Some , perhaps most , in our time, have no sense of where or what the center is. No pope, priest, no clergy or Guide of fame or humility can, in this age, pretend to the power to keep the dogs of war at bay. Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews slaughter each other by day and smile into the world's cameras in the evening. The sons and daughters of church-goers, fresh from child prayers and sweet singing in the choir, are raped or shot in the streets. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned .
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
But there were those believers and those individuals who still heard and lived and died by the sound of the Falconer, those whose flight never lost sight of the center. Many a Socrates, Joan of Arc, Thomas More, Beckett, Luther. Many a Christ of many cultures . I may be naive, but I assume there was a time in which such leaders as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln sought to hold the widening flight of the nation by such laws as they held upon their hearts, by the voice of their God as they heard it, by the ground of integrity as it led them. The law at the center may not always have held, but it was earnestly sought .