This oration is now housed in the Rare Book Collection of the Library of Congress in our nation s capital. I have not the calmness and impartiality which the infinite importance of this occasion demands.
Truth loves an appeal to the common sense of mankind.
Your unperverted understandings can best determine on subjects of a practical nature. The positions and plans which are said to be above the comprehension of the multitude may be always suspected to be visionary and fruitless. He who made all men hath made the truths necessary to human happiness obvious to all. They opened the Bible to all, and maintained the capacity of every man to judge for himself in religion. Heaven hath trusted us with the management of things for Eternity, and man denies us ability to judge of the present, or to know from our feelings and experience what will make us happy The hand of Heaven appears to have led us on to be perhaps humble instruments, and means in the great providential dispensation which is completing.