Putnam, George. Our Political Idolatry: A Discourse delivered in the First Church in Roxbury, on Fast Day, April 6, 1843. Boston: William Crosby and Co., 1843. First Edition. [11110]
Printed wrappers, 9 x 5 1/2 inches, 16 pp., institutional stamp on tp, dampstain in top third throughout. Fair. Pamphlet.
The text is Isaiah 10:11, "Shall not I, as I have done unto Samaria and her idols, so do to Jerusalem and her idols?"
A discourse on despotism and the approaching judgment of the United States. It warns against tyrannical leaders. John Tyler was the US President in 1843.
"Our text leads us to this remark, namely, that our nation is liable to the same errors and sins which in all ages brought distress or ruin on other nations, and that, greatly favored as we are in some respects, if we do as other nations have done, we shall suffer as they have suffered...Never was there a sovereign more courtier-ridden than ours, more easily duped by flatteries, or intoxicated by the sweets of power and the pride of dominion...A demoralized sovereign must be as pernicious here as elsewhere...The downfall of liberty and the decline of states has generally been brought about by the sovereign's gradually engrossing into his own hands all the power of the state, and ruling with the unrestrained sway of pure despotism...Absolute and unmitigated democracy, such as we are approaching, - far distant be the day of our reaching it! - is tantamount to downright and insupportable despotism, the worst in the world, because it is the reign of chaos and confusion...."
Rev. George Putnam (1807-1878), a graduate of Harvard Divinity School (1830), for nearly 50 years the pastor of the First Church of Roxbury, Massachusetts. Putnam was a Unitarian. He was an overseer and fellow of Harvard College, a member of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention and General Court, and a Presidential elector in 1864, in support of Abraham Lincoln.
