“In our nation’s Declaration of Independence did you know that there’s a significant Declaration of Dependence also? And one without the other won’t work. So, our text for today is taken from the next to last sentence in our nation’s Declaration of Independence. Now, understand, I’m no preacher. The pulpit is a responsibility infinitely higher than any to which I would aspire; but I am a historian and inevitably our professions overlap.
Our Nation’s Fourth of July celebrations have tended to focus on the word “freedom”. And yet, even as our nation’s founders offered their lives and their fortunes to win for our fledgling nation freedom from British rule, in that same eulogent document…the same document, they sought the guidance and the blessing of the Almighty. They appealed “to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our institutions”. “Rectitude”; that’s God’s standard for integrity and honesty. Our founders proclaimed themselves free to do whatever they might want? Oh my no! Oh no! They declared themselves free to do whatever they’d ought, and there’s the difference. They prayed ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth’. They bound themselves to God’s will, and that’s when, in an instant as historical time is measured, our little six percent fraction of this planet’s population began to accumulate more than half of this world’s good things. Collecting on God’s written promise that believing on certain things and behaving ourselves all else would be added, and so it came to pass.
It was only in recent generations that Americans, mouthing platitudes about ‘freedom’, have obscured the very meaning of America. And now, all over the often bleak and bloody front page it’s apparent that self-government without self-discipline won’t work. And you can say that another way: Capitalism without God’s no better than Communism. The Third Reich a classic example – Capitalism without God. The land which had produced Bach and Beethoven and Brahms ended up producing Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald. Self-government without self-discipline won’t work.
Today, once-free Americans have to be searched before they can board an airliner, not because there’s a dictator in Washington, but because there’s a handful of irresponsible ingrates running around loose. Because some who are free do not deserve to be, none of us can be. So they’re taking away our Fourth of July fireworks, they threaten to take away our guns, because some misuse theirs. Again, not because there’s tyranny in government, but because there’s anarchy in the unbuttoned brains of a handful of loony birds who don’t deserve to be free, so the rest of us can’t be. And it’s down that road, thumbing our noses at rightness and wrongness, that whole nations go from regulation to regimentation to tyranny. Self-government without self-discipline won’t work.
Much, much more important than our nation’s Declaration of Independence from foreign domination is our Declaration of Dependence on Divine Providence and sacred honor. You ignore the guidance system that was built into our republic, and we’re like any unguided missile, inevitably destined to self-destruct.”
Paul Harvey, July 4, 2004
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