We Give Thanks for Our Freedoms: Spirit, Body and Mind

 

Abraham Lincoln: Proclamation

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

As the 18th century ended and the 19th began, the spirit of liberty was strong in the land. The Revolution was over; men were freed from the tyranny of an unjust government.

But stronger than the Redcoats, many of the old ideas still kept us captive.

Early in the 19th century, the Lord sent forth three men who turned the world upside down, shook it open, and set the captives free.

The first of these, Joseph Smith Jr., was born December 23, 1805.  Three years and two months later, on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day.

 Man was never to view himself or his God in the same way again.

Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln were born in frontier circumstances. Each attended school only briefly, and each was enormously self-educated. Darwin came from a prosperous family and had a university education. No one who knew any of them or their families could have guessed their importance to the world.

Each produced a seminal document:

Joseph Smith Jr.: the Book of Mormon

Because of this "unlettered farm boy" and the message he brought, man (in the anthropological sense; includes both male and female) was freed from the centuries-old dogma of the Triune God.  When we pray, we are not addressing a formless blob or a concentration of energy; we are speaking to the father of our spirits, our Heavenly Father.

For the first time, we no longer had to ask Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? No longer did we fear that if we made the slightest misstep, forgot the smallest observance, we would burn in the fires of hell forever. No longer need we fear a frowning, vengeful God. Instead we kneel to a loving, gracious Father who loves us and asks only that we love him.

Abraham Lincoln: the Emancipation Proclamation

Another "unlettered farm boy" who saved the Union and made it clear once and for all that man must never be physically enslaved by another man. The soul of this great man is further revealed in his Gettysburg Address. His work laid the groundwork for freedom everywhere; a battle that is still being fought as I write this.

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species

Though I doubt that he would have thought of himself in this way, Darwin was the product and refiner of the Protestant Reformation. For centuries, illiteracy, the lack of Bibles translated into the vernacular languages, no printing press and no cheap paper conspired to keep men from reading Holy Writ for themselves. All they knew was what the local priest told them, and sometimes he was as ignorant as his flock. So everyone "knew" the Bible said the world and every creature in it was created in six days, fixed in their species forever.

Darwin was the quintessential naturalist; his brilliant seeking mind soaked up information and put it together like a huge jigsaw puzzle. He had the idea of evolution, but knew it could not fit into the 6,000 years alloted for creation. When he boarded the Beagle, his father gave him a going-away present. It was Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, and the five-year voyage of the Beagle became an unequalled adventure of the human mind.

The closing paragraph of The Origin of Species reads:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

These men perceived the Laws of Nature to be the Laws of God, their Creator and ours. In the early days of the 21st Century, let us look back with gratitude to the early days of the 19th, and to our several gifts of freedom. From Joseph Smith, freedom from the wrath of a whimsical and vengeful God; from Abraham Lincoln, freedom from the Simon LeGrees of the world; and from Charles Darwin, freedom from the tyrany of a young earth