Conscience and the State. A Discourse, Preached in the Westminster Church, Providence, Sunday April 27, 1851

15 pp. Black cloth, gilt titles, paper covered boards. A sermon on the relationship between morality and the rule of law, specifically within the context of reconciling Christian ethics with political realities in the United States during the mid-19th century. Hedge states "If it is God's world in which we live, as we fondly trust, and not Beelzebub's, then moral truth, in the final result, must guide its course, and not cotton or iron, or the stock exchange, or the foreign trade, or the home trade, nor all these together... They are the ship's cargo, not her compass." Frederic Henry Hedge was a Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist, a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and founder of the Transcendental Club, which helped popularize the Transcendentalist movement in the United States. Hedge at­tend­ed Harvard Un­i­ver­si­ty and Divinity School. He then pas­tored in Ar­ling­ton, Mas­sa­chu­setts (1829–35); Ban­gor, Maine (1835–50); Pro­vi­dence, Rhode Is­land (1850–56); and Brook­line, Mas­sa­chu­setts (1856–72). He edited The Chris­tian Ex­am­in­er (1857–61), and was pre­si­dent of the Am­er­ican Un­i­tar­i­an As­so­ci­a­tion (1859–62). He went on to teach ec­cle­si­as­ti­cal his­to­ry (1857–78) and Ger­man li­ter­a­ture (1872–82) at Har­vard.