess you have to say because he's coming to the south and the whole state is a war zone and he speaks from his heart he says i know the heart of the oppressed for i myself have been severely scourged by that iron rod my life has been threatened and endangered for no other cause but sacrificing my merits and risking my honor in life in defense of my injured oppressed country nothing gives me greater pleasure than to be happily instrumental to undo the heavy burdens and let the o pressed go free and to break every yoke of injustice and oppression so i have a variety of different individuals in these ministers one of my most one of the most interesting i think is azariah chandler who is the minister in waitsfield now he is one of three of these ministers who received notice that he was to give the election sermon the night before now this would have put me into a sort of panic but it was an unusual man he was a rough character he believed in the hard life he in the wintertime he would go out and cut a hole in the ice in the pond and and immerse himself in it so that he could feel this it's pain he would routinely go barefoot he slept on the ground in the grass any time of the year and when he was in college he had he went to uva m and twenty of arrived at the class and have any shoes on and they said hey you have to have shoes so the next day he went out and brought issues in over a shoulder and they know so he gets up the morning of this sermon in waitsfield he walks the twenty miles barefoot to montpelier where he's giving this sermon and he walks into the hotel which is probably the pavilion hotel at the time and everyone laughs hysterically at him they give him a hard time by the way he explains this in his own writings by saying that he suspected he had been born barefoot they think of him as just this you know this rube i think and his first lines recognizing that the man who was supposed to be there was the president of you v m and have become sick this voice comes out of this barefoot crude may i am most deeply my beloved friends do i participate in your regret for the afflicted dispensation which has deprived you of your expected labors of abler hands and has drawn me from an  scurity equally appropriate and beloved to officiate on so public and so interesting and a cage i didn't want i have i'm giving voice to these sermons for the first time in more than two hundred years and i have come to cherish the language and cherish the individuals enough so that i imagine that some point i'm going to try to persuade the friends of the state house to have an evening like a farmer's night where we could get the leading pastors of vermont to give pieces of the sermon so that we could actually hear them but here is chandler in later talking about nations where superstition reigns whose faith teaches them to expect more from the mast the crucifix the absolution of the priest or the intercession of a dead saint because talking about the catholics then from internal purity and practical godliness whose earliest maxims teach them to yield their bodies to the monarch's will in their souls of the guidance of pontifical infallibility where villainy is so common in integrity so rare that scarcely an individual but what would in a moment acquire intelligence to understand or virtue courage unanimity or even conscience to maintain their rights as i said only have we only have fifty one of the sermons three or four of them were never published the rest were published and yet they've disappeared from the face of the earth and it's one of the striking things about this study is what they say about us after we're gone now these are mostly well they're all men they're all ministers most of them have been are in a church for thirty or forty years they've spent their time giving sermons you know there's something to give to sermons a week at least one of the minister is calculated at the end of his life he had given eight thousand sermons in his time and he also counted up the number of funerals and weddings and baptisms and services that he had held so these are professionals these are people who are used to giv g a sermon now a sermon for all of these sermons almost every one of them follows a set plan election sermons have been given in connecticut in massachusetts for one hundred fifty years before we started doing it and one of the questions was well how did we ever start to do it it turned out that one of our original founders thomas didn't serve for seven years in the in the connecticut legislature and would have sat through seven election sermons so the first time we have a sermon opportunity which is seven hundred seventy eight in march we have the reverend peter powers who's who comes from i can't remember where he comes from  has an interesting background in that he was asked at one time by the fifth avenue indians who are in the area if it would be all right if they killed one of their own in the courthouse and whether that was in god's will this was  a man named to molest his parents were and you will know these names joe and molly famous for giving names of pawns over in the marshfield area and he had killed a man and been forgiven because he was killed his girlfriend he was trying to kill her suitor and he missed and so they said that was ok that was strike one and then he went to kill someone else and there was some other reason forgive but the third time he did it it was just too much so they said well we're going to have to have our little tribal council and we're going to have been tried and they found that he was guilty and that he should be punished by being executed but they felt uncomfortable living in vermont  subject of when they were part of this community so they went to the judges in newbury of the the orange county court and they said would this be all right and they said well it's your loss sure you can use the lobby and then they went to powers and they said is this ok is and he took it in the evening and he prayed on it and he said he thought that was right too so where it work was the father of the man he had killed put a bullet in his head and he was buried on the lawn outside of that courthouse and about twenty years ago when they were repairing that redoing the landscaping they plowed his body up so that this is actually been referred but peter powers it was more than just that and just to give you an idea what they looked like his dress on the sabbath was a curse curse the mirror coat with breeches and stockings a three cornered hat a fleece like wigs a white band and  but he wasn't a proud man a man name way while bringing reverend peter powers goods from charleston to newbury broke through the ice while reaching the pump a new sick and said that is a curse hole and this was reported to the reverend who admonished him demanding that he repent why said mr way did not the lord cursed the earth for man's sin yes said powers he says we have but little encouragement from visibility at present he's this is again war is imminent all things outward look dark it is a dark day on account of an unnatural war a dark or on account of the great wicked inquiring the way to zion the spirit of conviction in conversion seems apparently to have left the country almost universally the wise virgins are slumbering and sleeping with the foolish some such an impenetrable hardness of heart prevails that no judgments of heaven seem to make any impression on the wicked but every day they grow more obdurate and insensible so now he's established the basic themes that we will hear again and again through these sermons which is we have a moral corruption because of our depravity it's seen by sabbath breaking blasphemy not taking the oath of office and more importantly the oath for truthfulness in a court seriously and  these are the things that he these these are they things that he is really lobbying to ensure that the legislature takes seriously and it isn't taking seriously because there is there is no enforcement of these things by the way in case anybody is worried about breaking the sabbath laws it was eight hundred ninety four that they allowed us to travel is here when it was prohibited before that and also that there was a in actually between eighteen zero one  it was against the law of vermont to have any fun that is no plays no dances no public events of any sort other than the sermon other than the church  and its extreme important to think of this the sermon today it's something that we have in a church service but in early vermont it was the thing it was the main reason that you would that would be the only time of the week when everyone would sit down and you would actually listen and some of the some of the ministers have said it was the most remarkable opportunity to educate and to bring forward some of the principle ideas that they had in seventeen eighty a new minister comes to bennington david avery he brings a slave they think hey just three years ago we abolished slavery here you can't have a slave the person he raised that problem with was excommunicated because of taking that object but he only lasted three years and it was a major problem in the church they finally got rid of him and when asked to explain why they got rid of him one of the things they said was that the real source of the controversy was that reverend avery walk to church holding his wife's hand and that showed he lacked humility lips with no more meekness which is the most galling of all derives their separate origin we have joseph bullen who comes to westminster and he  is the problem with him in most cases these ministers be the real last forever or they don't last very long so in the case of bullen is usefulness while in westminster was much impaired by his devotion to money getting he kept a store manufactured potash speculated in land and was considered quite shrewd at the bargain it's bolen who in excommunicating a man name as a right or right wh shot a bear on sunday and the report of the gun has been heard at church in the middle of the sermon they have a little hearing and they say you've got to go and right who was a revolutionary hero and a pretty rough character anyway attends the next session of the church where the reverend is about to read the excommunication order and he brings his rifle and he points at right at the head of the not all things are expedient and hands it back to the minister after which everyone flees and azariah stays a member of the church now one of the people i have met in my journey who i have come to respect more than any other is reverend a suburban of that for it and he was there forty years he was a force of religious importance in the state and he of that was also a lot more written about him  he for instance he wrote his conversion and story which i thought was inspiring in one of his journals at times very suddenly everything around me shone with particular brightness and supreme glory it seemed to penetrate through my soul and fill that with light then my mind felt serene and calm as the morning without any agitation or distress my heart seemed to melt within me and tears would flow plan to flee but silently down my cheeks i experienced inward sweetness enjoyed too great for utterance so he was like a star he had been to yale he had studied with the great theologians and he had great opportunities in connecticut was heading connecticut but they said would you just stop by thetford for just one sermon and this was common that they would move around and there what he found there was not inspiring he later wrote they appeared to me to be very litigious quarrelsome in temperate immoral clownish and vulgar and in view of towns around they stood lowest in public estimation but he was told that this would leave him more rude to be successful if he pitch camp was and i cited to state then he was successful it trained over sixty men for the minister including the minister that whose house is down the street from my house in berlin james ho he also was successful in welcoming one hundred fifty new souls to his church in just one year they say his biographer said he was not a great orator but his great reasoning power and the clearness with which he presented his subject to the minds of the here is made a deep and lasting impression he had a strong view against methodism dancing and has a special ability to draw the young from vain amusements he also said that how important good family government was as the basis for a sound civil government by that means children are fitted by their parents the orderly and unruly subjects of government be promoted the development of schools where the operation of self in this may be restraint and preachers to lead the way to a better world and even found something nice to say about taxes taxes and heavy taxes to i may say are of great service to the public wealth not only by as by them government is supported but they oblige us to be industrious and frugal we have lyman potter seven hundred eighty seven from  history of norwich it says in his pulpit efforts he does not appear to have been especially happy his delivery being marred by a slight impediment in speech and by a harsh shrill voice he preached long sermons made long prayers and used many long metric hymns in his services he dressed in the clara poole garb of the day with loose and flowing coat skirts powdered hair and wore a three cornered cocked hat of the continental pattern being a man of large size and commanding appearance he was the object of considerable all but he too spent too much time farming and then fell into some problems there it's interesting  that many of these men are described as large or portly and in fact the one minister who is thin this young woman meets him and says how can you be a minister when you're letter to a friend of this so a friend someone in the pastor remembers him lois leverage who wrote a letter to a friend saying that she detested the reverend samuel shuttleworth who delighted in hurting his wife's feelings in public but she knew such gossip to be wrong and consider the poor impression it might make on her friend to say so now we've got the minister who's in trouble for walking to church with holding his wife's hand and the other one who makes who makes his wife mockery in public so we have samuel williams samuel williams as well is probably the most important person in terms of the contributions to vermont he was the first real historian of vermont he wrote a history of vermont seven hundred ninety four he co founded the rutland herald he was the leading scientist of vermont and was sent on special missions to the north to set the boundaries of the state and in up to this point i have thought he would if we were going to put ten faces up there that made vermont he would be one of them but only in the reading on it was also a congregational minister in rutland and he hollis professor of mathematics and natural philosophy and was about to assume the presidency of harvard college but then left under a cloud in seventeen eighty eight that is just six years before he became the election sermon  late later bradford minister stated i have heard it called forgery which led to his instant resignation and he went away from the metropolitan matric droplets of culture and refinement from the society where he had been so honored to the venue in backwoods town of rutland he had great learning ability but there was this sad episode in his life which destroyed the theme of a life that promised so much but he came to vermont and what happens when people come to remote from a sad experience somewhere else they flourish she became it was a second act and he was allowed to become one of our major characters always probably fearing something would reveal this i suppose but  listen to his voice this is he's he's telling this the legislators his role the the business of the pulpit is not to direct our civil rulers what measures they are to pursue in public affairs but to suggest those moral and religious considerations which are of the highest authority an obligation and lie upon them with because you are wait and then he introduces a subject which is common throughout which is faction party unitarians tended to become tories or i mean the earth but federalist and the methodists in the baptist tended to become republicans and it was this kind of a secular and religious separation of people and if you see this tension all the way through the early years from seven hundred seventy eight to about eight hundred twenty s and then all of a sudden religion gets interested in social issues like slavery abolition of slavery like temperance like sabbath breaking that sort of thing and these movements are non denominational and they bring the protestant sects at least together in a way which allows them to take concrete action so we have prohibition in eight hundred fifty two after a long struggle where abolitionists long before the rest of the country there was a south carolina legislature was so upset with our abolitionism that they had a resolution to the president of the united states that he should hire ten thousand irish workers to dig a trench around the state of vermont floated out to sea and drown it which if my geography is right means that so would maine  some of quebec go as well but so we have i'm conscious of taking more time than i should since i read somewhere about a sermon that no souls are saved after twenty minutes but bear with me because there are some really wonderful things here this is a man named thomas merrill who stands out as the least tolerant it sounds like he's going that way he says religion religion cools the fire him of ambition in a successful man to give him a serenity of mind in the midst of the world business to teach him the instability of earthly things the frailty of his own frame  vanity of world enjoyment and the importance of laying up a treasure where mothman rust doth not corrupt it pours oil and balm in the wounds of those who are brought down by the arrows of misfortune it checks the ardor and impetuosity of the youth counsels cautions and vices and leads him in the path of reputation and usefulness to the goal where he receives these laurels but he openly criticized the religion of the qur'an for arming its followers with the impediments of torture and bloodshed to exterminate all who will not implicitly embrace it no one listening would have missed his message about godliness and its role in governing the nation yet he speaks and brookfield a good but not a great man said his biographer the fault was that his government in his family was too much like the lies and he lived to see the fruit of this fault in a bad life in the end of a d son i don't know any more about that than that but he was loved every one felt that father lyman was his or her friend the children felt so he bent over the sick bed with deep compassion he took little children in his arms and laid his hand on them and pra visit all the district schools twice a term he closed these visits with the catechism in a prayer he was not a great preacher but he was so kind and tender the everybody loved to hear him the sermon was had more heads than any creature has a right to usually end it is for noon discourse with the remainder of the subject would leave a providence will be attended to in the afternoon and the pulpit brooke feared was very high and deacon kellogg s near the base that he had to look up at the preacher at more than a forty degree angle with his lower jaw dropped he swallowed at the end of each section of the sermon and young people said he was swallowing the preaching and so he was jim had a reputation locally as a as a mediator settling suits that would otherwise have been taken to court and at the end of one successful session in rochester he said we have got the fire most out but you may find some sparks now and then and if you do run for a bucket of water and twenty it as soon as possible phineas picked eight hundred seventeen the first to be openly critical of the catholic religion  d this is the one i was thinking of he says if our charities are not exhausted if our sympathies are not paralyzed if our affections are not colder than frozen poles we hope the pulpit impress will groan for the miseries of the oppressed the trumpet ought to sound long and loud until the continent shall tremble and free herself of her city burden that's the racist concept by the way until all shall cry out let them colonize help them to colonize we will colonize them we will by the blessing of god colonize protect and bless them until the king of nations shall grant them national privileges and then he sees the future of the world as protestantism takes over the world the cruel arm of the catholic church superstition would be broken the inquisitions of spain and portugal will be overthrown violence will be heard no more nor would the influence of this unity stopped there the persians who worshipped fire would feel the fire of the holy ghost the mohammedan suit propagate their false religion with the sword pierced with a two edged sword of the gospel would renounce their delusions and fall down and worship the son of god the religion of the grand lama in tartary would give place to the worship of the true god juggernaut in hindustan to which the human service sacrifices are offered would be huge in pieces and even their spiritual sacrifices would be offered to the god of heaven as i say most of these sermons have been a little bit more tolerant of other religions but it ended in eight hundred thirty four for several reasons which have been explained one of which was that by the time we got to eighteen thirty four ministers had thrown off that riz resistance to giving political opinions and were starting to talk about these subjects which while many in the audience agreed were seemed out of place in a way but the main reason according to the letter deming who writes a postscript to this process of that time is that the state had to buy dinners for all the ministers that came to these sessions and they thought that wasn't useful amount of spent expenditure so they ended it there and and d notice there was any difference in the way that the legislature acted without an election sermon today we don't have election sermons we have chaplains chaplains who appear regularly if they don't get a legislator appears and they start the day with a prayer in the senate and the house and there's a statute that says they should be paid five dollars for their services that day we have  what if we go back to where these statistics that i was telling you about and i think what we've got now is that if you think about it at the beginning we had congregationalists as the majority religion in the state and it was said that fifty sixths fifty four percent of the people in vermont were congregationalists at the time mostly on the eastern side of the state which also happen to be where the last outpost of toryism of the people who resisted the independence of vermont the western side was said to be with methodists and baptists was to be a little bit unruly congregations work were conservatives and i think it's also interesting to see how often a minister of a particular faith becomes a minister of another faith and many of them change their mind or their churches change and they kick them out more than a third of the size of them and their careers by becoming missionaries they go to south carolina and in georgia to treat with the two supply religion to the indians who are been moved around and one is actually sent to honolulu to try to  expand the religion at that time but sadly enough some of them suffered more than that william s perkins the episcopalian minister in arlington was the founder of the first a possible church there and it was very successful and he went into the monthly and gave the election sermon and when he got back he was accused of evangelical leanings and the bishop of vermont bishop hopkins came to arlington and had a trial and dismissed him from the ministry because of what he had said except that they he did have a little cabby at that if he could you know repent that everything would be all right so an hour later he produced a letter which satisfied everyone he was restored to his ministry at that time others have one one's minister went really bad and became a lawyer several ever seemed as though you don't retire as a minister though they always would they would be thrown out in some way they would be the church would get real and there was a there was a lot of fighting over how much they were paid early on we didn't have money so we were to pay him and wouldn and  didn't you know goods but people have after a while forgot doing that so that we have a minister who is going to come to your house and pray with you because he wants to have dinner and it becomes difficult and again  this we have chandler walking from waitsfield the minister in my town james hobart at the end of his forty years as the pastor for the congregational church said he was tired and he wanted to retire and they had a town meeting where they were going to see if they could sort of give him is a pension and it was so angry and so distraught that they moderator my predecessor adjourned the meeting without any action being taken and he didn't get anything so he proceeded to become an itinerant minister and he would walk from berlin to plainfield he would walk sometimes walk one hundred miles at a time and go to church to church and take  could you could i take your sunday service sometimes the ministers would have five or six churches and they would have to move around even if they were close enough in that day to do it if there are remarkable men there all men there are remarkable sermons and and i feel really proud of having the opportunity to to read them i have to say that the experience of reading them is not it takes some getting used to so i find  myself giving due respect to the ministers if i'm not listening to them and if i get the feeling like i'm lost i have to stop for a day and sort of clear my head in a way but what i've seen the opportunity here is greater than just the history of election sermons the opportunity is to tell the history of vermont for the first sixty years because of what they say about the issues of the day in their sermons and while i was really looking for a development or an evolution of religious thought i was really surprised that they all seemed pretty much the same other than the episcopalians that seem to want to talk seriously about why a bishop is more important than the election of the minister by the  by the congregation but largely there is no miracles very little all this sort of calvinist burden i've extended my reach to read some of the early sermons of george whitefield and those sermons are filled with rath and you know jonathan edwards with with  ners in the hands of an angry god so that the audience would break down and and weep and this would be the biggest event of their life this in happened in the legislature legislature with little to start she was a little less of that but imagine an hour i mean most in many years they would have the militia of the town meet the governor outside as he came into town and they would come in they would be cannon shot off and guns and then they would then they would go to the legislature and they would elect the speaker and swear in all the legislators and then they would stand up and listen to a sermon for an hour now that's different kind of folks than them thinking of today i didn't make a stand for this lecture and this isn't a sermon but today i think i saw that three percent of moderates consider themselves congregationalists and twenty some percent are catholics and and i've seen figures unsubstantiated that forty percent are deists so maybe ethan didn't really lose his way after all  cash year which compared to some of those small towns was was incredible and he was president of the university at the center of it right there were three a university presidents university of vermont presidents and three middle sermons that i would be a c so i decided i would start reading them from the newest backwards so that i would at least have a chance to get into the flavor of it but i can't say that i saw that much difference i think some of the better ones were the were the earlier ones in a way but so this is what is this going to be a book of pamphlet i don't know what it is i am still wrestling with it but i've still got twenty to do thoroughly and i can't wait and thanks very much