"While we are calling to mind the mercies enjoyed, it will not be amiss to admonish you of our abuse of some of them,--abuses which, unless reformed, are likely to convert our blessings into curses. Our national sins are pride, self will, and covetousness, and our freedom is misused to an excess of licentiousness. We are, as a people, blessed in the possession of civil and religious liberty. With regard to civil freedom,--I judge from a studious comparison of the polities of different Governments which I made in former days,--no nation possesses a larger measure than these United States. The experiment of a great people binding themselves by a written. constitution in which all that is essential to government is ordered, and all that is valuable in liberty, is secured, has been attempted under the scornful eye and evil wishes of tyrants, and before the earnest gaze of patriots and of friends. It has been executed by three generations of freemen, amidst every variety of vicissitude in war and in peace, in prosperity and distress. Our liberties, accordingly, are restricted and bounded by constitutional laws. Throughout our civil polity are checks and balances, limitations and restraints, that hedge us in and shut us up to certain paths and specific enjoyments. The Law stands above us, and deals out to each citizen his proper measure of liberty, prescribing reciprocal rights and obligations, and thus securing to every citizen of the Republic his due proportion of happiness, and prohibiting all obtrusion upon the privileges of others. The peculiar feature of our government, that which makes it free, is, that it is a government of law, which the people themselves have made for themselves and their children. Their only sovereign, under the great God whom they profess to acknowledge, is the sovereign law. Now, the tendency of our generation and of our age is to disregard the law. The maxim that "the voice of the people is the voice of God," is true only, 1st, when the voice does not contradict God's voice in the Bible, and, 2d, when this voice of the people is lawfully uttered. Assuming that nothing is designed or expressed contrary to the Bible, then the next condition must be fulfilled, before the voice of the people can be urged as authority; it must be duly uttered; uttered from the constituted tribunals of the constitution. Any law is binding upon the conscience until the law be lawfully changed. I may object to the constitution of our State, but I have no right to contravene its provisions, until they are regularly and constitutionally revoked or altered; and if I have no right to take the law into my hands, neither have you neither have the majority, nor even the whole commonwealth promiscuously assembled. The law must be altered lawfully, and in the mode prescribed by the constitution, and until then, it is supreme and sovereign. It were far better to suffer oppression, than to violate this cardinal principle, for it is this which secures our lives, our liberties, and our pursuit of happiness. For the barriers of our will being one by one overthrown, lawlessness will rush in like a flood, and bear us on the roaring waves to ruin."
--- Francis Vinton; A Thanksgiving Sermon (4 December 1845)
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2 comments:
Excellent quote! Thanks for posting it.
It is truly sad that 164 years later we still find ourselves in the same situation.
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