Remarks to Members of the Southern Baptist Christian Leadership Seminar.

Dr. Valentine, Dr. Scales, ladies and gentlemen:

I am glad that you could come here this morning. You are always welcome to this Rose Garden. There are not many roses in bloom outside, but there are a lot of thorns inside.

This is, after all, your house-even if Brooks Hays and Bill Moyers think it belongs to them. If you wonder why Brooks and Bill are both around, I just want to assure you that I am trying to be scriptural. A proverb in the Old Testament says "In a multitude of counselors there is safety." Brooks keeps telling me that it really meant "In a multitude of Baptist counselors." Everyone, I think, knows that two Baptists make a multitude.

If you doubt their influence, I urge you to read last week's Saturday Evening Post. There is an article in there, and they are usually accurate, which says that all three of the new staff members that Johnson brought to the White House are Protestants. Well, it so happens that two of the three are Catholics. The only conclusion I could reach after reading that article is that Bill Moyers converted those two other fellows and baptized them in a mighty big hurry. Of course, that is why I keep the swimming pool full all the time.

I wish you could have seen Billy Graham and Bill Moyers in that pool together the other day. Everyone else was already a Christian, so they just took turns baptizing each other.

I want you to know that Hays and Moyers are faithful to the cause, though. I go around turning out the lights, and they keep reminding me that the Scripture says to "Let your light so shine." I just replied that Scripture also says that "The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of this life."

Looking at Brooks and Bill, I am reminded of another Scripture, "The glory of young men is their strength, and the beauty of old men is their gray hair," and poor Brooks--he is losing his beauty.

I have had a lot of experience with Baptists before, for a long time. My own heritage is heavily weighed with Baptist influence. My great grandfather, George Washington Baines, Sr., preached across the Southland from Alabama into Arkansas, Arkansas to Louisiana, Louisiana to Texas, where I am told that 90 percent of the great Baptist preachers finally wind up.

While planning churches in the wilderness of Arkansas around 1837, he was elected to the legislature for one term, proving that politics and religion either do or do not mix. We are not sure just which. He went from Arkansas to Louisiana. He became what one magazine later described as the best preacher that was ever in north Arkansas, an honor his heirs are sure he carried modestly, as any Baptist 'preacher would do.

While in north Arkansas, he made one missionary expedition into Texas, to Lady Bird's hometown, and he helped organize the Baptist Church in Marshall, Tex. This was enough to give him the Texas fever, which is not, I am told by authorities, what Paul had when he fell ill on one of his journeys.

In 1850 he packed his family in a wagon and journeyed 17 days to Huntsville-Huntsville, Tex.--and there became pastor of a struggling Baptist church. He became Gen. Sam Houston's preacher. Unlike modern Baptists, he found his congregation a little reluctant to bring their tithes into the storehouse. On the wall in my office there is a letter ¹ written to my grandfather by one of his parishioners, Gen. Sam Houston, and it reads:

¹ Dated November 23, 1857.

"My Dear Brother Baines:

"You will find enclosed your note, and if you will renew it for the same amount of $300 and send it to Mrs. Houston, I will be obliged to you. You perceive that I knock off the interest for six years at 8 percent per annum, amounting to $140. This I am not loathe to do, as you have the luck to minister to congregations who think you can afford to preach to them gratis. If you do not devise some plan to change their .practices, they will think that you ought to pay them a good salary for attending church when they could stay at home on Sunday and thusly be in greater readiness for the week's work. I am not alluding to charity, tho I think the Scriptures enjoin that as one of the brightest Christian traits of character, but I allude to plain old-fashioned honesty of paying what they subscribe. They ought to know that paper currency will not pass in heaven. It must be the coin which is only issued from an honest heart. Cotton fields and cotton bolls will find no market in paradise.

"Mrs. Houston unites in affectionate regards to Sister Baines, yourself, and family. Truly Thine,

"Sam Houston"

His abilities as a fund raiser apparently brought Brother Baines to the attention of other Texas Baptists, because that is still a pretty important ability for a preacher to have, even today. At the first session of the state convention after he came to Texas, he was elected to represent the body in the Southern Baptist Convention. He was selected to preach the annual sermon for the next year.

If that doesn't prove he was orthodox, nothing will. He then moved to Independence as a pastor, then to Anderson, where he labored as pastor and editor of the first Baptist paper in Texas. When the Civil War broke out, he accepted the call as President of Baylor University at Independence, the second president of Baylor, and for 2 years struggled to keep that young school alive. He resigned to recover his health. Before his death in 1882 he had pastored in Saledo and Florence, and also served as an agent for the Baptist Educational Commission.

It is not good to dwell on the past, for faith is a personal power by which we live today and not a monument for the dead. The faith of our fathers, the faith of men like George Baines, may become the folly of their children if individually we fail to see God face to face. No man knows that better than I do.

As the Psalmist had done long ago, our Nation passed through fire and through water in those dark days following that tragedy in November. I am convinced that we emerged stronger and more determined because millions of Americans sought to renew their faith in God. I know that I did.

When the pressures were the heaviest and the need for strength from above was the greatest, Lady Bird and I sat down to eat a meal alone. No word or glance passed between us, but in some way we found ourselves bound together, and I found myself speaking the words of grace that I had learned at my Baptist mother's knee so many years ago. The occupant of the world's most powerful office, like the most private citizen, has nowhere to go for help but up, up to the secret place of the most high, where faith and spiritual power are abundantly available.

I am not a theologian. I am not a philosopher. I am just a public servant that is doing the very best I know how. But in more than 3 decades of public life, I have seen first-hand how basic spiritual beliefs and deeds can shatter barriers of politics and bigotry. I have seen those barriers crumble in the presence of faith and hope, and from this experience I have drawn new hope that the seemingly insurmountable moral issues that we face at home and abroad today can be resolved by men of strong faith and men of brave deeds.

We can only do this if the separation of church and state, a principle to which Baptists have given personal witness for all their long history, only if the separation of church and state does not mean the divorce of spiritual values from secular affairs. To day we have common purposes. Great questions of war and peace, of civil rights and education, the elimination of poverty at home and abroad, are the concern of millions who see no difference in this regard between their beliefs and their social obligations. This principle, the identity of private. morality and public conscience, is as deeply rooted in our tradition and Constitution as the principle of legal separation. Washington in his first inaugural said that the roots of national policy lay in private morality.

Lincoln proclaimed as a national faith that right makes might. Surely this is so, and surely if we are to complete the great unfinished work of our society, spiritual beliefs from which social actions spring must be the strongest weapons in our arsenal. The most critical challenge that we face today is the struggle to free men, free them from the bondage of discrimination and prejudice. This administration is doing everything it possibly can do to win that struggle.

We are going to pass the civil rights bill, but our efforts alone are not enough. I am proud to say that in this cause some of our strongest allies are religious leaders who are encouraging elected officials to do what is right.

But more must be done, and no group of Christians has a greater responsibility in civil rights than Southern Baptists. Your people are part of the power structure in many communities of our land. The leaders of States and cities and towns are in your congregations and they sit there on your boards. Their attitudes are confirmed or changed by the sermons you preach and by the lessons you write and by the examples that you set.

In the long struggle for religious liberty, Baptists have been prophets. Your forebears have suffered as few others have suffered, and their suffering was not in vain. This cause, too, this cause of human dignity, this cause of human rights demands prophets in our time, men of compassion and truth, unafraid of the consequences of fulfilling their faith. There are preachers and there are teachers of injustice and dissension and distrust at work in America this very hour. They are attempting to thwart the realization of our highest ideals. There are those who seek to turn back the rising tide of human hope by sowing half-truths and untruths wherever they find root. There are voices crying peace, peace, peace, when there is no peace.

Help us to answer them with truth and with action. Help us to pass this civil rights bill and establish a foundation upon which we can build a house of freedom where all men can dwell. Help us, when this bill has been passed, to lead all of our people in this great land into a new fellowship.

Let the acts of everyone, in Government and out, let all that we do proclaim that righteousness does exalt the Nation.

Thank you.