Excerpt from A Discourse: Suggested by the Burning of the Old Lutheran Church, on the Night of September 27th, 1854, Delivered in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Winchester, Va;, The Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity, 1854
Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire. - Isaiah LXIV, 11.
Though these words, beloved, give a natural voice to our grief, so natural that they were on the lips of some during the burning of the church, and have been suggested to almost every one since, yet it would be affectation to pretend that our feelings rise to the same intensity as those of the Jews, who used them when contemplating the destruction of their temple. In the mouth of the Prophet, who embodied the spirit of his nation, they are the expression of a climax of sorrow: Zion and the holy cities are a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation; and in flames, their temple, more like a beautiful dream than a fabric, like a dream has vanished. Ours is not such a grief as theirs, for the Jew's idea of the temple was more like that we have of heaven than that we have of a church. In their temple Jehovah was visibly enthroned, the light between the Cherubim Mas his face, whose glory was hidden by the awful veil from every eye but that of the High Priest, who entered but once a year, and that not without blood. In that temple only could the public worship be fully performed. As the objects of the first dispensation required the preservation of a strict unity, God bound many of the blessings of the covenant to one central place, linking the nation by every possible tie to Jerusalem. The dwellers in all portions of the earth, as they hasted year after year to the great festivals at the temple, were reminded, that wherever their tents might be pitched, the city made glorious by God's resting in it was their home. The temple was their bond of life, the heart of their state - that gone, the Jew became a mere atom of a dismembered body, a particle of dust to be floated at the will of waters, and borne at the mercy of winds, till the day of the resurrection of his people.
No one temple limits us in the worship of God. We sow the land broad-cast with churches.
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