“Governments do not make
ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically
true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create
institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by
their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own
responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the
government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates
the character of a nation.”
“It is little wonder that
people at home and abroad consider Independence Hall as hallowed ground and
revere the Liberty Bell as a sacred relic. That pile of bricks and mortar, that
mass of metal, might appear to the uninstructed as only the outgrown meeting
place and the shattered bell of a former time, useless now because of more
modern conveniences, but to those who know they have become consecrated by the
use which men have made of them. They have long been identified with a great
cause. They are the framework of a spiritual event. The world looks upon them,
because of their associations of one hundred and fifty years ago, as it looks
upon the Holy Land because of what took place there nineteen hundred years ago.
Through use for a righteous purpose they have become sanctified.”
“ But the
conviction is inescapable that a new civilization had come, a new spirit had
arisen on this side of the Atlantic more advanced and more developed in its
regard for the rights of the individual than that which characterized the Old
World. Life in a new and open country had aspirations which could not be
realized in any subordinate position. A separate establishment was ultimately
inevitable. It had been decreed by the very laws of human nature. Man
everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny.”
“When we take all these circumstances into consideration, it is
but natural that the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence should
open with a reference to Nature’s God and should close in the final paragraphs
with an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world and an assertion of a firm
reliance on Divine Providence. Coming from these sources, having as it did this
background, it is no wonder that Samuel Adams could say “The people seem to
recognize this resolution as though it were a decree promulgated from heaven.”
"If this apprehension of the facts be correct,
and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain
conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be
dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features
the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a
declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty,
popular sovereignty, the rights of man — these are not elements which we can
see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the
religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the
American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of
our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we
neglect and abandon the cause.”
“If all men are
created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that
is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these
propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only
direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward
toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no
rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay
claim to progress.”
“No other theory
is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the
product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science
and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our
Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first.
Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it
may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain
the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the
fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must
cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must
follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep
replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires
before which they worshiped.”
– Calvin Coolidge – Speech on the 150th
Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
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