Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 3.

Two volumes of his collected and printed sermons came to me from his daughter, Miss Lucy Osgood, a woman of rare learning and worth. Consequently I have a clearer and more definite opinion of him than of the others I have sketched. While one cannot get the same impression of a strong preacher from reading as from hearing him, and must miss his personal quality, still there was enough of this in Dr. Osgood to fill his words, and to breathe from the printed page though it has grown sere with age. His was a strong and virile mind, with a firm grasp of whatever subject he undertook to treat. Among them all there is but one controversial discourse, which was preached in Maiden to prevent, if possible, the formation of a Baptist church. The religious sermons are plain, well-reasoned, earnest discourses. The style is not the brightest, is rarely relieved by illustration or figures of speech. He was at his best in his political sermons, which were always preached on special occasions, such as Thanksgiving or Fast days. One of them has a rather striking title: ‘The Devil Let Loose,’ and has as its topic the danger and menace of the French Revolution. He exposes its godlessness with force and severity. Very likely he felt the evil of its contagion upon American life. He was himself a stanch Federalist, no lover of the democratic tendency of the nation, especially no lover of Jefferson; and his fear of democracy is not disguised. The sermon referred to by Rev. Dr. Pierce, preached on Thanksgiving Day, 1794, occasioned by the appeal from the decision of the United States Government to the people of the United States, by Genet, minister of the French Republic to the United States, who went to Charleston to fit out vessels of war against England, is able in its representation of the situation, and in the force with which it presents the fatal danger to the country if it does not stand loyally by the decisions of the General Government. But I have been even more impressed by a