We pride ourselves upon the fact that we can worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience.  We speak easily of God, “whose service is perfect freedom,” but it was not we, but our fathers who achieved that.  Our fathers “left us an heritage, and it has brought forth abundantly.”

I say this to draw clearly the line between mere material wealth and that which is the real wealth and welfare of a people.  We are rich, but our fathers were poor.  How did they achieve it?  Not by their wealth, but by their character—­by their devotion to principle.  When I was thinking of the speech I was to make here to-night, I asked the descendant of a New Englander what he would say was the best thing that the fathers had left to the country.  He thought for a second and made me a wise answer.  He said, “I think it was their character.”  That is indeed the heritage they left us; they left us their character.  Wealth will not preserve that which they left us; not wealth, not power, not “dalliance nor wit” will preserve it; nothing but that which is of the spirit will preserve it, nothing but character.

The whole story of civilization speaks this truth with trumpet voice.  One nation rises upon the ruins of another nation.  It is when Samson lies in the lap of Delilah that the enemy steals upon him and ensnares him and binds him.  It was when the great Assyrian king walked through his palace, and looking around him said in his pride, “Is not this great Babylon that I have built for the honor of the kingdom and for the honor of my majesty?” that the voice came to him, even while the words were in the king’s mouth (saith the chronicle), “Thy kingdom is departed from thee.”  It was when Belshazzar sat feasting in his Babylonian palace, with his lords and ladies, eating and drinking out of the golden vessels that had been sacred to the Lord, that the writing came upon the wall, “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”  Not only in the palace, but all through the great city there was feasting and dancing.  Why should they not feast and why should they not dance?  They were secure, with walls that were 350 feet high, eighty-five feet thick, with a hundred brazen gates, the city filled with greater wealth than had ever been brought before within walls.  But out in the country a few hardy mountaineers had been digging ditches for some time.  Nobody took much account of them, yet even that night, in the midst of Belshazzar’s luxury and feasting, the veteran troops of Cyrus were marching silently under the dripping walls, down the bed of the lowered Euphrates, so that that which had been the very passageway of Babylon’s wealth became the pathway of her ruin.

Unless we preserve the character and the institutions our fathers gave us we will go down as other nations have gone.  We may talk and theorize as much as we please, but this is the law of nature—­the stronger pushes the weaker to the wall and takes its place.