Author: Jim Naughton

God, source of all freedom,

this day is bright with the memory

of those who declared that life and liberty

are your gift to every human being.

The changes which have been taking place in our ideas about God have been mainly in the direction of a purified ethical conception of his character. We have been learning to believe, more and more, in the justice, the righteousness, the goodness of God. In the oldest times men thought him cruel and revengeful; then they began to regard him as willful and arbitrary—his justice was his determination to have his own way; his sovereignty was his egoistic purpose to do everything for his own glory.

Freedom is also the condition of a christianized social order. Men can have no fraternal relations until they face one another with a sense of freedom and of equal humanity. Despotism is always haunted by dread, and fear is not a symptom of the prevalence of fraternity. In tracing the moral evolution of the Family, the School, the Church, and the State, we saw that every social organization is on the road to redemption when it finds the path of freedom.

In fictitious writing, it is possible to find refuge from the hard and the terrible, by inventing scenes and characters of a more pleasing nature. No such resource is open in a work of fact; and the subject of this work is one in which the truth, if told at all, must needs be very dreadful.