"Lord Monckton’s reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, “We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.” - (Justin Pulliam is the Northeast Regional Field Coordinator for CampusReform.org. He graduated Cum Laude with University Honors from Texas A&M University in December 2011, where he led the local Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow Chapter. He can be reached at justinpulliam@gmail.com.)
Here, in America, in just a little moment of time, on one small sliver of land on the globe, a few Creator-endowed individuals, possessing the gift of reason, and utilizing the recorded ideas of history's most enlightened thinkers, created a document which made it possible for the light of liberty to change the world for over 200 years.
In an April 1859 letter to Messrs. Henry Pierce & Others, Abraham Lincoln's final paragraph:
"All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."
Finally, Thomas Jefferson's last letter, prior to his death on July 4, 1826, declared:
"May it [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day [July 4th] forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. . . ." – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger C Weightman, June 24, 1826
Monckton, a member of British nobility, recognizes that our founding documents and the cause of liberty are a gift to the world. And the young brains full of mush at Union College, who are the beneficiaries of liberty, are trying to push us into a totalitarian, collectivist society.
Thanks for the Jefferson quotes. America has never been in more need of a Jefferson as it is today....