These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom.  We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes—­and I will strive in good faith to heal them.  Yet those divisions do not define America.  We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart.  And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.

We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom.  Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events.  Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills.  We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.  When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner “Freedom Now”—­they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled.  History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.

When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, “It rang as if it meant something.”  In our time it means something still.  America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof.  Renewed in our strength—­tested, but not weary—­we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

May God bless you, and may He watch over the United States of America.

***