Half the continent had changed hands at the scratch of a pen.  Governor Bernard, of Massachusetts, proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for the great event, and the Boston newspapers recount how the occasion was celebrated with a parade of the cadets and other volunteer corps, a grand dinner in Faneuil Hall, music, bonfires, illuminations, firing of cannon, and, above all, by sermons in every church of the province; for the heart of early New England always found voice through her pulpits.  Before me lies a bundle of these sermons, rescued from sixscore years of dust, scrawled on their title-pages with names of owners dead long ago, worm-eaten, dingy, stained with the damps of time, and uttering in quaint old letterpress the emotions of a buried and forgotten past.  Triumph, gratulation, hope, breathe in every line, but no ill-will against a fallen enemy.  Thomas Foxcroft, pastor of the “Old Church in Boston,” preaches from the text, “The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad.”  “Long,” he says, “had it been the common opinion, Delenda est Carthago, Canada must be conquered, or we could hope for no lasting quiet in these parts; and now, through the good hand of our God upon us, we see the happy day of its accomplishment.  We behold His Majesty’s victorious troops treading upon the high places of the enemy, their last fortress delivered up, and their whole country surrendered to the King of Britain in the person of his general, the intrepid, the serene, the successful Amherst.”

The loyal John Mellen, pastor of the Second Church in Lancaster, exclaims, boding nothing of the tempest to come:  “Let us fear God and honor the King, and be peaceable subjects of an easy and happy government.  And may the blessing of Heaven be ever upon those enemies of our country that have now submitted to the English Crown, and according to the oath they have taken lead quiet lives in all godliness and honesty.”  Then he ventures to predict that America, now thrown open to British colonists, will be peopled in a century and a half with sixty million souls:  a prophecy likely to be more than fulfilled.

“God has given us to sing this day the downfall of New France, the North American Babylon, New England’s rival,” cries Eli Forbes to his congregation of sober farmers and staid matrons at the rustic village of Brookfield.  Like many of his flock, he had been to the war, having served two years as chaplain of Ruggles’s Massachusetts regiment; and something of a martial spirit breathes through his discourse.  He passes in review the events of each campaign down to their triumphant close.  “Thus God was our salvation and our strength; yet he who directs the great events of war suffered not our joy to be uninterrupted, for we had to lament the fall of the valiant and good General Wolfe, whose death demands a tear from every British eye, a sigh from every Protestant heart.  Is he dead?  I recall myself.  Such heroes are immortal; he lives on every loyal