The Constitution of Our Country, The [Title Used Previo

Each hour we live we have more reason to be grateful for both liberty and law, and for the inspired Constitution that makes these priceless things possible and yet we seem to have too little awareness of what the Constitution means in its safeguards to freedom and personal privacy.

Always there are those who would encroach upon men’s liberties and lives; those who would intrude too much upon the freedom and privacy of people. “If men were angels,” said James Madison, “no government would be necessary…. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and it the next place oblige it to control itself.”

This is a delicate balance. There is no faultless wisdom among men, and no certainty as to the temperance of power or opinion. All are human; all make mistakes, and thus we need the safeguards, the checks and balances, that permit a maximum of liberty within the essential minimum of law. And so we thank God for the free agency of man and for what, under Divine Providence, our fathers fashioned for us.

But⎯”Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women,” said Judge Learned Hand. “When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”

Concerning the Constitution George Washington said: “It will be so much beyond anything we had a right to imagine or expect… that it will demonstrate visibly the finger of Providence.

“Nothing is more shameful for a man,” said Charles Sumner, “than to… enjoy it without transmitting it to the next generation.”

God grant that we may more often remind ourselves what our fathers fought for, lived for, died for: that “this land shall be a land of liberty.” ⎯and, in Franklin’s words, that “not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of the earth….”