In times like these, historians can help put things in context.  They can also show us that the issues of our time are the same ones that we have dealt with in one form or another throughout history.

For example, historian Heather Cox Richardson recently lifted up a speech that Abraham Lincoln delivered way back in January of 1838.  He was just 28 years old at the time and he was worried that his generation might not preserve the republic that the founders of our country had handed down.

Lincoln felt that the danger to our country was not foreign powers but Americans themselves.  “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

For Lincoln the problem was a growing lawlessness in both society and in government.  He felt that ignoring the law eventually broke down all the guardrails designed to protect individuals, while lawbreakers, going unpunished, became convinced they were entitled to act without restraint. 

“Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane,” Lincoln said, “they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”

The only solution, he felt, was to protect the rule of law on which the country was founded.  Lincoln did not feel that all laws are good.  Bad laws should be challenged and repealed, but only under the rule of law based on the Constitution.  To do otherwise would be to abandon democracy.  

He also raised an interesting phenomenon.  He said that because the country had already been built and was running well, people had nothing to fight for.  And when people do not feel they need to fight for their country they will take to tearing it down.  

“Men of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won.  For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” 

It is a process that would lead to people turning against each other.  The only way out would be for people to begin fighting for the democracy that would be in peril.    

Remember, he was 28 at the time.  His address, known as the Lyceum Address, is the earliest known speech of Lincoln’s to be preserved.  It is sobering because, of course, he was right and the Civil War lay ahead.  

To free us from the perils in which we live today, it is important to combine an appreciation of the lessons of history with the moral fortitude of our faith so that we can preserve the best of our country and build an even stronger and more just one in the days to come.

See you in church,

–Rev. Dominic