Macauley somewhere intimates that those who have no pride in
their forbears are likely to leave little that their descendants can take pride
in. Our pioneering progenitors were men and women unafraid. They had
convictions that steeled them against cowardice. Trusting in a fore-ordaining
God, the events and circumstances of the changing scene were related to Eternal
Patterns.
Our comforts, made possible by the privations of the
Fathers, may yet prove our ruin. Unless we, in their spirit, meet the perils
that multiply in our own time, dire things shall surely befall us. We have
become soft. Sacrificial devotion to great causes, spending and being spent,
frontier simplicity and directness practiced in some form—these things seem
necessary to every generation lest moral fibre disintegrate. Active practice of
the right is our salvation; not mere denunciation of evil.
Many “isms” of our time have become living religion to
millions of people. We need to beware lest the Religion that lived in our
Fathers degenerate, in us, to a mere “ism.”
Again we join fervently in the ancient prayer to God of
every generation—theirs and ours—“Let Thy work appear unto Thy servants, and
Thy glory unto their children, and let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon
us; and establish Thou the work of our hands upon us, yea the work of our
hands, establish Thou it.”
Jesse Halsey
General Chairman of the 150th Anniversary
Committee
No comments:
Post a Comment