Table of Contents

   The Bishop: Do you believe that you are not bound to submit your acts and your statements to the Church militant -- to anyone but God?
   Jeanne d'Arc: I will maintain what I have always said during the trial ... If I were condemned, and saw the torches lighted and the executioner ready to set fire to the pyre, and if I were in the fire, still I would not speak other than I have spoken and I would maintain until death what I have said at the trial. Official Record, Trial of Jeanne d'Arc, May 23, 1431.

   To myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. -- Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727.)

   We even we here hold the power and bear the responsibility ... We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth ... The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless. -- Abraham Lincoln, December 1, 1862.

Let us cease saying to ourselves: "We can't ... I can't ... It's too big for me ... My bit is too little to be missed or count ... Besides, the others will never agree ... It can't be done." The voice saying this to us is not the still small Voice that asked: "What doest thou here, Elijah?" It is time to stop saying we can not do ... what our Fathers did long ago. Let us remember that the Russians have gained so much respect in the past twenty years because they have done more than the world, or they themselves, expected. Their sputnik achievement brought them the prestige and confidence it did because it came as a surprise to them, and all the world.

If we need to take the foe by surprise to win a war we need even more to surprise the world if we are to win for freedom without war. To surprise the world, we must begin by surprising ourselves. To surprise ourselves, we must outdo ourselves -- and our Fathers. Nothing lower will hit the apple, trembling now upon our grandchild's head.

From illiterate peasants came Jeanne d'Arc. From a yeoman's widow came the tiny infant known as Sir Isaac Newton. From a log cabin's dirt floor rose Abraham Lincoln. And none of the three could have done what makes them remembered by all mankind had it not been for a host of unremembered men and women ... the unknown "knight, equerry and four servants" who escorted Jeanne safely through the long and dangerous journey from Vaucouleurs to the King at Chateau Chinon ... the two nameless neighbor women who on Christmas Day, 1642, went to the village for medicine to save the newborn Newton -- so tiny that his mother said she could have put him at birth in a quart pot ... "the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here," whom Lincoln remembered at Gettysburg -- and without whom he could not be revered as he is ...

If those who put their trust in material things can do so much today, what can we not do -- we who, like Jeanne, have put our faith in "the angel" in each man and woman? What can we not do ... if only we free that faith from fear, and let the angel in us act?

"This is the true joy in life," as Bernard Shaw wrote in Man and Superman, "the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature."

Do you want to taste the joy of knowing that you are devoting the best you are endowed with, the best you can, for the best of purposes? Are you as sure as I am that the best part of you -- and of all the rest of us -- is that inner angel? Do you agree that the best way to free the light, which these sparks of the divine together give, is to help unite them? Then all you need, to taste that joy now, is to start today to work for Atlantic Federal Union of the Free.