A Sermon Delivered before His Excellency Levi Lincoln, Governor, His Honor Thomas L. Winthrop, Lieutenant Governor

A mischievous prejudice prevails, that a man's private character has but little to do with his public character. Undoubtedly a man may want some of the qualities necessary to a good father, or a good son, or a good neighbor, and yet make an excellent magistrate or judge. Even these defects however, though they may not operate directly, must operate indirectly to injure him in his public capacity; because, by lessening the regard felt for him as a man, they must do something, at least, to lessen the regard felt for him as a public officer. And this, in a government like ours, is no trifling consideration; where official dignity depends in so small a measure on the pomp and circumstance of office, but almost entirely on the personal qualities of the incumbent. Besides, the reasons why some defects in a man's private character do not unfit him for a public station is, that though criminal in themselves, they do not imply him to be, nor make him to be, absolutely unprincipled. A man may have a very bad temper, for example, and be addicted to many bad habits, without being absolutely unprincipled. Let a man become absolutely unprincipled as a private man; and I can see no reason for supposing, that he will not be equally so as a public man. Libertinism in private life may be consistent, perhaps, with a scrupulous observance of the rules of an artificial and conventional honour; but it is the grave of sentiment, and gradually induces that moral heartlessness and skepticism, which is fatal to the higher virtues, and not more so to religion and true friendship, than to a disinterested patriotism.

Besides, in well informed and well disposed communities, nothing is more common than to overrate the talents, and real efficiency of bad men. We see it every where; for even in a number of brothers, if there is one of them who gives himself up to vicious and profligate courses, he almost always passes for the genius of the family. We judge a man's power to do good by what we see of his power to do evil; not reflecting that the latter is a very vulgar accomplishment, which seldom implies even so much as the perversion of a great mind. There is the more occasion that topics like these should be pressed in a government like ours, as it is essentially popular, and on this account more likely to be carried away by qualities that are merely striking and popular, in contradistinction to such as are solid and useful. If there is any one mark admitted by all to be peculiarly indicative of real greatness of mind, it is originality; nor do we object to this criterion when properly applied. But it unfortunately happens, that unprincipled men, not having the least particle of real originality, may easily gain a reputation for in the popular mind merely by being, or affecting to be singular in their ways of thinking and acting. Let a man of nothing more than ordinary powers strike away from the common track, advance a few startling paradoxes, and defend them with as much plausibility as he can, and straightway he becomes, in the eyes of the million at least, a wonderful genius.