A story was told how one day Jackson was dispensing justice [as a Tennessee judge] at a crossroads when the proceedings were interrupted by a local rowdy. This man, either drunk or belligerent by nature, brandished a pistol and sheath knife and threatened homicide against Judge Jackson, against the jury, and against everyone else associated with that morning's dispensation of justice. Jackson ordered the sheriff to arrest the rowdy for contempt of court. The sheriff tried but failed. The man was too violent to be apprehended, he said. Jackson then ordered the sheriff to summon a posse. The sheriff did so but had no better luck. The bully intimidated the posse and remained at large.

Jackson by now was thoroughly irked at both the bully's bad manners and the paralysis of local law enforcement. He ordered the sheriff to summon him -- Jackson -- as a member of the posse. The sheriff was skeptical, but Jackson insisted and was duly enlisted to bring the bad man in.

Jackson declared a ten-minute recess in the trial. He doffed his judicial robe, took up his pistol, and strode out the door. The rowdy was ranting amid a crowd of people not far from the courtroom door. Jackson parted the crowd and approached the man, who had worked himself into a full lather. Jackson showed his gun and said, "Surrender, you infernal villian, this very instant, or I'll blow you through."

Everyone gasped, wondering how the bully would respond. To general amazement he meekly handed over his weapons and allowed himself to be led away. When the onlookers recovered their breath, one inquired why the ruffian had surrendered to a single man after holding an entire posse at bay.

"Why, when he came up, I looked him in the eye," the prisoner said, "and I saw shoot. There wasn't shoot in nary other eye in the crowd. So I says to myself, says I: Hoss, it's about time to sing small, and so I did."

"A troop of Boy Scouts on a camping trip saved an 18-month-old girl who had fallen in a river upstream from them and was floating face down, officials said," the Associated Press reports from Omaha, Neb.:

The boys were swimming in the Platte River at Two Rivers State Recreation Area, about 20 miles west of Omaha, on Saturday when 11-year-old Christian Nanson spotted something floating in the water. It turned out to be a young girl.

Nanson and John Fitzgerald, 9, both member of an Omaha Scout troop, reached the girl and brought her to shore while others called for help on a cell phone, assistant scoutmaster Matt Fitzgerald told the Omaha World-Herald.

The ACLU describes the Boy Scouts as "an organization that will go the way of the Daughters of the American Revolution in losing its place in American life if it does not end its discriminatory practices."

What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin -- because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:1-11, NIV, emphasis mine)

In his [Dwight Eisenhower] Farewell Address as President, on January 17, 1961, he declared: "We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease, and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love."

From almost anyone else, that would be pie-in-the-sky optimism, but from the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, World War II, it was the American Spirit, clearly enunciated. Someday it will happen. My faith is based on what happened in Japan, Germany, and South Korea after World War II, and what is happening today in Bosnia. The American Spirit. By no means are we as a people all that special, or all-embracing, but we are part of a country that outshines those that have gone before us and most of those in existence today. I realize that sounds like some politician talking. I'm no politician. I am an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education, women's rights, freedom of religion, democracy, an openness to all ethnic groups, the will to admit that terrible mistakes have been made -- slavery, imperialism, segregation -- and determination to correct those mistakes.