Freedom… Force… and Silent Consent

Men rise heroically to violent threats, to rude attacks, to the sudden show of force, but often seem asleep to slow and subtle slipping.

Preoccupation with comfort and convenience, with personal privilege and problems, can lead⎯and often does⎯to a degree of complacency with which freedom is never assured or safe. Kahlil Gibran has given us some searching lines on this subject.

“In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together . . . ” he wrote. “And tell me . . . what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors? Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power? Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind? Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain? . . . Or have you only comfort . . . that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master? . . . Though its hands are silken, its heart is of iron. It lulls you to sleep . . . It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels. Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.”

“There are two ways in which a people can lose their rights,” wrote Robert Dunning Dripps. “One is by violence. . . . The other is by surrender or non-use, and there lies the great danger. . . . Every right has its . . . duty. Do you and I realize the extent to which we have been turning over . . . responsibilities and duties which it is ours and ours alone to perform? . . . Let us take out this . . . charter or our liberties . . . and perform our part of the agreement, in order that with clean hands we may stand upon the terms and provisions in which we have reserved and safe-guarded our rights . . . “⎯as another writer puts it, “in the firm belief that God in his providence established this nation for a purpose . . . for the protection of the rights of man. . . . ”

What our fathers fought and died for, grant that we may be willing to live for, reaffirming our faith in the Constitution⎯”a glorious standard . . . a heavenly banner . . . founded in the wisdom of God”⎯”by the hands of wise men whom [He] raised up unto this very purpose”⎯the symbol and safeguard of our heritage of freedom, which, please God, we may never lose, either by force or by silent consent.