I’m proud to be asked to be here today. I’m not quite sure why I’m proud. Is it that I’m proud because so many of the congregation I serve have been honored with Rotary membership and Rotary High Office, like Ebbie LeMaster, Wallace Witmer, Walk Jones, Wallace Johnston, and others? Or is it that I’m proud because here I find evidence that Presbyterianism has not failed, but is really living up to its Reformation principles of making religious ideas relevant to business and community and political life — that responsible churchmanship “must issue” in responsible citizenship?

Well, anyway, I’m proud and I’m happy, too, that almost simultaneously with your kicking old man LeMaster out of the presidency of Rotary, the Chamber of Commerce is kicking him upstairs to assume its Number One Post. Whom should we pity most, LeMaster, Mrs. LeMaster, or Frank Campbell?

Now, in this week that Ebby retires as Rotary President and Ike returns from his successes and failures in the Orient; in the week just before the Fourth of July and the month following the Summit Collapse, and I have Rotary’s ear for a few minutes, about what should I talk?

I would like to put in my two bits worth in the current debate on what has happened to our national purpose and what we should do about it.

You know how Walter Lippman has been viewing with alarm the present American scene because of our lost national purpose. And Archibald MacLeish says: “The trouble seems to be that we don’t feel right with ourselves or with the country. It’s not just the Russians. We feel that we are lost in the woods, and we don’t know where we are going, if anywhere.”

And Adlai Stevenson expresses his concern over the lost American purpose in these words: “At a time of universal social upheaval and challenge, our vision of our own society seems to be of limited social significance. An air of disengagement and disinterest hangs over the most powerful and affluent society the world has ever known. Neither the turbulence of the world abroad, nor the fatness and flatness of the world at home is moving us to a more vital effort. We seem becalmed in a season of storm, drifting through a century of mighty dreams and great achievements. As an American, I am disturbed.” (Meditation of a Senior)

Now, of course, the returning Fourth of July forcibly reminds us that our nation once had a purpose: noble, clear and commanding. That purpose was enshrined in the Constitution of the United States and in the Declaration of Independence, and the purpose was of sufficient energizing power to propel us through two hundred years of turbulent history, rather successfully.

Can it be that we have outgrown the ideals of our founding fathers? In the onward rush of human progress, have these quaint old ideas and institutions been superceded by scientific fact and economic necessity? Is idealism passe?

Archibald MacLeish bids us look abroad in the world today and behold how it is not communist ideology, but rather our founding fathers’ ideals, which are inspiring the emergence of new nations in Africa and the fresh stirrings for freedom and human dignity in South America.

One of my traveling companions in South America last summer was a lawyer from Tampa, Florida. As legal counsel for the Florida citrus growers, he was investigating legislation in every South American country on cooperative marketing. The officials everywhere were wining and dining him. One day in Santiago, Chile, he said to me: “Paul, it is remarkable how closely the constitution and framework of government in each of these South American republics is modeled on our constitution.”

Do you remember how the famous Bandung Conference held some ten years ago in Southeast Asia was opened? Is it not significant that this world congress of colored peoples from which all white peoples of the earth were excluded — this concert of the colonial and backward brown and black and yellow men who were meeting to draw up their Magna Carta — solemnly commenced their proceedings with a reading of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere?

Freedom is not dead. It is a burning fire that can never be extinguished so long as the world stands. Have we lost our American purpose, or just lost touch with it?

David Sarnoff believes that what we ourselves need, and what the world most needs now, is for us Americans to activate our slumbering idealism — to put up or shut up — to stop shouting out our principles of Jeffersonian democracy and start acting out our convictions that all men are created equal and really have certain inalienable rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whether they are seeking those rights or pursuing that happiness on a streetcar or a motor bus in East Berlin, Johannesburg, or Dyersburg.

The one hope that Walter Lippman holds out in the twilight of the American scene, through which he finds himself now groping, is for the arrival of another innovator in our public life. A man of the hour, a man with ideals and leadership qualities who will see the light, grasp the goal and without completely relinquishing our purpose of the past, lead us out of this winter of our discontent, this wilderness of our wandering toward the ever beckoning goal of freedom.

Lippman sees as the great innovators of the 20th century thus far: Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. And so he fondly hopes and waits for the charismatic man of destiny Providence will provide.

Who will the coming innovator be? The new President to be elected in November: Or, one of the advisors with whom he will surround himself? Or will he come from some unknown, unforeseen quarter, produced in a second American Revolution? Will he form a fascist or socialist state? Will he be the reincarnation of Alexander the Great, Napoleon or Einstein? Will he come as a mixture of Ghengis Kahn, Buddha, and Bismark?

As interested as I am in that hoped for innovator, I’m more concerned with preserving the solidity of the body politic of responsible citizens. I’m more anxious about who will be ready to respond to the right sort of leadership.

Suppose the citizenship in Germany in the early 1950s had been of the quality of men like Martin Niemoeller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the few who discerned the charlatan in Hitler and were prepared to go to prison rather than follow his evil genius? What higher purpose can a civic organization like Rotary or Kiwanis have than to review the contemporary scene, to debate fairly the issues, become informed, and remain faithful to truth and freedom?

When Ancient Israel drifted into a dispirited decade, and an immoral, atheistic, cruel tyranny dominated the international situation threatening Hebrew survival, the prophet Habakkuk vowed that he would live through that calamitous time by his faith. “The just shall live by faith,” Habukkuk said in his soul.

What did he mean — “live by faith?” Why he meant that when national security has hit a snag and leadership has vanished, and men seem to live in a spiritual vacuum, then a man can cling on to the good life and preserve hope in the world by holding on to the intangible values of the spiritual world, instead of placing his confidence in material things and worldly power.

One of the most striking illustrations of this in the history of the world was the contrast presented by Paris and London in their hours of crisis in the last war. When the bombers began to fly over London, was not this in effect the question which was put to the people of London: “Which will you have, your city, with its streets and homes and pleasant parks kept safe from destruction, or will you choose to cling on to those intangible abstractions, ideals called justice, freedom, and religion?”

We know how they answered. They said: “Let the courthouses and Old Bailey go, but be sure that justice is preserved. Let our churches and cathedrals and temples, those landmarks of centuries be bombed to bits, but be sure that men continue to worship God in this land. Let the Houses of Parliament and the national symbols of democratic government be destroyed, just so we preserve freedom in these Isles.”

In what pitiable contrast stood Paris with London! When Paris was threatened, the cry went up: “Save our beautiful city! Spare it destruction!” They saved the city — they capitulated in the realm of ideals — and they lost liberty, equality, and fraternity.

In any and all calamitous, vacuous times, the righteous shall live by faith in those eternal, unseen verities of the human spirit and not by putting trust in material things.

So, our search for an energizing national purpose and our wistful longing for an innovating leader, leads us to look within and ask ourselves are we such ones as are capable of following the one who alone is worthy to lead the nation and the world in such an hour.

When Washington’s officers grew discontented over their trials and deprivations and presented their leader with a list of their grievances against the Continental Congress, you will remember that Washington remarked: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country.”

Yes, there is much that “men in gray flannel suits now may learn from that man in the white marble toga,” as Marshall Fishwick of Washington and Lee University reminds us. “For the one thing he never lacked, even when in error or defeat, was integrity.”