Excerpt from Oration Delivered Before the City Government and Citizens of Boston, Music Hall, July 5, 1875 It is an old custom, as you know, in many of our Congregational churches, to have what is called a preparatory lecture, the purpose of which is to prepare the minds of those who are to commune, so that they shall partake of that feast of brotherly love in the right spirit. I consider my little speech to-day, this ninety-ninth anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence, to be a kind of preparatory lecture for the great feast to be held next year in Philadelphia. On the 4th of July, 1876, the thirty-seven sister States of this Republic, after a hundred years' experience of free institutions, will meet to thank God, and take courage. Certainly it is one of those happy coincidences which seem something more than mere accidents, that the people of this great Union, so long divided, and now so happily reunited, shall inaugurate the new century of freedom and union, henceforth one and inseparable, by giving and receiving the hand of fellowship, in the City of Brotherly Love. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.