Alan Keyes
April 30, 1998

Introduction: Our speaker tonight, Dr. Alan Keyes, is in point of fact, the host of a nationally syndicated call-in radio program. It is titled "The Alan Keyes Show: America's Wake Up Call." But what I would offer to you is that when it comes to Alan Keyes, he is a call-in talk show host by day, but his every waking minute is as man after God's own heart. Alan Keyes, more than any other spokesman in America today, has his finger on the pulse of America's moral condition. Not surprisingly, he was a candidate for President of the United States in 1996. He has been founder and chairman of the board of the Declaration Foundation. He served during Ronald Reagan's presidency as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

But in the words of another talk show host, whose first name is Rush, it can be said, "There is NOBODY out there right now who is doing a better job articulating the moral concerns and what they ought to be than Alan Keyes." I give you with great, great pride and humility, the incomparable Alan Keyes.

Alan Keyes: Thank you very much. Praise God. Thank you.

I've got to say, there are some events where it's easier for me to start speaking, and at some events it's hard. I am filled with such good feelings by this gathering this evening, and such a sense of hope, that it actually makes it more difficult for me to do what I have to do. Now why would that be? Is it because I have no hope? No, not at all. But it is because sometimes, in order to appreciate the tremendous importance of what we do--and also in order to appreciate what I think is the enormous accomplishment of the Indiana Family Institute--you have to dwell for a little while on just where it is we stand right now in America. And to tell you the truth, at this moment, looking out over this audience and in the face of what I think is the great witness of the things that can be achieved by the decent American spirit that is gathered in this room, it's kind of hard to remember where we are.

Of course I only have to do one thing to remind you. It's actually very easy, and with a couple of well-chosen words, I will be able to put you in mind of the real state of affairs in our nation.

Bill Clinton. (laughter, applause, more applause)

See, I told you. It is the easiest thing in the world--doesn't require any work at all. But you know, those words might put you in mind of a serious state of crisis in America, but it's not entirely clear to me that they suffice. Maybe they do, but I don't think so. I was looking around at what is going on in the country now, and some of the reaction to what's out in front of us. You know, to be quite honest, I think that there have been folks--and certainly the Indiana Family Institute is evidence of their concern and anxiety--who have seen the great crisis in America for years. Some folks have known that it was there and dedicated themselves to working to do something about it.

Would you believe though, that even right now, today, there seem to be many Americans who still don't know it's here? This despite the fact that our God, who is a great and good God, is also a God of many chances. I think He really wants to give us a chance, because He has specially blessed America. You and I know this. We must have a special place in His heart. Look at the material success we've enjoyed, the enormous challenges we've overcome, the tremendous role that we have played--indeed, more than a tremendous role, the indispensable, the critical role we played in this century in beating back the shadow of the greatest evils that mankind had yet faced. All of this is a testament to the special place America has in the eyes and next to the heart of God. And so it's not surprising that He wants to give us, as much as He can, a chance to pull back from the brink.

And that's why I think we're going through the era we are right now. I do have to tell you that sometimes I wake up and I wonder why we are having to go through this. And then it occurs to me that it's all part of God's wonderful plan. He wants to make sure we have no excuse. Because there are people in the country who could at some point say, "Oh, it was bad, but I didn't know it was that bad. I knew that there were some things wrong. I knew that there were children gunning each other down in our schools, and I knew that there was skyrocketing illegitimacy. I knew that families were falling apart, and I knew that fathers were turning their backs on their children, but you know, I didn't know it was that bad." But now it has been writ large up there on the face of our nation, where the whole world can look at it.

And if someone pretends they cannot see the depth of our corruption, still it is there every day on the evening news. I understand that the evening news now is the only thing that offers much competition to Jerry Springer for raunchiness. And we all know why that is. In order to talk about our great national affairs now, we have to decide on what rating it deserves. It is the first time I can think of where a discussion of public policy and constitutionalism requires an "X" rating. I never thought that my little areas in life would be that exciting, but here they are.

And we make light of it. Jay Leno makes jokes about it. But I think to a certain extent it's quite obvious that we are laughing through a deep sense of anxiety. And some of these polls out there that claim we'd just as soon that Ken Starr went away and didn't do anymore--I think that is because most people are so embarrassed that they just want it to stop. And while they ought to be embarrassed, they ought to be more than embarrassed.

Because we have succumbed to the notion that we are dealing here with a little, isolated crisis of turpitude. We think that maybe it just concerns an individual. We make all kinds of excuses for ourselves, and for the individual involved. I've even heard people say that it doesn't matter what he does in the Oval Office. No, actually they say it doesn't matter what he does in his bedroom, but since he did it in the Oval Office, they are actually saying it doesn't matter what he does in the Oval Office.

Now, of course, how far are we going to extend this? Because he does make all kinds of decisions in the Oval Office, besides the bad ones. What we are really trying to say is that there is no connection between our moral selves and our public selves, and between those things that we hold dear in our nations life as a community and those things that we are supposed to respect in our choices as individuals.

I think in some ways this is a natural consequence of our acceptance of what I call the phony doctrine of the separation of church and state. As construed by our courts now, that separation has been erected, of course, into a separation between morality and politics. And, lo and behold, after all these years of trying, we have effectively and totally achieved that separation, to such a degree now that we cannot speak of our politics without moral shame, and cannot think of our leaders without a sense that the very thought corrupts our minds.

But I think we've reached this point because, at some level, we've forgotten who we are and where we come from. We think, perhaps, we're a nation like other nations--bound together by the fact that we have all been in one place for a long time, or speak a common language, or come from a common ethnic and racial stock. That's generally how nations have defined themselves in the course of human history. Of course, all you have to do is look around this room and you'll see what difficulties we might have in that regard, for we are indeed a motley crew, a nation of nations, a people of many peoples. We come from many backgrounds and heritages, and the truth of the matter is that we have not all even been in this place for a long time, because some of us arrived yesterday and some the day before yesterday, and none of us has been here that long. For this is a new nation, in a new world, that the old world hadn't even heard of until just a moment ago in terms of human history.

So what makes us a nation at all? How come we are not just a bunch of strangers, happened upon the same place, trying to work out how we shall live here on terms that don't achieve our mutual destruction? Is that all we are? If we are something more, then I think it has to do with things that can't be seen as easily as they are in other nations, can't be touched and quantified as easily as they might be in other places. If, despite all our differences of heritage and racial background and creed, we are still one people, it is on account of something we can't so easily see, touch, describe. At least in one way.

But, you see, in another way we can. I find it all the time. I have yet to find an American audience that doesn't have a sense of recognition when you speak certain words. They kind of lean forward a little bit in the chair and settle a little bit more deeply into themselves, and they make their own affirmation to what is in fact the affirmation of our identity as a nation: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

See, you can't say the words without each and every one of us having some chord within us struck that resonates with their truth. "Ah yes, that's who we are." We are the people, more than anything else, constituted by our common reverence for those ideas--ideas so easily summed up in our sense that each and every human being, each and every person as they come from the hand of God, comes from His hand with a spark of immortal dignity, not to be violated by governments, not to be held in contempt by human powers, but giving to each and every one of us, whatever our background, state or condition, the right to stand boldly before the world and demand respect for our human dignity. That is who we are.

But knowing this, I sometimes think we don't bother to think through the consequences of this fact. If this is who we really are--a people who believe in this idea--then it would seem to me that we ought to think it through very thoroughly, because it has enormous implications for the choices we make, and for the kind of people we are supposed to be. In this sense, more than any other nation at any other time, we cannot continue to exist if we do not respect the requirements of that character which is needed to make us a nation. And I use those terms not just in the ordinary sense of the words, but in the sense that apart from our respect for these ideas in practice, we are not a nation at all, we are not a people. We can't hold it together--and we won't, by the way.

We live with the delusion that we will be able to break away from every discipline required by our common life and liberty, and yet survive in freedom. This will not work. We stand right now, at a decision point. And it is an urgent one. If we make the decision wrongly--and right now we are--then the Republic and the liberty it implies will perish, and most of us here tonight will live to know that it is gone.

Have you reflected at all on how crushing that is going to be to you? That we will live to know that we are the people, this was the generation, that pushed away our heritage of freedom, and that consigned our children and our grandchildren to the graveyard of despotism and tyranny? We will know that we are the ones who did this. Have we wakened yet to the horror of that shame? I don't think we have. But it is the crisis we face.

And it is now upon us in almost every area of our lives. Because in every area of our life as a people, those great ideas on which this nation is founded, from which we as a people derive our character, are being challenged, are being broken, are being tossed aside and their consequences being ignored.

Well, tonight let's spend a minute or two just simply going through those consequences--starting, of course, with the greatest one that is also the hardest for many people to think about, though I'm not sure why. And let's keep thinking about the words I spoke, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

I was reading an article the other day about how someone--I think it was the National Science Foundation--put out a pamphlet which they are sending to all the teachers of school science courses. The aim of this pamphlet is to make them more confident in their teaching of evolution. Now as far as it goes, I think it's perfectly reasonable for folks to be teaching evolution. It is an important scientific theory. On the other hand, part of the aim of this pamphlet also, as they declared it, was to nip in the bud this movement that has been seeking to reintroduce into the classroom the idea of creation.

Now in the articles that I read it was taken for granted that this was just a contest between the religious zealots and the staid defenders of science. I have a problem though. Because remembering the words I just spoke, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," I would like somebody tell me how we explain them to our children, if we cannot define creation.

We read every day treatments of great issues. This one might seem to be just a contest between the some scientists and some religious people. No it's not. Hidden away at the heart of this issue is a decision about whether or not we shall stand by the principles on which this nation stands, or abandon the very concepts without which we cannot understand them. We stand or fall by these decisions, and yet we make them without reference to their consequences. This is madness, you know.

But more important even than the idea that our children would have to understand the concept of creation, there's another, even more disturbing one. Because if those words are true, from which we profess to derive the whole doctrine of rights and liberty, and due process and self-government, which characterizes this nation's life, then there is another important challenge that we face as citizens. Because for the last fifty or sixty years we have been exposed to a doctrine whose aim is to forbid the speaking of the name of God in our public places and from our public platforms, for fear that we shall somehow violate the supposed separation of church and state.

This doctrine leads naturally to the consequence, I suppose, that our statesmen no longer have the right to stand before gatherings on the Fourth of July and read with any confidence the words of the great Declaration which we celebrate on that day. For if the words of that Declaration are true, then nothing about this nation's life and nothing about its sense of justice and right can be understood apart from the existence and acknowledgment of God.

We don't want to say this to ourselves anymore. We don't want to admit it. You have heard the story of the judge in Alabama named Judge Dement. I call him "Judge Demented," myself. He sits on the federal bench in Alabama dictating to the folks in Dekalb County that they cannot have prayers in their school system--not before the games and not before the assemblies, and in no way. He has even gone so far as to put monitors in the hallways of the schools in order to make sure that there is no inappropriate religious behavior going on. When I was in school they put monitors in the hallways of the schools to make sure that other inappropriate behavior wasn't going on, but now they stand at the crossroads in those same hallways handing out condoms, so I suppose they don't monitor that behavior quite as much anymore. Truth to tell, though, when I speak those words to you, there is a school in America, a whole school system, where there are monitors in the hallways monitoring to make sure no inappropriate religious behavior is going on.

See, I just told you that, and you're still sitting down. I don't understand this; I don't understand it. It proves to me, half the time, that we are already slaves. I'm not supposed to insult my audience, but the fact that we can sit here and hear that report and not yet be up in arms means that we are already slaves. For there can be no greater violation of what we now call the freedom of religion.

That's even a misnomer, showing how much we have forgotten ourselves--for the Constitution doesn't guarantee the freedom of religion. You didn't know that, did you? That's not what it says at all. It doesn't guarantee the right to believe what you want, to hold any creeds that you feel like holding. It doesn't guarantee the right to mouth in silence whatever prayers you wish to present to your God. The words in the Constitution refer to that right established by God's hand, not by the Constitution, which is "the free exercise of religion."

We not only have the right to believe, we have the right to act according to that belief. And if there are judges sitting on the federal bench, or any other bench, who are telling us now that they have the right to tell our children in schools that they cannot pray, that they cannot worship according to their conscience where and when they please, then our Constitution already has become a worthless document, because we are no longer a people with the heart, the courage, or the understanding to make it a reality.

You see, our ideas have consequences, and we no longer want to see that. We think, "Well, let's be easy-going about this doctrine of separation of church and state." Yet if we accept this doctrine, and drive God from the public square, then from what source, exactly, do we claim our rights?

I know that there are folks in the ACLU who will tell you that we claim them from the Constitution. You have noticed, haven't you, that the judges on the bench are rewriting the Constitution every chance they get and whenever they please. So if you derive your rights from the Constitution, I feel sorry for you, because they are disappearing quickly. Your right to keep and bear arms is already gone, virtually destroyed. The Tenth Amendment doesn't exist; the Ninth Amendment is nearly out the door. The right to be secure in your person and property from illegal searches and seizures is under assault. If it is the Constitution as interpreted by the folks who now sit on the bench from which you derive your rights, then your rights are like the invisible man--fading, fading, going, going, soon to be gone. And when they have been interpreted away, to what court shall you appeal to get them back?

We got them in first place after not just centuries, but millennia of human oppression, because finally somebody stood up with the wisdom to understand that our dignity doesn't come from courts, and it doesn't come from scraps of paper--it comes from the God who made us all. If He does not exist, then our rights do not exist. If our acknowledgment of His authority does not survive, then they will not survive. This is the simple truth.

And here is the whole point of what I'm trying to do tonight--please, please understand. If what I just said is the simple truth, then the hour of our doom as a free people has already struck. The clock is sounding out the tones of midnight for us now. The decisions have been rendered already that drive this fundamental truth from our public square, and that reach into the hearts of our children to rip it out. We are far gone already.

But there is more. Because the harder part of this is not just recognizing how, in some conceptual way, we are being deprived of the basic necessities of our freedom. It is also to recognize the extent to which, through our own passions, we are being seduced to live in such a way that we contradict those basic truths.

I know that there is a practical way in which we can talk about the requirement of moral character in our lives. And that practical way is very simple--I mean, who'd want to live in a society with people totally out of control? Robbing all the time, stealing, lying, killing, cheating, a war of all against all. Thomas Hobbes was perfectly right in his description of that world. "The life of man," he said, "is miserable, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Not something very attractive to contemplate. So at a practical level, we obviously want some restraints on people; anybody in any society would. We would prefer that most of the time people don't lie. We would prefer that most of the time they behave in such a way that they at least have a little control over their sexual passions, even if it just extends to not raping us at the moment.

But if this is as far as it goes, we haven't yet reached the state of liberty we're supposed to have. Because beyond the practical sense that in order to sustain, at some practical level a little of this and a little of that, we've got to have a little bit of restraint, there is the profound sense in which if our first great creed is true, there are consequences from those truths for our discipline. The simple fact of the matter is that it is hard to know how you claim your rights from God, appeal to His authority when it comes to fighting for those rights, and then when it comes to deciding whether you shall be faithful to your marriage vows, when it comes to deciding whether to cheat on that business deal, when it comes to deciding whether you shall slander that neighbor, you'll throw His authority aside. A great problem is that if you throw His authority aside, when it comes to the decisions you take for yourself, then respect for that authority will be gone when it comes to appealing from the oppressive decisions of others. We haven't awakened to this yet, have we?

Why am I smiling? There's an irony in all of this. Rousseau refers somewhere, in one of his writings, to somebody who sells in the morning the bed that he's going to have to sleep on in the evening. It's kind of a paradigm of stupidity and lack of common sense. And yet we are such a proud people; we think we are so wonderful. We sent a man to the moon, we have such wonderful technology, we have built such a wonderful nation. And yet here is the authority of God on which our whole system rests. And along come the seductive politicians to tell us that our women have the right to choose.

Now what is "the right to choose" ultimately based on? It is based on the notion that it is the mother's choice whether or not that child in the womb has any rights. The rights of that child therefore derive from the mother's choice. But if that is true, then it is no longer God's authority on which they rest, it is human authority from which they come. And by embracing the doctrine of abortion, we toss away that authority now that we shall appeal to later when the boot heel of oppression is upon us and we are looking for some power beyond human power to justify our struggle against oppression.

If that person who sells the bed in the morning, forgetting he'll have to sleep on it at night is stupid, then what are we? And why do we sit here so complacent, thinking that we still have time? We have already effectively destroyed the ideas, and even many of the sentiments, on which our liberty depends. We survive now as a nation because we are living on inertia, moving forward because we have moved forward. But it is already running out.

And you may take what I alluded to in the beginning, if you like, as just a little crisis of some individual's character--but you and I both know better. The moral crisis exemplified right now at the highest level and in the highest office of our land is the emblem of the fact that we have, in terms of our moral decline, already come close to the end of the line. We should have known it when our children started to die in the womb. We should have known it when they were dying in the schools and in the streets, we should certainly know it now.

So what are we going to do about this? Or are we going to wake up and do anything? This is the enormous question that is in front of us now. I think that if we could really see the consequences of a wrong choice, none of us would be sitting complacent, not even for a second. If we could really see. Do you know where we are right now? I would say that it's 1924 in Weimar, Germany. That's where we are right now. The Weimar Republic was the regime that preceded Hitler's Nazi Germany. Do you think that folks sitting about at dinners, if they could have seen what would happen to their civilization by the end of the 1940's, might have felt a sense of urgency about stopping the rise of Nazism?

Ah, for the wisdom of hindsight. We are a great and powerful nation, and yet at the same time, we have gathered together in this land every race, every creed--and, just by the by, every ugly passion and every hateful possibility on the face of the earth. What do you think is going to happen when this nation, armed as we are now with the powers of science that go beyond even our most horrific imagining, what do you think shall happen here if we go bad? We stood as the watchmen on the walls against the dark night, but now the ideas that were represented in that evil have sapped underneath our walls. The very ideas we fought in Nazi Germany are coming forward now, in different clothing. For the gas chambers of the holocaust, we substitute the sterile lights of the abortuary. But the idea is the same.

We speak now of euthanasia, and killing for compassion--not even knowing that in these arguments we echo the very words and phrases that the Nazis used to justify their murder of those who were disabled, of those who were maimed, of those who were mentally handicapped. We dress the evil up in different words, we clothe it in different ways, but it prepares our hearts for the same acceptance of wickedness. Because once you've started to regard respect for human life as a matter of convenience, as a matter of human judgment and decision, where do you draw the line?

We started out with Roe vs. Wade. Judge Blackman told us that this would never go beyond the first trimester. Of course it went all the way up to the ninth month, and then we have partial-birth abortion. Now it's all the way out of the womb, practically.

The other day I read in the New York Times Magazine an evolutionary biologist named Steven Pinker arguing for greater understanding for mothers who kill their infant children. We have gone from "it won't go beyond the first trimester," all the way to "why don't we think about infanticide?" And in the speech, he even goes so far as to suggest that it might be a boon to mankind if parents had a little time to think about it. Of course, he got it all wrong, as I've told people. It just goes to prove that some of these people who claim to be compassionate are not compassionate at all. He said you should give parents maybe two or three weeks after the child is born to sort of think about it. I figure this must be a man who is not married and has not yet encountered any teenagers. Otherwise, he'd want to give us longer, don't you think? I mean, the real temptation doesn't come until many years later. [laughter]

The truth of the matter is, though, that that joke illustrates where we get to when we start making our respect for human life a matter of our decision and convenience. He says two or three weeks; I might say 14 or 15 years; somebody else might opt for something in between. On top of it all, once we've decided that it's a matter of whether it's quality or not quality, convenient or not convenient, it's a calculus of profit and loss, of burden and gain. How do you think that calculus applies to those of you who are all gray in the temples? You don't enjoy life as much as you used to. Probably don't enjoy it much at all. Yet you're still taking up a place here, why don't you move along? When they offer you the right to suicide, please stop for a minute and consider whether they are offering you a right or making a suggestion. And eventually the suggestion will become an order. And the order will become the emblem of a culture that no longer understands that God is God, and that there is from His hand an intrinsic value, in this, His gift of life.

We are already here. We are already living in a society ruled by a doctrine of death. And what we are gathered here tonight to do and to decide is not whether we shall preserve it--for it is gone, that world we knew. We must decide whether, while we still remember what it was, we shall work to restore it now, so that our children will know it again as what it is supposed to be. This is why you are here.

And it's why it was so hard for me to start this talk, you see, because I think these days, that I play a hard role. Most Americans would like to believe that we are simply fighting to preserve our decent land. Our decent land is gone. It is, as it were, in a coma, at the very edge of permanent death, and we must decide whether we shall give our all now to revive it, in the truth of its moral capacity, moral discipline, moral purpose.

I say this because, only if we understand that this is where we are, will we realize that what we have to do now is just as hard--indeed harder--than what they had to do at the beginning. They pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Do you want to know the truth? We have reached a stage now where we not only aren't willing to give our lives or our fortunes, we don't even want to risk embarrassment to stand up for the things that are right. We have leaders who, right now, are not willing to speak out against the smut in the White House because they're afraid of public opinion. We have preachers who will not stand in the pulpit and demand our respect for the Commandments of God because they're afraid of public opinion.

It's time for us to understand that the challenge of this nation's future is with us, now, here, immediately--that we must reach within ourselves and begin to demand, once again, first that discipline which understands that though there are personal choices, there is, in a sense, no personal choice.

Because when we decide whether we're going to cheat on our spouse, we're not just making a choice for our private lives. We are making a choice that undermines the very possibility of our most important social institution. It's true. When our young women decide whether they shall abort a child in their womb, they are not just making a personal choice. They are deciding whether in our hearts, as in our laws, as in our institutions, we will respect the basic principles from which we derive our liberty. When we decide whether as parents we shall stand before our children willing to take the embarrassment and risk the temporary resentment that might come from bearing witness to the truth--that this conduct is right, that conduct is wrong--we are not just deciding for ourselves and our households. Rather, since our households are the building blocks of liberty--let them crumble, and freedom crumbles.

Every choice we make has some implication for our freedom. Every choice. And that means every issue we face. How we handle our families, how we handle our sex lives, how we use our money--with each and every step we are deciding that shall we be free, or that we shall we be slaves.

Shall we be free . . . or shall we be slaves?

Today, there are so many voices in our science, in our universities, in our entertainment, in our news media, in our politics. They all promise us rights; they all speak of liberation. But in the end they all represent the same wide road to slavery. WE must decide now, as have previous generations, whether instead we shall choose the sometimes harder road, the always higher way that leads to freedom.

And that, I think, is what you are gathered here for tonight. The Indiana Family Institute, I think, comes out of a heart of recognition that we must, each of us, ourselves, decide that we shall now stand for what is right; that we shall become--in our families, in our workplace, in our churches, in our schools, in our communities--those who are rebuilding America's life and hope and freedom.

But we must also come together so we can see that we are not alone. That yet there is in America a great, a decent majority of people who, once they are awakened, will with some ease move this nation back where it belongs. But it must begin here. It must begin with each of our decisions to look in our lives and see the ways in which we can make a difference. And then to come together in places like this to see the ways in which, working together, we can make that difference for all. I hope that you will make up your minds tonight, because it is so late. I guess I wouldn't be here if I didn't have great confidence that, as a people, we were going to do right.

I take that confidence not just from my own personal optimism, but from a heritage that is, in fact, still the heritage that shapes us. When this nation began, its Founders--who could have decided on a way of life that simply gave them all the power, as had their forebears in Europe--decided instead to respect what they had come to believe to be the deep truths of human justice. And even though it reproached a great evil among themselves, the evil of slavery, they set forth as the emblem of this nation's life great principles of truth. They chose what was right.

And in the decades that followed, many people struggled with the issue of slavery--with the rights and wrongs of it, weighing up the profit, weighing up the selfish motivation, weighing up the power, and weighing up all the things that this or that way of life could derive from the continuation of this human evil. But in the end, with great struggle, and even at the cost of blood, this nation decided we would do what was right. And it was that heart for right that enabled us twice in the course of this century to come to the rescue of a world gone mad, and to stand when it was over with the thunderbolts in our hands and offer to that world, not oppression, but the hope that someday there would be a universal human liberty. We did what was right.

And now the time has come for us, ourselves, to look at what is going on in our hearts, and in our nation, and in our schools, and with the same resolve that we showed when God called us to save the world, to save ourselves for freedom. It is that heritage that gives me hope that, as we stood in the past in the glory of His providence to do His will, so we shall stand there now. Beginning here, beginning with us, beginning with our decisions tonight and tomorrow and every day, until we can look around again and know that this is truly again the nation that--because it rests on those great truths that respect God's authority and seek in human justice to do His will--offers hope to all of humankind that we shall yet fulfill the better destiny of man.

God bless you.