Text of speech by George F. Will Delivered June 8, 2001, in the Archibald Room of the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Ky., during a program sponsored by the Presbyterian Lay Committee. Posted Sunday, June 10, 2001 I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to have an hour to spend with friends where I can't be interrupted by Sam Donaldson. I know I come to you at a time when you have conflicts and arguments and a bit of stress, and some of you are anxious about the future. Let me begin by telling you that I come before you as a fan of the first-place Chicago Cubs. Together we stand while hope remains. I grew up in -- as you know, the Chicago Cubs last won the World Series in 1908. That's just two years before Mark Twain died. If you go to Wrigley Field, you can buy a T-shirt that says, 'Any team can have a bad century.' I grew up midway between Chicago and St. Louis in Champaign, Ill. At an age really too young to make such life-shaking decisions, I had to choose between being a Cubs fan and a Cardinal fan. All of my friends became Cardinal fans and grew up happy and liberal. I became an embittered Conservative. But we do learn about hope and about faith planning for the long-term future of being a Cubs fan. I really am a passionate baseball fan and I really only write about politics to support my baseball habit. But I've come here from a frankly political city not to talk to you about politics because I don't think politics is what we're about. You're about something better and more important than political questions. But you are asking yourselves what every serious political philosopher asks -- what politics at the end of the day is about, which is the great question of how we should live. And you are concerned, as we in Washington increasingly are, because we are concerned about the condition of the culture and how that complicates the business of being a good American citizen. We are worried today, as we have been for more than two centuries, about the soul of our country. That's frankly religious language that is woven into our history. I was, just at the beginning of this week, at Princeton University, where my goddaughter is a sophomore, where I received my Ph.d and where a friend of mine was graduating. And at Princeton we revere the name of someone who I know is revered by this audience. A man who really ranks high among the most important of our Founding Fathers, yet is not widely recognized as such by people perhaps outside of this room and others of your spirit. I refer, of course, to John Witherspoon. John Witherspoon was not only the great formative influence on one of our great universities, Princeton, he was singlehandedly the teacher of the young country. His students included -- listen to this -- 12 people who attended the Continental Congress; five delegates to the Constitutional Convention; one president, James Madison; one vice president, Aaron Burr; 49 members of the U.S. House of Representatives; 28 United States senators; three Supreme Court justices; one Secretary of State; three Attorneys General. He is the only clergyman to have signed the Declaration of Independence, he helped draft the Articles of Confederation and he was a member of the New Jersey Legislature that ratified the Constitution. He is also emblematic of a simple fact -- sometimes forgotten, sometimes it can be argued against even if it makes some people unhappy. The fact that is the religious life of the American people and the political life of our country are -- and always have been -- inextricably entwined. Now, this is quite shocking to some people, and to some famous political philosophers, because it was said that we in America, and the modern age in general, would outgrow religion. Karl Marx you may know, the man who was full of prophecies about the future -- every one of which was wrong. I once, when I was a student at Oxford, I went to a book party. A man who was a Marxist had just written a three-volume biography about Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution … And the Oxford Marxist Society held a tea party for him and they, being my kind of people, I decided to go. And at this tea party, this author who did the book about Trotsky gave a little speech about his hero in which he said the following. He said, 'Proof of Trotsky's farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet.' Marx is a little bit like that - none of his predictions have come true yet. One of his predictions was that in the modern and industrial age all pre-industrial phenomena, all the forces that shaped the world before the Industrial Revolution, would disappear. Under the bright light of the white heat of science, religion itself would disappear. Well, we in the United States are A. The most modern of nations and B. The most observant, the most devout, the most religious of all modern nations. That tells you something: that there is no incompatibility at all between being a modern nation and being as faithful as we were when we were launched as the first new nation of the great modern age. But Marx did say one thing. It was more or less true. He said that politics is necessarily an epi-phenomena. What he meant was, and he was right, was that politics is sometimes like a cork on a stream -- and the stream is culture. But the real fight for the good society is the fight to control culture, to shape it, and there is no force more shaping of culture, particularly in this country, than religious belief. There is a great conservative insight and there is a great liberal insight. The great conservative insight is that the culture of a society -- more than the politics of a society -- determines the success of that society. The great liberal insight is that the politics of a society can have a shaping influence, for good or ill, on the society. Today, liberals and conservatives working together are trying to find ways to give projects, to use the government, to improve the culture that shapes the souls that shapes the citizens. Now, we've just had a most interesting election six months ago that tells us much about the condition of our country. What I say about it, I assure you I will say nothing partisan and intend nothing partisan. I simply offer some facts, some internal ledgers about the election that may not have come to your attention. It is said that because the country is so closely divided that we must be, as a people, bitterly divided. I don't really think so. Ladies and gentlemen, 50 years ago we were arguing in our country about Korea, Joe McCarthy, Douglas MacArthur, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss -- those were bitter political days. Thirty-five years ago we were arguing in our country about whether African-American citizens could enter voting booths and restaurants. Those were bitter arguments. Thirty years ago we were arguing about ground war attrition on the mainland of Asia with a conscript army for ill-defined purposes. That was a bitterly divided nation. We were not bitterly divided -- closely, yes, but not bitterly divided -- in the year 2000. It is said we are divided by race. I don't believe that. Yes, minorities vote predominantly for one party rather than the other, but go out on the streets of the American nation and ask any American of any color to name, say, their three most admired Americans and you're very apt to hear them say, 'Well, Michael Jordan, Colin Powell and Oprah Winfrey.' That's not a bitterly divided nation. It's often said, 'Gosh, we only have a plurality president,' someone who didn't get 50 percent of the votes. Ladies and gentlemen, that's the third time in a row we've done that. At the end of the 19th century we had five consecutive elections that produced merely plurality presidents. A Presbyterian president named Thomas Woodrow Wilson ran twice for president and never got 50 percent of the votes and was quite a strong president. No, this doesn't tell you the real story of our country, but I'll tell you what does. If Mr. Gore went to Andrews Air Force Base in the state of Maryland, which he carried, he could board a plane and fly to the state of California, which he carried, he could fly directly, not zigzagging, and not fly over another state he carried. The country is divided in an interesting geographic pattern and the geographic pattern indicates that our divisions today are cultural, not economic. You could say, years ago, the slogan was, 'It's the economy, stupid!' Ladies and gentlemen, the American people almost never vote on economic issues. The election-turning issues in our country are almost never the pocketbook. In the 1790s, when the differences between Jefferson and Hamilton began to produce the embryonic party system of our country, they weren't arguing about economics. They were arguing about whether or not we should have a rural, yeoman society with a certain kind of person or an urban, restless, industrial society -- the sort that Hamilton wanted -- different kinds of people, a different soul of the country. When Andrew Jackson made war on the banks of the United States, it wasn't about banks and money, it was about whether or not we ought to have speculation and a certain way of earning money that might have a bad effect on the soul of the country. When we argue about abolitionism or secession, or immigration or Prohibition or desegregation -- all the great arguments in American history have been about the culture of our country and what kind of people we will be. About 20 years ago, I gave the Godkin Lectures at Harvard and they became a book -- a book read, I may take it, by dozens. The title of the book was Statecraft As Soulcraft. The subtitle of the book was 'What Government Does' -- not what government ought to do, but what government cannot help but do. Government cannot help by the laws it passes and the values it enunciates and incarnates. It cannot help have a shaping effect on the culture and the soul of the citizens. And it is that about which Americans are worried today. If you doubt that, let me tell you this: Our elections are now settled largely in the suburbs. Largely in the suburbs. And the suburbs this year were almost dead even. Bush carried them by that much, lost the suburbs in the north, carried them in the south. But there's a different suburb, and it tells you about where the country is going perfectly. There are distant suburbs in our country, far out on the fringes of the city. Collin County, Texas, near Dallas. Forsythe County, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. Douglas County, a suburb of Denver, Colorado. You know you're flying over one of those suburbs when you look down and you see an enormous megachurch looking like an ocean liner in a sea of parking lots. Those churches represent towns, and those towns and counties and suburbs voted for Mr. Bush by a landslide. Now if you want to ask how someone voted, get some inkling about how someone voted, there are really two questions that are predictive: The first one is ask the person you're curious about, are they married. Married voters voted pretty handily for George Bush. But the most important question is this, it concerns religious appearance. Michael Barone, the editor of the Almanac of American Politics and nobody in America knows more about our politics, has looked at the numbers from our last election and said, 'The way we vote is the way we pray or don't pray.' The country, it turns out, ladies and gentlemen, has two groups, each of them 42 percent of the population. Exactly 42 percent. One 42 percent is composed of Americans who go to religious observances one or more times a week. That group voted 20 percent for George Bush. A landslide, a 20 percent landslide. Those who go to religious observances rarely or never voted, that 42 percent, voted a 17 percent margin for Mr. Gore. These groups, by and large, break down between those who are and who are not alarmed by the condition of the culture. Asked before the election, the American people -- over a large voting sample -- 57 percent said they were alarmed by the condition and the trajectory of the American culture. They voted 2-1 for Mr. Bush. We are a country divided between those who are alarmed and those who are not alarmed by the condition and the trajectory of our country. Now that is not, you notice, talking about economics. One of the delights of living in America today is that we have largely solved the economic problem. We now know how to manage a large economy. We have largely ironed out the business cycles which at one point in our social history were so fierce and so frequent that they threatened the social stability of our country. … I am deeply puzzled as to why it is that in America today, which is far richer than it was 40 years ago, far more, parents say they have to work, even when children are very young. I don't understand it and, frankly, I don't believe it. But again, those who say the culture of the United States is just fine have not tried to sit in their own living rooms and watch prime time television sitcoms with their children. It's an odd country that we live in when parents cannot watch television in prime time with their children without wincing. Now, while we see the coarsening of our culture and the alarming assault on values brought to us, paid for, by sponsorship of major American corporations; served up in our living rooms by major American entertainment companies; while we see this, we as a people have been undergoing a kind of triumphalism. After all, we did prevail in a terrific Cold War. We divided the city of Berlin, the country of Germany, the continent of Europe -- in a sense, the entire world -- in a huge test as to which system was best. When the Wall fell down in Berlin, and the Velvet Revolution occurred across Eastern Europe, it was conducted in the language provided by America's 3rd and 16th presidents. They spoke the language of Jefferson and Lincoln. And we have a right to feel triumphant and a right to feel proud. After all, the Soviet Union tried to plant Marxism with bayonets in Europe for 70 years. Today, there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe. And so it seems that the American model of social organization prevails around the world, we have a right to feel triumphant and to think that things are going well. So far, so good. Well, let me tell you a little baseball story. True story. In 1951, Warren Spahn, on his way to becoming the winningest left-handed pitcher in the history of baseball, was pitching for the then-Boston Braves against the then-New York Giants in the then-Polo Grounds. And the Giants sent up to the plate a rookie who was 0 for 13 at the time. It was clear this kid would never hit big league pitching. It was a kid named Willie Mays. Spahn stood up on the pitcher's mound, 60 feet six inches away from Mays, threw the ball and Mays crushed it. First hit, first home run. After the game, the sportswriters went up to Spahn in the clubhouse and said, 'Spahnie, what happened?' And Spahn said, 'Gentlemen, for the first 60 feet that was a heck of a pitch.' It wasn't good enough because it didn't get to the catcher. And it's not good enough to say so far, so good in society. In fact, there are reasons for alarm about the trajectory and our kind of society. Today, if you go into any bookstore and you look on the New York Times bestseller list, you can see there's a biography of one of our most thoughtful and most neglected founders, John Adams. And John Adams said something wonderful when he was writing one of his tremendous letters to Abigail. He said the following. He said, 'I must study politics and the world that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.' He expressed the great American hope that every generation would get better -- not just materially, but morally. And, yet, there is a problem. Some people have called it the cultural contradiction of capitalism, and it goes like this: Capitalism depends on some stern virtues -- thrift, industriousness, deferred gratification, self-denial. All these virtues produce wealth, affluence, eventually luxury -- and luxury begets self-indulgence, indiscipline, decadence if you will. The question is are we as Americans condemned to an automatic and irresistible cycle of decadence and decline. I think not, but in order to fight the problem you have to define it. You have to understand what the question is. To understand the question confronting us as a people we have to understand America's revolution in democratic theory and I think I'll tell you what that is. Before the American Revolution, all political philosophy would agree that if democracy were possible, and it was an enormous if, that if democracy were to be possible it had to be in a small society, something like Pericles' Athens or Geneva. And it had to be a small society because philosophers thought democracy was impossible without factions in it. So, the only way to have a successful democracy was to have a society so small that it was homogenous, without factions. Well, that was of very little relevance to people trying to found a democracy on the North American continent, particularly when they planned what the continent was going to be. Remember that at the time of the American Revolution, there were fewer than 4 million souls in this country and 80 percent of them lived within 20 miles of the Atlantic tidewater -- but, what did they call their conference? The Continental Congress. They knew where they were going, they were going to California. But how do you have a democracy in a huge society like this? Well, our founders had a simple catechism. It went like this. What is the worst outcome in politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny is democracy prey? Tyranny of the majority. Solution? Don't have majorities. Have shifting coalitions of minorities, unstable coalitions of minorities, then you won't have a stable tyrannical majority. Therefore, said James Madison in Federalist 10, The first duty of government, the first duty of government, said Professor Witherspoon's student James Madison, is to protect the different and unequal capacities of acquiring property because that would produce different kinds of factions, economically-motivated factions. And, he wrote in Federalist 51, we've seen throughout our system the process of supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives. Now, this was a pretty cold-blooded and hard-headed political philosophy. It said we're going to design a system that will work even if no one has been interested. Even if everyone is self-interested. Oh, our founders were realists. They said men are not angels, were they they wouldn't be governed. Men are not angels and they are interested, and we have to take them as they are. Oh, this worked, it's given us a good, free society; a productive, free society. And yet, ladies and gentlemen, there's a problem in there because what we have done in the modern world is neglect something that the ancients understood. Aristotle, Aquinas, St. Augustine. In the modern age we take our bearings from what is low and common and powerful, people interestedness. The ancients said we should take our bearings from something higher, what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. We should not be thinking of ourselves as mere creatures of the desires, mere bundles of appetites who are not responsible somehow. We are driven as a billiard ball is driven by a cue, by our own appetites. It reduces us to matter, soulless matter. You know, it's been said that man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and comes to resemble the pictures. That means we should be very careful about how we portray ourselves. Think of pictures without words. Perhaps we have too much resemblance to false and unworthy pictures of what we are as human beings. Since the Enlightenment, since the 18th century when America was born, we have tended to define human well-being in terms of independence. Independence. Well, it's never too late to ask the question, Independent from what? We have tended to say that self-sufficiency, self-sufficiency, is the condition we should aspire to. But sufficient for what? Independence, self-sufficiency are recipes for a radical autonomy that postulates human beings as responsible to no power higher than their own wills, wills or appetites. And against that conception of man's stance, an old exception - 2,000 years old - that involves a loving surrender to a pure kind of freedom of faith to God. Now, that offends a great many people in the modern age. Self-sufficiency, they say, independence, breaking all bounds of nature. I'm bound to say that there's a strain of feminism nowadays that is itself a form of utopianism. It says that we can break all the bonds imposed upon people by anatomy, that in no sense is biology destiny; that the hold on your gender is a social construct invented by society and can be taken apart and that any words relating to gender that divide identical lives of men and women are impermissible inequalities and unjust. Well, this is an attempt to treat human beings and nature as infinitely plastic to the desires and whims of shifting political agendas of the day. It is autonomy, I guess, it is independence, it is self-sufficiency. But it's also radically inconsistent with what we know to be natural right or is right by nature for our kind of people. Well, what do we do? One of the things we do and traditionally have done in our society is to make sure that our political system deals with the strong, slow, steady passions of interestedness in our economic life, the commercial and the public. But there is more to society than politics. And dealing with the most important work of society is not done by politics. That, paradoxically, is why the separation of church and state is important. The principle of separating church and state is to say that politics and the state are not omnipotent and that the most important sphere of life is left to more important institutions. One of which, of course, is what has brought you to the banks of the Ohio River tonight. The separation of church and state simply denies that the state has rightful authority over all of life -- but, every society must be concerned about the moral and religious upbringing of its young, all of them. We hear a lot of talk about reproductive rights. Let me tell you a part about a reproductive right that is not sufficiently talked about, and it is that every society has a right to reproduce its citizenship, reproduce people equipped to be citizens of a free society. That's a very demanding vocation -- anyone can be a citizen of a tyranny, where no judgment, no discipline, no law or compass is required. The state does the job. You know where Americans used to get this? From a Presbyterian clergyman named William H. McGuffey. You've heard of his readers? His readers were the moral instruction for our country for many generations. It has been estimated that from the first edition of his readers in 1836 through 1920, 120 million American children -- half the schoolchildren - acquired their moral bearings from his readers. Ah, but he died, and the fourth edition of his readers came out after his death, in 1879, and a very interesting change had occurred. Hitherto it had said, one should not covet one's neighbor's riches because it's a violation of God's commandment. The 1879 edition said one should not covet one's neighbor's riches because God will make you rich anyway. Now, this was an America undergoing a change, a secularization, a slow abandonment of the river that is part of a serious religious faith. Well, all free government depends on private institutions, non-state institutions, non-governmental institutions to look after character formation. Once upon a time, we could trust our schools, grades K-12, to do that. It's harder to do that now in a culture that bristles with hostility toward organized religion. A society in which, if you try to say a prayer or a benediction at a high school graduation, you find yourself hauled in front of the Supreme Court. And as a secular government grows, the culture begins to be shaped by it, itself becoming a secular culture. Now, we've learned a thing or two, as we've matured as a people, about how primary culture is -- culture meaning values, customs, morays, habits, dispositions -- in shaping our social problems and our solutions to them. It's been a long and painful lesson, but we've learned it. We have learned not just that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas have large and lasting consequences. Take education. Everyone in America is worried about education -- and well they should be. We may be graduating today from our high schools the first generation in American history less well-educated than the generation that came before. Fortunately, we've punctured some of the complacency, at least in Maryland education. I live in a suburb of Washington called Montgomery County, Maryland. A few years ago, someone running for the school board in Montgomery County ran an ad on the radio that said, 'If I'm elected, the schools of Montgomery County will begin to produce Beethovens and Einsteins.' I don't know how it is where you live, but in Montgomery County we'd be very pleased if, upon leaving school, our children had heard of Beethoven and Einstein. Well now, let's think about what the problem is. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the shortest school year in the industrial world. Ours is 180 days. 220 in Europe, 220 in Japan, 240 days in Korea. We have a short school day, it turns out. A study done for the government last year concluded that about half a high school student's day is devoted to what you and I would recognize as core academic subjects. The rest is devoted to propaganda, politics and social reform. Someone said recently that the 3 Rs now stand for racism, reproduction and recycling. But most of all, most of all, we have -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- for 50 years have bet on a wrong idea. The idea that we bought into right after the Second World War, when the Baby Boom generation began going through the public school system like a pig through a python, was the idea that the best predictor of a school's performance is the amount of money that you spent on it, increased financial aid. … We've done that for 50 years, in both parties. Teachers' salaries went up, class sizes went down, pupil/teacher ratio got better -- and test scores went down. You know why? It took us a long time, but now research has demonstrated that there is one solid predictor of how a school performs. And it's not the amount of money you spend on it. The highest per capita spending in this country is in Washington, D.C. A Pemple study showed that the longer you spend in a District of Columbia public school, the worst your life chances are. Private, parochial schools in Washington spend a third as much per capita and do a much better job -- it's not money. The solid predictor of a school's performance that explains 90 percent of the differences is the quality of the families from which the children come to school. It can explain most of the differences in a school's performance in four areas: Number of parents in the home. Quantity and quality of reading material in the home. The amount of homework done in the home. And the amount of television watching in the home. Ladies and gentlemen, there's nothing that government can do with any of those four areas. It's all families. We've seen the primacy of culture, not just in education, but in welfare reform. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, it was the consensus that poverty existed because poor people did not have material goods and services that government could give them … But in the 1960s, two lines on a graph crossed in a way that was ominous because it was counterintuitive. One was the rising graph of welfare dependency, while another graph - unemployment - was declining. How could this be? Well, what that told us was that we had a new kind of poverty. A new kind of poverty that meant that John Kennedy's hopeful axiom that a rising tide raises all boats wasn't working any more. The economic tide was rising and lots of people were stuck on the bottom. Why? Because we had a new kind of poverty. It's called behavioral poverty or a spiritual poverty. It is that people, a certain portion of our fellow countrymen, lacked the morays, habits, customs, dispositions necessary to prosper in a modern, industrial society. And that economic growth would know. And the government had to start sending different signals. It had to say a lifetime of poverty won't do. It's not acceptable. Certain things are expected now. That's what happened with the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. Since it was passed, since we ended the lifetime entitlement of welfare, since we turned responsibility over to the states, which built 50 different social experiments in this, welfare rolls have been cut in half partly -- largely -- because we sent a sent a new moral message, 'This is not acceptable.' Different behavior is expected. This is statecraft and also soulcraft. And ladies and gentlemen, it has worked. This is what is being tried now with the Bush administration's faith-based initiatives. The administration is simply saying they are not going to violate the separation of church and state and they're not going to construe the separation of church and state as requiring a secular state to be hostile to faith institutions that work. The government is not responsible for all parts of life, but it can do business with and cooperate with the most serious institutions we have, which are non-political institutions. They are faith institutions. Now, what Abraham Lincoln called the silent artillery of time has destroyed many ideas in the last 2,000 years, but you are here, drawn here by an idea 2,000 years old and going strong, impervious to the silent artillery of time. You are here because you believe, as I do, that the soul of the country is in constant jeopardy, that there are aspects to modern life, aspects of the American political assumptions, aspects of the American economic system, that can -- unless combatted -- become perilous to the soul of the country. It's a good time to be alive. There is nothing wrong with material goods. Nothing wrong with economic growth. It funds the good life. It funds institutions, hospitals, schools, churches. I am not belittling this. It's a wonderful time to be alive in terms of medicine. Do you realize that it wasn't until 1914 that the average visit to the doctor did more good than harm? We valued doctors at that time for what? For their bedside manners. That's all they had. Doctors could make you comfortable and nature healed you or killed you. It was about that time that Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice, said that if you took all the medicine in the world and threw it into the ocean, it would be better for the people and worse for the fish. To be serious, 100 years ago one in four American children died before age 14. If your child got diabetes, you watched your child go blind and die. It's a good time to be alive. We have done much to preserve the body. All I'm saying is that it is now time for us to do as much to serve the soul. And I believe that we, as a country, are now beginning to ask the right questions. I'm not going to tell you what the future will hold. I'm not a good prophet. When it comes to prophecy, I subscribe to the Zeke LeGeurl principle. Real baseball fans remember that Zeke LeGeurl was a first baseman of spectacular immobility. Zeke understood the first rule of baseball, which is that you cannot be charged with an error if you do not touch the ball. However, I am hopeful because I think our country has a long religious tradition of asking the right questions. The right questions always come down to care for the soul of the citizen and the soul of the country. And as the economic problem becomes less urgent, our attention to the questions of soulcraft become more intense. And we begin to understand again the principle of responsibility -- everyone's responsibility to the body, the best. I will tell you, I promise, the final baseball story. It is the greatest baseball story ever told. And it's true. Rogers Hornsby, the greatest right-handed hitter in the history of baseball, was at the plate and there was a rookie pitching on the mound who was understandably petrified. And the rookie threw three pitches to Hornsby. The rookie thought they were on the edge of the plate, but the umpire said, ' Ball 1. Ball 2. Ball 3.' Well, the rookie got flustered and he shouted at him, 'Umpire, those were strikes.' The umpire took off his mask, looked down at the rookie and said, 'Young man. When you throw a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know.' You see, Hornsby had become the standard. If he didn't swing, it wasn't a strike. And that is the life of responsibility, which is one by one, from the inside out, you can change society, get people better Lincoln understood this. In 1858, with war clouds lowering over the country, he spoke at the Wisconsin State Fair and he told this story. He said there was a ruler who summoned his wise men and cautioned them to go away and devise a statement to be carved in stone with a reverent view and forever true. Lincoln said they came back awhile later and what they had carved in stone was, 'And this too shall pass away.' And Lincoln said, and yet, if we Americans are as assiduous in cultivating our human lives as we are prodigiously talented in cultivating the material world around us, it need not be so. It need not pass away. And that is the recurring hopeful theme of life in this nation in which there is separation of church and state, but no separation whatever at any time between the life of faith and the life of citizenship.

Respond to this article

News From the PCUSA Home · News · PLC Publications · The Presbyterian Layman Online Reviews · Archives · History of the Lay Committee · Feedback · Links