Guinness - Last Call for Liberty

InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
ivpress.com

2018 by Os Guinness

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Pressis the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges, and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, visit intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New American Standard Bible, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Some content in chapter five first appeared in Os Guinness, A Free Peoples Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012). Used with permission.

Some content in chapter six first appeared in Os Guinness, The Global Public Square: Religious Freedom and the Making of a World Safe for Diversity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013). Used with permission.

While any stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information may have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates. Author photo courtesy of Lancia E. Smith Photography on behalf of the C.S. Lewis Foundation.

Cover design: David Fassett
Interior design: Daniel van Loon

Cover images: tattered American flag: JamesBrey / E+ /Getty Images
old yellowed paper: ke77kz / iStock / Getty Images Plus
blue sky: czekma13 / iStock / Getty Images Plus

ISBN 978-0-8308-7337-1 (digital)

ISBN 978-0-8308-4559-0 (print)

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

DOM

And with gratitude to Daniel Elazar,

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Leon Kass,

Jonathan Sacks, and Michael Walzer,

great Jewish thinkers whose work illuminates freedoms past

as it inspires and instructs freedoms future

Let my people go!

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, that you and your children may live.

Remember the earliest of days; grasp the years of generations that have been. Ask your fatherhe will tell you all; ask the elders of your kind, and they will say.

The citizens chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority, and at length... they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten. And this is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs dictatorship.... The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

We can endure neither our vices nor their cures.

A man in a boat began to bore a hole under his seat. His fellow passengers protested. What concern is it of yours? he responded. I am making a hole under my seat, not yours. They replied, That is so, but when the water enters and the boat sinks, we too will drown.

Should any one of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name. The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved on our souls.

Pray for the welfare of the government, for if not for the fear of it, each man would swallow his neighbor alive.

When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty.

Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.

For so long as one hundred men remain alive, we shall never under any condition submit to the domination of the English. It is not for glory or riches or honors that we fight, but only for liberty, which no good man will consent to lose but with his life.

The best instituted governments, like the best constituted animal bodies, carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend to their dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live.

Free peoples, remember this maxim: liberty can be gained, but never regained.

There is not a more difficult subject for the understanding of men than to govern a large Empire upon a plan of liberty.

The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

All projects of government formed of a supposition of continual vigilance, sagacity, virtue, and firmness of the people, when possessed of the exercise of supreme power, are cheats and delusions.

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.