As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding, we should give thanks for the courage of the founders. In the conclusion to the Declaration, the members of Congress wrote, "for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

It is true that in declaring independence they were risking their lives, their fortunes, and their honor. As Benjamin Franklin said when the Declaration was adopted, "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." Had the revolution failed, all of them would have been hanged, their property would have been confiscated, and their names would have gone down in history as failures or worse. We owe them a debt of gratitude for their courage.

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence would also want us to remember the principles to which they were dedicated and to which they dedicated this country, stated in these, the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence from memory.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

We are not accustomed to political statements that make reference to the laws of nature and of nature's God, but the concept is not as foreign as it may seem. An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church defines natural law as the "universal moral law that is given by God and knowable by human reason," as "universal standards" that "provide norms of right conduct," as "a rule of action that is implicit in the very nature of things." Thus, when the founders spoke of natural law, they referred to universal principles of right and wrong, of good and evil,........

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