Here’s a picture of three members of the Declaration Committee, working hard on incorporating the 600th revision requested by the Continental Congress, in wool suits and without benefit of a word processor. You can tell by the look on Jefferson’s face that he’s about ready to knock those bifocals off Franklin’s puss and tell him, “If you know a better way to put it than ‘Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes…’ then why don’t you just do the next draft yourself, you old gout-sack?”

But they soldiered on, and did one another no recorded violence. Such were the sacrifices that bought us our liberty.

Some pertinent quotations from each of the three:

“Let me add that only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” (Benjamin Franklin, 1789.)

“(R)eligion and virtue are the only foundations, not only of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all governments and in all combinations of human society.” (John Adams in a letter to Benjamin Rush, Aug. 28, 1811.)

“God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed their only sure basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that those liberties are the gift of God?” (Thomas Jefferson. One of the quotations inscribed in the Jefferson Memorial, Washington D.C.)

(The quotations above are all found in Christianity and the Constitution, by John Eidsmoe.)