On the Declaration of Independence

Fr. James Schall, SJ, is one of this country's best thinkers, and he writes clear, concise essays, too. In an essay published on the Ignatius Insight website, we find the following:

But the colonists also recognized that not all "evils" are, as they put it, "sufferable." The unwillingness of a people to do nothing about anything with itself or others is not a sign of virtue but of decadence. A kind of "slavishness" sets in and is passive before every evil. The colonists did not belong to that class of men who thought they never had to stand up to anything, never had to draw a line, never had to act. They stood on the side of those who saw with the great Burke, who sided with them, that the best way to magnify evil is for good men to think they need to do nothing about it.

....

Much of the poverty and disorder in the world is the result of refusing to learn what we have already learned, or more often the refusal to put it into practice. We are certainly a fortunate people in many ways. Few people on the whole have lived better lives in a material sense. But our good life is not unrelated to the reasons that make us unique, reasons stated in the Declaration as if they were intended in essence for mankind, so that they are not simply "ours."

....

The most pressing immediate issue facing us today is a militant religion, however we distinguish it, which persists in an announced world mission throughout centuries and constantly brings back this effort whenever it is not prevented. Belloc understood this in his time. What too many of us cannot or will not grasp is that we have a real and shrewd enemy who recognizes our internal vulnerabilities and inability to recognize that this missionary effort is real, even if, as it is said, only embraced by a portion of Islam.

....

Lincoln spoke of this form of government described in the Declaration as "not perishing from the earth." If we know our Plato and Aristotle, we know that any government, the worst and the best, can disappear from two causes: 1) internal change so that the original people no longer "hold" the same truths on which it was based, and 2) from foreign conquest. Watching Europe these days, one is tempted to add, in honor of Paul VI, that governments can also cease simply when its people no longer see it necessary to have children.

....

The "new government" thus established, now one of the oldest countries on the planet, was literally to "provide new Guards for our security." Unless this provision is continually accomplished, nothing else is possible to a free people. Awareness of this truth is both common sense and high wisdom. A people unwilling to make this provision for such "guards," under reason and under law, unwilling to pledge itself to its own and to universal principles, not only will not be free, but will not deserve to be free.

Worth reading.