God will have a free people, and while we have a duty to perform to preach the gospel, we have another to perform, that is, to stand up in the defense of human rights -- in the defense of our own rights, the rights of our children, and in defense of the rights of this nation and of all men, no matter who they may be, and God being our helper to maintain those principles and to lift up a standard for the honorable of this and other nations to flock to, that they may be free from the tyranny and oppression that is sought to be crowded upon them. This is the duty we have to perform, and in the name of Israel's God we will do it.

For the Latter-day Saint, the survival of the American Republic is an essential part of his religious responsibility. The Constitution of the United States is a divinely revealed document intended by the Lord to be a vital factor in preparing the earth for the Savior's return. One cannot in ignorance or apathy fulfill that mandate to preserve the Constitution and the institutions of our liberty.

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors; they purchased them for us with toil and danger and at the expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.

Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty

The sects that exist in the United States are innumerable. They all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator, but they agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man. Each sect adores the Deity in its own peculiar manner, but all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.... The revolutionists of America are obliged to profess an ostensible respect for Christian morality and equity, which does not permit them to violate wantonly the laws that oppose their designs.... Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.

Our liberties are safe until the memories and experience of the past are blocked out, and the Mayflower with its band of Pilgrims forgotten; until the public school system has fallen into decay, and the nation into ignorance.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites -- in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsel of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions could be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism.