“Our American way of life” is a phrase constantly heard these days. It is a good phrase, and to many sincere and honest persons it means liberty of conscience, freedom of individual enterprise and the right to worship God after the dictates of our own conscience; it means the rule of law instead of the rule of tyrants; it means a minimum of interference from the state and a maximum of liberty for the individual citizen.
To millions of others, however, it means little more than the right to sin to their heart’s content without molestation by the civil authorities. The Constitution may be, as Gladstone said it was, the noblest document ever struck off by the mind of man. But we must remember that there are countless thousands of Americans who use it merely as a place to hide when they are caught in some act of iniquity.
Liberty as used by the American founding fathers meant freedom to do good; many today conceive it to mean freedom to do evil, and they work it for all the traffic will bear.
1 Corinthians 8:9; Galatians 5:13; 1 Peter 2:16
The Next Chapter After the Last, 47, 48.