indelibly engraved.....................

 In 1750, Mayhew, fresh from receiving his Scottish divinity degree, preached a sermon in Boston celebrating, somewhat shockingly, the hundredth anniversary of the execution of King Charles I.  One of the lessons, the radical young man noted, was that "no civil rules are to be obeyed when they enjoin things that are inconsistent with the commands of God."  Indeed, such resistance to authority was "a duty, not a crime."

    Adams was paying attention to such thinking.  He would later note that this was the sermon that made Mayhew's reputation.  He studied it repeatedly before he went off to college.  "I read it, till the Substance of it was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory," he told Thomas Jefferson decades later.  "It was read by every Body, celebrated by Friends, and abused by Enemies."

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles