I have always been struck by the Lyceum speech made by Abraham Lincoln at age 28 in Springfield, Illinois on January 27, 1838. It was a complex meditation on a topic that is very relevent to our own day: how Americans are to retain what the Founding Fathers bequeathed them: a free nation. Lincoln understood that the essential threat to our free society was not external but internal:
Lincoln knew that the memory of what the Founding Fathers accomplished over time would fade. He would be saddened, but not surprised, that in the third century of the Republic our schools spend little time teaching our children about the Revolution, and instead spend a great deal of time in indoctrinating children in the fashionable, and often pernicious, political shibboleths of our day. A people cannot love what they have forgotten, and if I had to put my finger upon one factor that has most contributed to the current problems we face, it is a collective ignorance, almost an amnesia, about our past, among a majority of Americans. Lincoln’s closing passage served as a warning in his day, and it is even more relevant in our own:
But this state of feeling must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it.
How painfully beautiful, Prophetic.
Lincoln’ statement at the end “truly as has been said of the only greater institution, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ ” indicates I think his perception of the United States has having been founded by God just as the Church -the only greater institution -is founded by God.
there is too much in the speech to adequately respond in a short blog comment! The “mobocracy” he refers to is now presiding at the gates of hell.
Lawlessness is the threat, lack of faith and fidelity to the Revolution (which I would rather call; “the sea change” and the Constitution– that lawlessness which is more and more ascribed to our very government.
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Lincoln and Washington pray for us