Bishop Ricken's Message CHEYENNE – Everything has its price, and that is what the Founding Fathers of the United States realized when they hammered together the Constitution of the United States. They had studied every major constitution in the history of the world, going back to the first great constitution of the ancient world, the Athenian Constitution, and they saw the flaws, dangers and limitations of each. Their goal: liberty, as the prime concern of government; liberty for every man, woman and child to be born in the new nation, liberty as the air and very breath of the nation, liberty as its charter and its firm foundation, and they shaped a Constitution and a form of government to provide just that. But they stated their purpose with luminous clarity: to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The one flaw in that Constitution, at the time, was that none of these “blessings” would benefit the African slaves who were also part of the nation, brought here forcefully in slave ships that had no regard for their liberty or human dignity. And it was the insight, instinct and legal genius of Abraham Lincoln that saw that such a republic could not stand, unless the laws of the country aimed at “liberty and justice for all.” In 1838, when he was only 29 years old, he gave an address to
the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,
on the Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions, in which
he laid down with graphic illustrations the price that
must be paid for liberty: that price was personal integrity, a
massive passion for just laws, and a sense of personal
responsibility for assuring that liberty itself does not become
an unbridled passion for mere personal autonomy, with no regard
for the common good and the rights of others, with the only “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us…If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” “Or die by suicide”…because the moral fiber, moral character and moral integrity upon which the nation was built had become no longer the foundation of its laws and political institutions, and had been replaced with something resembling personal anarchy and unbridled self-interest. The lessons of the past, so carefully weighed by the founders of the nation in their study of the political institutions of history, were ignored and set aside as antiquarian and outdated. Moral character and moral character alone is the sole safeguard of our political institutions. That was denied at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 by John Rutledge of South Carolina who declared that religion and humanity had nothing to do with the founding of the republic, that “interest alone is the governing principle of nations.” That principle almost brought about the dissolution of the nation “four score and seven years” later. It was Abraham Lincoln who, almost singlehandedly, reversed that equation and restored to the public life of the nation moral character, a moral purpose and the founding of law upon firm principles of morality. With corporate greed motoring the economy of the nation, with politicians declaring that their private life has nothing to do with their political prowess, with youths scarcely out of high school corrupted by easy money and easy morals for their athletic abilities, with literature and drama proclaiming complete freedom from moral restraints in the exercise of their craft, with marriage and family life riddled with infidelity and casual liaisons as a way of life, and with religion being separated more and more from daily life, the moral fiber of the nation seems to be in decline, and the lessons of history tell us that juridic and political collapse is not far behind. Liberty is safe only in the hands of those who
see liberty as an opportunity for the “good |