but also the first war in which we have eschewed some of our most powerful weaponry and destructive tactics even while employing more weaponry of penultimate efficacy than in any other of our wars to chew up the land and the inhabitants, civilian and military, whom we profess to be helping toward self-determination;

the first war in any place or time in which a body of draft-age citizens, not only conscientious objectors to all wars (like many of the early Christians in the Roman Empire), have taken upon themselves a right (hitherto exercised only by emperors, kings, divines, and jurists) to make an individual determination as to what constitutes a just tear.

And yet be it remembered also that never before our America has any nation in history socially, religiously, and through its judicial organs ever tolerated such an extraordinary latitude of expression and action in time of war as in our days.

But it is not on these long familiar anomalies of the Vietnam War that I have asked you to reflect upon this noon in chapel before we face the yet more difficult events ahead. We know that the President's policy of withdrawal through Vietnamization has consolidated behind him and his frighteningly articulate Vice-President a large portion of that silent majority which is to be found in any nation, that silent majority which bears its full share and sometimes more in the great exertions of society in war and rapid social change, that silent majority which generated instinctively those symbols and slogans which bond society together.

In the tragic polarization of the American people which we now sense impending, let us not aggravate the situation by disparaging the civil loyalty and trusting rally-to-the-head-of-State on the part of all those fellow citizens whose instinctive patriotism and whose military and quasi-military formations became visible and audible on Tuesday last. It is our responsibility even more than theirs in the struggle between that kind of patriotism and what most of us would consider the higher patriotism of prophetic self-criticism that the flag of our American commonwealth be neither abandoned by us nor ripped apart in the imminent encounter, even when we insist that the remarks about the moratorium and the mobilization by the former governor of this state and by the Vice-President are, because of the eminence of these spokesmen of administration policy, a more serious aggravation of the frightening moral schism in our society than the introduction of Vietcong symbols by youthful extremists on our side.

Our self-control and our sorting out of licit and illicit actions and sanctions for our position are now much more difficult than in the civil rights movement, Phase I. When this Phase I came to an end with the assassination of Martin Luther King, it was especially meaningful to have the American flag fly alongside the UN flag and the Christian flag in the funeral procession in the streets of Montgomery because the States Rights banner of the Confederacy had been the overt or covert symbol of the opposition to integration then being enforced by the Attorney General, the U.S. marshals, and the Supreme Court. But now in the kindred movement of opposition to the war, enlisting many of the same people and in any case the same kind of people who participated in the civil rights movement, the sanction of the American flag and the plenitude of the Anglo-American tradition of loyal opposition has been purportedly withdrawn from us in sweeing gestures and sonorous rhetoric from spokesmen very high in the Federal government.

While dissent and appeal to America's principles of fair play is called defeatism and even treachery, getting out of the war through the expedient of Vietnamization just because the United States forces are now clearly not winning is generously called patriotism. We who are excluded from the presidential embrace as unpatriotic are going to find ourselves tested all the more perilously as the tragic dilemma of our nation unfolds.

Yet, despite the perhaps temporary inward withdrawal of allegiance to the flag of the Republic on the part of some black militants and other alienated groups, despite the Vietcong flags of some of our fellow resisters (who for their part of overtly anti-establishment and have lost hope for America except through revolution), despite the direct appeal to us and felicitation on our activities over the head of our government from Hanoi and the NLF, we will not waver in our conviction that we rightly march under those same three banners that preceded the mule-drawn cortege in Montgomery: under the UN flag, symbolizing international concern and universal justice, under the banner of the Church for us who are prophetically Christian, and under the flag of our Republic concerned with liberty and justice for all.

Before it became Veterans Day it was Armistice Day. Many of us here can remember the tonality of the original celebration of this day with traffic and all activity stopping at 11 a.m. for a universal moment of solemn silence in recollection of the prodigious sacrifice in resolution that war might forever cease as an instrument of national policy. Those who march on Washington November 15 will be hearing the mulled drums of that other and perhaps mote humane America which had fixed upon Armistice Day not only as an annual tribute to those who had died in the War against the Central Powers but also as an annual reminder of our solemn pledge to do everything possible as a nation to prevent recourse to war. Repentance and compassion are also part of the American tradition.

IN THE tradition of evangelistic Christianity, the confession of sin in repentance is the principal spiritual transaction during revival preaching and hence the principal mark of the ongoing Christian life, even as the Lord's Prayer invites us to daily repentance and forgiveness of sins. It is an irony of what can be called White House religion that the chief spiritual advisor of both President Johnson and President Nixon is precisely our foremost preacher of repentance. Repentance is a religious term which, when cast back into its original Greek sense in the New Testament, means change of mind.

Although Billy Graham has acknowledgedyouthful idealism and even courage in the resistance movement, he does not seem even to be groping for a sense of national or corporate repentance or change of mind and heart; and yet the idea of national or corporate repentance is almost uniquely ours as Christians and Jews because of the prophetic conception of religion woven into the basic fabric of scripture. Accordingly, there have been many religious leaders in our country in both the liberal and conservative tradition who have long cried aloud with Amos "that for three transgressions and for four" we may be doomed to ever more grievous turmoil within our nation and abroad.

The uniqueness of the present conflict in American society is that, despite the failings of many earnest evangelists of individual repentance and moral purity, the prophetic conception of the righteous remnant of a nation is sufficiently strong among religious and secular people alike to enable us to participate in the most significant reversal of national policy on moral grounds ever compassed in so relatively short a time, given the unprecedented magnitude of our goal. Never before has such a large proportion of the population of any nation become so actively involved in reversing the policy of its head of state as is now the case.

When France withdrew from Vietnam and again from Algeria, although there accumulated much popular support respectively behind Mendes-France and de Gaulle, these near parallels to our own proposed action are also quite different in that leadership in these painful disengagement's over there came from the head of government. And in the American Revolution, although there was indeed Edmund Burke, who could see English principles victorious in the rise of the Revolutionary Republic, it was the thirteen colonies themselves who wrought the victory.

As we perceive the uniqueness of the action in which we are now engaged, thwarted though we long seem to have been at the polls and in our pleas from the podium and in the papers, yet are we inexorably swerving the policy of our nation. And as we do this in the streets and at the polls, let us in the sanctuary not minimize or disparage the moral ground on which our government has taken its stand. It is hard to repent if your policy is based on the compassionate abandonment of the maxims of an isolationist fortress American. It is hard to repent if your policy is based on the scrutiny of historic experience and on the resolution not to permit the armed crossing of the Czechoslovakian or any other international frontier through acquiescence, umbrella in hand, in any Munich Pact, however disguised.

And yet that very fixity of high moral purpose under the slogan of no more Munichs has in fact, because of our preoccupation with civil war in Indochina, brought it to pass that ironically precisely the Czech frontiers were once again forcibly crossed at the very moment when there was such substantial hope that Czechoslovakia might prove to emerge for the good of all mankind as an irenic mediator between the Communist and the Western political and economic systems. One can scarely imagine a more damaging consequence of our government's alleged sole rationale for the Vietnam War in terms of respect for present frontiers and national self-determination than the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, alongside our own grotesquely massive penetration of Vietnam and our unilateral determination of its macerated body politic. In our savage defense of "democracy" or self-determination there, most of the natural cells of village communitarian consensual democracy have long since been sucked up into our refugee and relocation camps.