Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730–1805: In Two Volumes

49. A Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Washington [1809]

- 4 9 A SERMON OCCASIONED BY THE DEATH OF WASHINGTON Henry Holcombe SAVANNAH I 8 0 0 HENRY HOLCOMBE (1762-1824). Born in South Carolina, Holcombe received no formal education after the age of eleven. He enlisted in the Revolutionary army early in the war and became an officer by the age of twenty-one. He converted to the Baptist faith about this time and was rebaptized (having been raised as a Presbyterian), and he achieved some fame for delivering fiery sermons to his troops from horseback. He became pastor of the Pine Creek Church in 1785, married the following year, and soon thereafter baptized his wife, her mother and brother, and his own father. In 1795 he became a pastor in Savannah, Georgia, and five years later he received a D.D. from the College of Rhode Island (Brown). While Holcombe vigorously opposed deism and the theater, he generally mingled his religious and civic concerns by founding an orphanage in Savannah, working to improve the state's penal code, establishing and supporting the Mount Enon Academy near Augusta, and publishing a literary and religious magazine called the Georgia Analytical Repository. He became ill in 1810 and moved to Philadelphia , hoping for better health in a different climate, and accepted a pastorate there. He tended toward isolationism of the kind recommended in Washington's famous phrase "no entangling alliances," which to Holcombe translated into a rejection of foreign missions. In his later years he preached against war as contrary to God's revelation. The sermon reprinted here is one of Holcombe's most famous and one of hundreds preached all over America to mark the passing of "the father of his country," George Washington. It was preached in Savannah on January 19, 18oo, and repeated several times elsewhere. ~Know ye not that there is a great man fallen? ~ 2d of Samuel, 3d Chap. and part of the 38th Verse. n these words David refers to Abner, a distinguished officer of his day, who fell an unsuspecting victim to the well-known traitorous scheme, and by the bloody . hand of Joab, whose brother Asahel, to save his own life, Abner had reluctantly slain in a battle at Gibeon. To awaken a correspondent sense of their great loss in the afflicted tribes, David addressed to them the pathetic inquiry adopted on this melancholy occasion, as applying with the most forcible propriety to the late Lieutenant General George Washington. Know ye not that in him a great man, a much greater than Abner, is fallen? The sufficiently visible effects of this penetrating conviction render a comparison of these great men unnecessary, would the dignity of my subject, and the solemnity which reigns over this unexampled and overflowing concourse admit it. Their coincidence in point of greatness, established by the highest authorities, whatever disparity as to the degrees of it, may exist, is all that is requisite to my purpose. In reliance therefore, on the plenitude of candor to which I am already greatly in arrears, however inadequate to the important service which has unexpectedly devolved on me, and with all the unaffected diffidence which overwhelms me, I shall make immediate advances towards the awful ground on which our greatest orators sink unnerved, and giants in literature stand and tremble! And though I am not about to deliver an oration, nor to pronounce an eulogium; but to preach a sermon, and briefly touch on one of the greatest merely human characters, I am fully apprised of the delicacy of my situation, and too sensibly feel the pressure of difficulties. My feeble soul take courage! A Demosthenes or a Cicero might fail here without dishonor; and though the famed Ca:sars, Alexanders, Pompies and Marlboroughs, must resign their inferior laurels to the more famous American general, he was but a man; all his greatness was derived from his and thy Creator, and thou wilt be assisted in the execution of thy arduous design by the prayers, candid allowances and liberal constructions of thine audience, who will deem 1 399 HENRY HOLCOMBE it very pardonable on thy theme to be defective. The first doctrinal observation which our text, and the occasion of our assembling, unitedly suggest, is seriously important: Great as Abner was, he fell; and Washington is fallen; it, therefore, undeniably follows that great men, as well as others, must fall...