Lincoln's Immortal Call to Honor and Defend Freedom

Today, Americans gathered at Gettysburg Battlefield in the small wooded town in southcentral Pennsylvania to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a 272-word masterpiece of the English language. But, more than that, President Lincoln touched the hearts and souls of every American, then and forever after. He called them to honor their Constitution, to honor their war dead, to honor the task assigned to them by God - of supporting, defending and holding sacred the freedom and liberty given to them, and to all people, by God through the Founders, and to protect forever the democratic principles enshrined in American political institutions. The Lincoln Gettysburg Address defies attempts to dissect and explain it. It defies time. It defies efforts to make it irrelevant. As long as men and women seek freedom and are willing to defend it and fight to create and keep it, Lincoln's words will tower over them as the blessing sent from God by means of the tall, lanky and fiercely American man who saved them from their baser selves. Here it is. Take heart from it in these troubling and divisive times. America will survive for as long as her children can remember, understand and defend his words. ~~~~~ "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."___Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863.