Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy
New York Herald Tribune We are determined to press on, shoulder to shoulder, in the West and in the East until our fluttering banners herald the resurrection of liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of action, and liberty of religion.

We believe in all these freedoms. We believe that they are the foundation stones of the good society. We have fought to win them; we have fought to preserve them. We are steadfast in our belief that humanity can and will improve with time and everlasting, unremitting effort: that the world is not doomed to suffer forever the scourges of war any more than the plagues of pestilence, and that a gentle Providence urges us upward and onward. We believe that rational human beings have all fundamental things in common and can shape their destiny to God's good will. We believe that the progress of the past is earnest of the progress of the future, and offers more than mere hope for peace and justice.

If we did not so believe, we would not be fighting this war; we would not be fighting for another chance for a better world. Put it this way: We say we are fighting for survival, for self-preservation, and self-interest. We are but that which we call "self-preservation" and "self-interest" rests on something profoundly fundamental. They rest on principles and convictions—ideals, if you wish— which have forever sustained and inspired... man.

Rev. James J. Smithson
Vancouver Province British Columbia, Canada

In the midst of this war to restore "the four freedoms" of thought, speech, deed, and conscience it is well for us to ask whether we are prepared in heart and mind to enter fully into liberty and to be the custodians thereof for our less fortunate fellow men.

We need to be reminded often that the foundation upon which true liberty rests is that of responsibility. Charles Kingsley said, "There are two freedoms: the false, where one is free to do what he likes; and the true, where he is free to do what he ought."

F. W. Robertson says this: "False notions of liberty are strangely common. The only liberty that a man worthy of the name will ask is to have all restrictions removed that prevent his doing what he ought."

The "ought" in liberty spells responsibility.

Strange, how men shy away from the responsibilities inherent in liberty. Let someone else take the responsibility (they say); tell us how to behave; tell us what to think. This attitude to life gives rise to dictators in church as in state.

This world will never be safe for democracy until men realize "each of us must give account of himself unto God." Therein lies the measuring rod of justice to our fellow men.

Yes, liberty carries within it responsibility to God and man. It was this which caused Webster to write, "The most important thought I ever had was that of my individual responsibility to God."

We hear the cry, "We must get back to God."... Let us lay it to heart that the nation can only get back to God as the individuals who make up the nation accept their personal responsibility to Him.

"Every one of us shall give account of himself to God."

The Rev. E. E. A. Heriz-Smith
The Spectator, London, England To the question whether there are any signs on the horizon of a religious revival I would answer that if my experience is shared by chaplains of other public schools —and it seems reasonable to suppose that it is—then the prospects are not unpromising. Impatience in the young with what seems to them to be outworn or purely conventional beliefs, and a heartfelt desire to find something to satisfy their spiritual stirrings, are promising pointers to a future where there will be a widely held resolution to build a new order on true spiritual foundations.

Wendell Willkie
The Boston Daily Globe, Massachusetts

Recently we have been prone to think of freedom in purely economic terms. It is true that a man cannot be free unless he has a job and a decent income. But this job and this income are not the sources of his freedom. They only implement it. "Freedom is of the mind." Freedom is in that library of yours, around which this campus is built. When you range back and forth through the centuries, when you weigh the utterance of some great thinker or absorb the meaning of some great composition, in painting or music or poetry; when you live these things within yourself and measure yourself against them—only then do you become an initiate in the world of the free. It is in the liberal arts that you acquire the ability to make a truly free and individual choice.

Those who are suppressing free discussion... have of course a rationalization for their policy. They say that they must conduct political warfare. In the conduct of political warfare, they claim, it is damaging to say certain things. The enemy, they tell us picks them up, distorts them, uses them against us. All this, of course, is true enough. But what of it? The time has never been when men did not seek to distort the utterances of their enemies for their own advantage.

And what has won out in the long battle? Always the truth. Spread the facts, analyze them, debate them, make them available to all the world. There is no other form of political warfare that can possibly win the great political struggle in which we are engaged. Truth alone can win it.

We must establish beyond any doubt the equality of men. And we shall find this equality, not in the different talents which we severally possess, nor in the different incomes which we severally earn, but in the great franchise of the mind, the universal franchise, which is bounded neither by color, nor by creed, nor by social status. "Open the books, if you wish to be free."

Canadian Baptist
Toronto, Canada

George Walter Fiske, late Dean of Oberlin College, has said that true education is "a refining process through which the personality —rough and crude raw material ...—grows sensitive, appreciative, responsive, liberated, expressive, friendly, wise and skillful." Those are all personal values which mean, as Dean Fiske went on to suggest, that you are not educated unless you can answer "Yes"' to questions such as these:

Has your education given you a sympathy with all good causes and made you espouse them?

Has it made you a brother to the weak?

Have you learned how to make friends and keep them?

Do you know what it is to be a friend yourself?

Can you look an honest man or a pure woman straight in the eye?

Do you see anything to love in a little child?

Are you good for anything to yourself? Can you be happy alone?

Can you look out upon the world and see anything but dollars and cents?

Can you look into a mud puddle by the wayside and see anything in the puddle but mud?

Can you look into the sky at night and see beyond the stars?

Can your soul claim relationship with the creator?

Then "spare not your canvas; stretch it out." Dwell in an expansive environment that provides ever more adequate accommodation for the human values of life and room for the spirit of God.