The Patriot’s Dream – July 04, 1999
The blessing of freedom is easily taken for granted—until it is lost.
From a silent battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the patriot’s dream of freedom begun two generations before. Then it was a “new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”1 But on the fields of Gettysburg, the dream needed a “new birth” if “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people” were not to “perish from the earth.”2
The blessing of freedom can be lost if it is not reborn with each generation.
John Winthrop gathered his fellow Pilgrims together on the tiny deck of their ship anchored off the coast of Massachusetts in 1630. He spoke of his dream for the life they would have in the land they had never seen as he said: “We shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”3
The dream is reborn every time individuals set aside their self-interests for the larger interests of country. For example, a woman leaves her desk twice a week at lunch to teach English to immigrants. A retired couple walks to the local elementary school to help children with math and writing. A neighborhood plants a large communal garden, sharing the work and produce with others in the community. A family specializing in home repairs spends Saturday mornings fixing faucets and patching roofs for the elderly and handicapped.
These people, along with countless others, have remembered and renewed the patriot’s dream.
We are the spiritual posterity of those patriots. Our inheritance is a love of country and a love of people. We sing of them “who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life.”4
Program #3646
1Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address,” (Gettysburg, Pa., Nov. 19, 1863).
2Gettysburg Address.
3John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (1630).
4Katherine Lee Bates, “America the Beautiful,” (1893)