YALE UP ; SITY DEC 24 1917 LIBRARY Waatitngtons Itrttjfmy * •jJrearhriii bg Sty? ftromtft ^oroara rrmtt <§f ttjr- #nno of ih* Sronlntt0n 3n % g>tafc of £faro f nrk ©hurrtj of th* Jnraraatum Nwn prfe (Ettg JMmiarn 21»t, 1315 * Printed by £rqu*8t UttBtftnginn 0 String "And the Lord said unto Moses, Go unto Pharoah, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me." — Exodus 8:1. Before proceeding further, I wish to say a few words of sin cere and serious welcome to the Sons of the Revolution, and to members of other patriotic societies here represented. You come to commemorate the birth of the great and good man who was, under God, the founder of this independent nation. You bring with you the flag which represents the nation's unity. By bring ing it within the Church, you unite in a symbolic act, as did Washington in his character, the love of country with the fear of God. The circumstances under which we meet to-day are singularly fitted to imprint upon our minds the significance of this commemoration. We meet under the shadow of the great est war which has ever desolated human happiness. We should be less than human if we could banish the shadow of it from our consciousness, or the sadness occasioned by it from our hearts. But we should be less than Christian if we did not let it serve to deepen and to dignify our thinking, awaking in us moving recollections on such a day as this. The distress of nations nearly "related to us reminds us of the ordeal in which our own nation received its baptism of fire. The spirit of sacrifice mani fested by foreign peoples, their endurance, their unwithholding devotion, call to our minds the sacrifices, and sufferings, and the valor of our fathers through which our priceless heritage was won. And the very magnitude of the disaster which has be fallen Europe, its comprehensive character, shock us into a sharpened consciousness of separate nationality. To Washing- ton we owe, humanly speaking, our separation from the present conflict. It was he who severed by his sword the cords of government which bound us to the British mother country; he again who bade us, by avoiding entangling alliances, to main tain in peace the jndependent life which had been so greatly and honorably won. What is the meaning of our independence? What is the essence of its life, its character, its isolated mission, this nation's that under God he founded, and that has grown so great? "And the Lord spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharoah, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me." The Old Testament is the history of a nation. That is the reason for its perpetual influence, the secret of its perennial charm. For it is the story of the first nation which was conscious of a moral significance in its history, and of a spiritual unity in its collective life. This unity, this significance, go back to its beginnings. They have their origin in the work of Moses. They find interpretation in his character. It is given to a few men to possess within themselves generative virtues to which history is receptive, to be in the lives of nations the germinating seed. Moses was such a man, and milleniums afterward Alfred King of England ; Vladimir the Great of Russia may possibly be reckoned as a third. William the Silent has been compared with them, and at a later date our own George Washington. They stand at the beginnings of national courses, and are causally related to such beginnings. They are fathers of their respective countries in an all but literal sense "Let my people go, that they may serve me." Israel's great ness consisted in this sense of mission. Called out of the dark ness of surrounding heathenism, Israel was liberated in order to proclaim a God whose name was holy, who required of men and nations righteousness instead of ritual observance, character in place of sacrifice. In this great conception of God as the re- quirer of righteousness, the nation was given a unifying influence which is the clue to its entire history. The fugitive slaves whom Moses led from Egypt were made a nation by being given a mis- sion. They were knit together into indissoluble union by being made custodians of the moral law. And so it is that we have here, as I said before, a nation which may be looked upon as a spiritual entity, a nation capable of moralized life and conduct, see ing that it interprets its collective life in terms of character, and founds its corporate existence upon law. The Hebrew nation was keenly, almost painfully aware of this distinction from its neighbors. It was surrounded by the empires of antiquity. It claimed kinship with none, it was absorbed by none, it en deavored with singleness of purpose to keep aloof politically from all. In the Book of Daniel we read the reason for this spirit of aloofness. The empires of the ancient world, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Persia, the empire of Alexander, are represented in his vision as great beasts, rising in succession out of the anarchic sea. Israel, and Israel alone to the prophet's vision, appears in sem blance as a man. And why? Because the empires were im personal, while Israel was personal. Because their unity was artificial, while that of Israel was vital and organic. Because they rested upon force and circumstance, while Israel rested upon law and living will. Well might the heathen empires be likened to the ruthless forces of nature ! Impersonal, voracious, beast-like, they knew no inward unity or mission, and so were utterly destitute of spiritual significance. "Trust not in the shadow of Egypt," ran the solemn warning of the prophets. Israel could not fulfill its national destiny, could not be true to its historic mission, except by pursuing its high and separated way alone. The task of Washington was the founding of a nation. To speak of his task in the same breath with that of Moses is an exaggefation which he himself would have been the first to depre cate, and the analogy would become ridiculous if it were unduly pressed. George III was no Ramses of the oppression, but only an obstinate and somewhat unimaginative monarch, who might have pursued a very different course in his treatment of the American colonies if he had ever visited them and seen them for himself. And our Colonial forefathers were no overworked and down-trodden slaves, but a high-spirited company of pioneers, of the same race and freedom-loving traditions as their rulers, and correspondingly sensitive in any question relating to their rights. No: the analogy lies deeper, and is to be found in the essential character of all nation-building. Nature is no lover of uniformity. By race, by soil, by circumstance, by every agency at her command, she strives unceasingly for that diversity in which the richness of human life consists. "Let my people go, that they may serve me." It is the solemn call of nature, and of the God of nature, calling every people to achieve its individual destiny, to lead its separated, independent life. "What living man," cried a New England patriot, "what living man, having simply reason for his attribute, will imagine that God's high providence could have meant this vast, almost continental region of the new world to be, for all time, the mere convenience and farmhold subserviency of a little patch of island three thousand miles away ; exploited by that mother country, kept for trade and taxation and place and office, given no voice in parliament, per mitted, in fact, no future of its own?" Here is the raw material of protest which Washington was called upon to quicken into a nation. It is his glory, his claim to rank among the great of history, that his own character could be a focus for these vague, unformulated, national aspirations. His work in this respect resembles that of Alfred. As the one deserves to be called the first Englishman, so the other deserves to be called the first Ameri can. As the one gave to the Saxon Heptarchy a consciousness of organic oneness, so the other gave it to the revolted colonies. In each were exhibited the same nation-building attributes, jus tice, patience, unselfishness, deep religious earnestness, a love of peace, and a reverence for law. The work of Alfred the Great and of Washington may be compared with that of Moses, and contrasted with that of em pire builders, in that in it there is an attempt, more or less suc- cesful, to transmit to the nations which they founded the ideals and aspirations with which they were themselves inspired, the character which they themselves possessed. In the conquerors of history, Sargon, Ramses, Cambyses, Alexander, Napoleon, nothing remotedly resembling this is to be observed. Empire builders conquer, but nation builders personify. Empire builders create an outward and extensive unity, but nation builders an inward and authentic one. "Let my people go, that they may serve me," can be predicated only of a nation. It can be said only on behalf of a people which is capable collectively of moral ized conduct, which possesses a unity founded not upon circum stances but upon will. Let me quote in this connection Wash ington's circular letter addressed to the governors of all the States on disbanding the army. At the time of writing it he believed that he was retiring from public life; indeed, upon subsequent occasions he referred to this letter as his legacy. And can we, who reverence his memory, who honor him as the founder of our united people, ever forget the closing words of this his spiritual legacy? "I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection; . . and that he would be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation." "That charity, humility, and pacific temper which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion." Members of the patriotic societies who have met to commemorate the birth of George Washington, I know that you will realize with me the profound, the inexhaustible significance of these words. They are the words of a man who, like the Apostle Paul, was not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. They are the words of a man who was not afraid to apply the doctrine of the Gospel to the conduct of the nation he loved. Wiser counsel, more searching exhibition of the springs of moral life and national greatness, were never given by the leader of a people to those who had achieved their independence by his valor, and their unity under his fostering care. He drew his sword not as conqueror, but as emancipator, as a warrior for human liberties. When the work was done he sheathed it, then to his life's end he kept it sheathed. Frantic efforts were made to induce him to pursue a different policy. France, who had stood sponsor for us at the time of our baptism of fire, France, to whom we were indebted as to no other foreign power before or since, France needed our assistance in her war upon our former enemy, and we withheld assistance. Honor, as men thoughtlessly reckon it, gratitude, apparent in terest all were on the side of war; tumultuous popular opinion beat upon Washington like a storm to move him from neutrality, but he would not be moved. Days of trial followed, in compari son with which he must have counted as a light thing the days at Valley Forge. For those were days largely of physical, but these of moral endurance. Then he was upheld by the love and the allegiance of many whose sentiments were now converted into reproach and scorn. What was the meaning of this great with holding ? What was in Washington's heart, when by sheer force of personality he restrained this eager nation, newly emerged into national consciousness, from following great bugles of chal lenge blown from across the sea? We, who know his character, know that it must have been from motives high above mere pru dence. Prudence is not the key to the character of nation builders. Prudence will not account for the self-restraint of the friend of LaFayette. In the letter to the governors we find the reason for the self- restraint of Washington. The nation was to be a Christian nation, and to be Christian it must exhibit a pacific temper, and obey the precepts and follow the example of the Redeemer Christ. Revolution, war to obtain national liberation, war in order to the being of a people, was one thing. "Let my people go, that they may serve me," was the injunction of the Lord of hosts. But war for any lesser purpose, war for any minor reason, was a de parture from the pacific temper in which Washington read the nation's mission, as well as the nation's weal. To enter entangling alliances would have committed it not only to exclusive friend ships, but to corresponding obligations of enmity. To partici pate in the wars of the old world would have been a betrayal of mission by the new. For the mission of the new world was democracy. The mission of the new world was to devise and maintain government founded not upon force, but upon law, and YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 9002 08561 1334 the organized expression of the people's will. We cannot have it both ways. If force is our ultimate reliance, then war is our ultimate resource. If law is our ultimate reliance, then law-abid- ingness and the social virtues, justice, mercy, charity and peace, are our ultimate resource. And what has force to do with moral issues, with questions involving right and wrong? What does it prove concerning essential justice if one government is able to impose its decisions upon another by mighty armies, by invincible navies, by inexhaustible wealth? What reparation can it be to wounded honor if we go forth to maim or slay in the flower of their youth and strength and hope the irresponsible citizens of some other government that may have done us wrong? These are the methods of tigers in their jungle, of the beast-like em pires of Daniel's vision, not of that Israel in whom the Lord Jehovah put the heart, the conscience, the living will of man. As Israel, so America is set apart for mission. We are isolated in order to study democracy in all its mighty meanings, to devise pacific solutions, to forward the rule of reason and the reign of universal law. What doth the Lord require of thee, O America, but to follow Washington's example ! What doth he ask of thee but character, to do justly, to love mercy, to abide faithfully in that charity, humility, and pacific temper which were the char acter of God incarnate in the Blessed One !