Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.
I recall, William, our discussions about Kirk's first principle and how it was worded as more open to all sorts of conservatives in this later phrasing:
Belief in an enduring moral order.
Now what strikes me is the underlying point apparently made in the above address, how all people of the cultural age of our founding documents, with their wording, would have allowed for the limitations of the God of Western Christiandom and Judeaic faith and culture.
I remember Franklin's warning to Thomas Paine over his Rights of Man and Paine's reassurance with words to the effect that despite his "free thinking" he still held with the broad "enduring moral order" of his time.
That commonality accross the broad plain of thought is what the Rationalists of totalitarian democracy can't give us in our current time.