“The heart’s reverence for right, and the hand’s loyalty to truth. . .”
For this Independence Day, I’ve dug out a really rich, wonderful address by Rev. Thomas Starr King. I’ve chosen some excerpts that I feel speak to the ideas of Unitarian Universalist patriotism is these times, in contrast to the perilous times in which this particular address was written in 1851. If you would like to read the entirety, the Google Books project has archived Patriotism, and other papers in PDF format.
Rev. King was a remarkable man, credited by President Abraham Lincoln with keeping California in the Union during the Civil War due to his stirring orations. According to the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography: “Barely five feet tall and physically fragile, King was undistinguished in appearance. Well into his thirties he appeared no older than a youth. His energy and magnetism as an organizer, minister, and preacher, however, quickly impressed any who had mistakenly judged him by appearance. ‘But, though I weigh only 120 pounds,’ he remarked late in life, ‘when I am mad I weigh a ton!’
He also “organized fund raising for the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization, headed by Henry Whitney Bellows, charged with overseeing the health and medical care of the United States army. By the end of the war California had donated one quarter of the money received by the Sanitary Commission. The first large donation, sent by King, arrived just in time to be of use at the battle of Antietam in 1862.”
Today, one of two Unitarian Universalist seminaries is named for Rev. King, the Starr King School for the Ministry, along with two mountains (one in New Hampshire, and one in California).
As with any document from 1851, you may want to substitute gender-inclusive language in your reading of this text.
Patriotism
by Thomas Starr King
The substance of this article is from a discourse, delivered in Boston, before the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, on the occasion of their two hundred and thirteenth Anniversary, June 2, 1851.
[Patriotism] is a constructive quality, quickening the intellect by its love of country to zealous ambition to improve it and raise it higher. It is an imaginative sentiment. Imagination is essential to its vigor. It comprehends hills, streams, plains, and valleys in a broad conception, and from traditions and institutions — from all the life of the past and the vigor and noble tendencies of the present, it individualizes the destiny and personifies the spirit of its land, and then vows its vow to that. So that it is of the very essence of true patriotism to be earnest and truthful, to scorn the flatterer’s tongue, and strive to keep its native land in harmony with the laws of national thrift and power. It will tell a land of its faults, as a friend will counsel a companion; it will speak as honestly as the physician advises a patient; and if occasion requires, an indignation will flame out of its love, like that which burst from the lips of Moses when he returned from the mountain, and found the people to whom he bad revealed the holy and austere Jehovah, and for whom he would cheerfully have sacrificed his life, worshipping a calf.
The distinctive feature of true patriotism is that it is pledged to the idea which one’s native country represents. It does not accept and glory in its country merely for what it is at present, and has been in the past, but for what it may be.
. . .
The human race is vitally one, and whatsoever is eminent or best, in any line of social manifestation, is somehow connected with other and distant portions of the common body; as the topmast branch of a tree bears life that is due, in part, to the health and fidelity of juices in the root, and as the wave that foams upon the shore, discharges an undulation that began far out upon the sea.
Our country is foremost in the line of public justice and orderly freedom, and therefore all the influences which, in distant lands and former centuries, supported and quickened those principles, are somehow represented in the social blessings we enjoy. All that former thinkers have done to justify the principle of freedom, and heroes have achieved against the oppressions of despotism, and martyrs have suffered for their perilous love of liberty; all the stimulus which religion, in the past, has given to the heart’s reverence for right, and the hand’s loyalty to truth; all that eloquence has done to make tyranny tremble, and fan the popular sense of justice to a flame; all that literature has preserved, in treatise, song, or drama, of past devotion to liberty, and longing for its triumph, are related, and have contributed to our success in the structure of a social polity. We may properly enjoy the pride, if we will be faithful to the privilege, of bearing in our institutions the best thought and life of the past, concerning public justice and social welfare.
. . .
Patriotism is unselfish devotion to the idea of a nation, its heaven-inspired soul, its representative office and mission. And anything lower than this form of it here, any interpretation of it equivalent to a defence of every act of every administration, even when that act does violence to the spirit of our history and the providential pointings of our call, is a disgrace to ourselves, an abuse of a noble word, and an offence before God. If a country such as ours is to raise no loftier, no more heroic type of national virtue than that, our fertile zones will indeed be barren of attractive fruit. Then we may say, here is America, but where are the Americans? Then, —
“When we climb our mountain cliffs,
Or see the wide shore from our skiffs,
To us the horizon shall express
Mere emptiness and emptiness.
And to our eyes the vast skies fall,
Dire and satirical,
On clucking hens and prating fools,
On thieves, on drudges, and on dolls;
For Nature has miscarried wholly
Into failure, into folly.”Moreover, a lower type of patriotism than that of insight into, and devotion to the representative, or ideal country of which our land is the projection, with us is little else than suicide. Never was there a people whom it so behooved to be patriotic in the highest sense; for our patriotism is daily passing into fact, and becoming part of the nation’s substance. We vote it, we speak it, we incarnate it in the men we select to act for us. New States, almost while we are reading these pages, are rising to have a voice in the highest councils of the Republic, and from their ideas of what this country is for, and from the quality of their passion for it, the institutions are springing which will mould, or powerfully control, the budding intellect that will soon be on the stage. We are living for the future. It doth not yet appear what we shall be. We can say only that we are a mass of tendencies. And the sentiment of patriotism that obtains is breathing year by year, the life-element or the death-element into the structure of our land.
. . .
If the glory of the foundation of our land was in the establishment of a principle, the glory of its history must consist in the unfolding of that principle. True patriotism, therefore, which labors to keep a nation faithful to its mission, cannot be satisfied here unless the idea of human worth and privilege that awakened and supported our political struggle, ripen and produce their finest spiritual fruit. In this respect the growth of our country should be like that of an endogenous tree; the gradual development of the life-principle at the centre manifesting itself in the nourishment of new products, throwing the old results, year by year, farther out into history, till the political effects of the Revolution become the gnarled root, and tall, hardy stem, which preserve and defend the active inward forces, that now unfold in leaves and blossoms, and announce the harvest. In the peace movement, the temperance reform, the judicious and practicable schemes for the abolition of bondage, the attempts to discover a more Christian organization of society; — in every association and all effort that seek the highest welfare of man, and prepare the way for his free culture and rightful enjoyment, as. a creature of God, the American idea justifies itself and culminates; and by strengthening this tendency, and only thus, can Patriotism be faithful to its law, and vindicate its nature.
Every mention of the ideas to which our land is consecrated, and of the importance of its mission, calls up the crisis which we have recently passed through, and the danger witli which, it is said, our land was threatened. Patriotism has learned to pronounce with emphasis the word Union. It is a hallowed word to it. It does not like to hesitate in uttering it. It has uo desire that its tongue should falter with it, or merely to lisp its utterance. But there is danger in our reactionary eloquence that, in eulogies of union and assertions that we must have it, we overlook or too slightly estimate the conditions of union. This country has an ideal character, a representative value. Its mountains were upheaved, its rivers were grooved, its prairies unrolled, its night-skies bent, for the home of an idea. Its glory cannot spring from vast extent, populousness, power, and wealth, but from the un-questioned dominion of an idea. If we are to be one, we must have a great undying sentiment. “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable;” that is the marriage-vow, that alone can be the marriage-bond. We cannot vote ourselves together, we cannot keep ourselves together merely by cultivating superficial, or commercial good feeling. The unity of our nation — the most marvelous and splendid organism of history — may stand forever unshaken by the diversities of climate which it includes, by the variety of material interests — commerce, agriculture, industry — which it enfolds; may indeed be all the stronger for the twisting of so many strands: but though nature made our vast landscape one; though it be interlocked by rivers, railways, and canals; though it be vascular with myriad arteries of human skill; though the geographer may find no place where he can split our country, the strife of hostile ideas will rend it as the valley yawns by the wrench of the earthquake. It is the office of Patriotism to see this and to say it, — to say plainly and solemnly that no political unity, no charter however wisely concocted, or defended by the most stalwart mental muscles, can stand before the fierce and equal combat of two mutually destructive principles. There is no treason, no lack of patriotism in saying this, unless it is unpatriotic to say that chemical wraths will not combine, and that powder and fire will not marry peaceably.
We need the feeling of brotherhood; we need to be knit together in ties of cordial amity; but no amity can be manufactured where the laws of spiritual affinity interpose a ban. Whatever peculiarities of State institution, however wrong and heinous, exist in the separate members of the confederacy, let them keep, undisturbed by interference from other States, till they choose to abolish them themselves. Whatever laws are demanded by a just and strict construction of the central compact, let them have, so long as we profess to have that charter, and let them not be forcibly resisted. But, though the sun now breaks through the recent cloudy screen, if peace, harmony, and strength are to bless our nation, there is one direction in which we must not go beyond the letter of the bond. The “pound of flesh,” but not a tittle more must be asked, not another fraction can be granted, not so much as will “turn the scale even in the estimation of a hair.” What is local must be local. The inward, vivifying principle of our government must be sympathy with liberty; its attitude must be respect for liberty; the spread of its domain must be under the sanction and for the ends of liberty, or the inspiring sentiment of union and the bond of unity, that which filled the hearts and quickened the intellects of the noble men who built our Constitution, that which gives glory and renown to our charter, will wither and die.
“Behold,” said David, “how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” But if the time is to come when a large section of our land insist that human bondage is to be sanctioned and extended wherever our banner and our eagles go ; that the haggard genius of oppression must sit with equal privilege and honor with the spirit of freedom in the exalted seats of our confederacy, then — I utter only the simplest lesson of science — then there can be no unity, for we shall no more be brethren; the gulf of antagonistic ideas will divide us; the nerve of patriotism, in the best souls, will be shrivelled; for the ideal beauty of our nation will be expunged, its hovering genius will flee, and there will be no America to serve; and our glory, whose auroral promise tinges our first annals, and whose beams are now gilding the mountain-tops, will be stained with blood, and finally pale. Then, while he looks back and sees, as Paul saw in the past of his nation, that unto us pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the promise, and the fathers, and looks around to see the fatal faithlessness of the children to the divine idea and the providential intimations of the past, the only utterance of patriotism that will be possible, from the Christian breast, will be the sorrowful exclamation of Paul, “I could wish that I were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”
We conclude, then, by saying that patriotism is not only a legitimate sentiment, but a duty. There are countless reasons why, as Americans, we should love our native land. We may feel no scruples, as Christians, in welcoming and nourishing a peculiar affection for its winds and soil, its coasts and hills, its memories and its flag. We cannot more efficiently labor for the good of all men, than by pledging heart, brain, and hands to the service of keeping our country true to its mission, obedient to its idea. Our patriotism must draw its nutriment and derive its impulse from knowledge and love of the ideal America, as yet but partially reflected in our institutions, or in the general mind of the Republic. Thus quickened, it will be both pure and practical. The agency of an overruling and friendly power is suggested by the study of the critical seasons of our past history. But our patriarchal and heroic periods have passed. Having endowed us with the means of our own development, the divine agency retreats to leave the field for human responsibility. We cannot rely for our honors or safety upon the past; with tlje principle we must reject the privileges of primogeniture. We are here, by favor, to a vast and noble work. “To whom much is given, of him will much be required.” We may feel, as we look upon our territory, which exhibits every zone, and represents lands that invite all varieties of industry, that God grooved our noble rivers, and stretched our prairies on their level base, and unrolled our rich savannas, and reared the pomp of our forests, and washed the long line of our coasts with generous ocean waves, and wove all these diversities into one, to be the home of no mean people, and the theatre of no paltry destiny. The world waits to see the quality and energy of our patriotism. The book of our country’s history, preserved by human heroism, and providential care, is handed to us, that we may inscribe there the records of its glory, or its shame.
Source: Rev. Thomas Starr King, “Patriotism,” excerpts from Patriotism, and other papers, originally delivered in 1851, though this volume was published in 1864 after his death.
Tags: duty, History, justice, liberty, passion, patriotism, principles, Thomas Starr King
