Independence Day

From:  An Address to American Youth

by:  Reverend L. Parmele

Independence Day!  The booming cannon and rattling firearms!  It is not the wrath of battle, but only echo-thunders, rolling back upon us from the great war-tempest of '76.  Nor are these sounds now mingled with the cries of the wounded and groans of the dying - mournfully terrific swelling up from the field of blood.  The report of guns and voice of artillery that fall on our ears today are all mellowed down into notes of enchanting music, and sweetly chime in the glorious triumphal anthem of our national jubilee.

Upon the youth of America is conferred the noblest birthright in the whole world.  The stars under which you were born beam with brightest promise and kindle loftiest hope.  Before you all, without any miserable and silly distinction of ancestry or estate, is placed the brightest diadem of moral dignity, intellectual greatness, and civil honor. 

In countries where rank is obtained on easy terms of ancestry and a man becomes a king simply because his father before him was one, noblity relaxes into indolence of spirit and imbecility of intellect, and royalty, with all its imposing honors, degenerates into mental dwarfishness, and the king's jester is often, really, a greater man than the crowned head. 

Let us remember that religion was the early harbinger, and continues the guardian angel of the American birthright - the note of religious freedom struck on the rock of Plymouth, and was the grand prelude to the swelling anthem of civil liberty.  Now, the war-storm over, and the battle-thunder ceased, the precious blood of our forefathers that was poured out as a free shower upon the earth - those peerless drops are gathered over us in a bright bow of promise, spanning a continent and resting on two oceans, attracting a world to "the land of the free and the home of the brave."  But the fear of God is the great keystone in this bow of national hope - take away this, and the sunlit arch will vanish into the blackness of a second moral deluge.