As the venom poured from the congresswoman’s lips, a tremor of discomfort passed through the room. It was an audible wincing at her calculated breach of collegial etiquette, the severing of one of those fragile ties that bind us as a community when all the other bonds fail. A shudder was even detectable in the ranks of the opposition Democrats, who sensed that Maxine might have gone a scorched earth too far. Waters herself seemed to hesitate a moment with the same awareness, although it didn’t arrest the momentum of her attack. And attack she did.

Even after her allotted time had elapsed, she had not vented the full quotient of her wrath when the chair’s gavel signaled that her moment of abuse had run out. There was expectancy in the air as the entire room waited to hear whether and how the chair might respond. And then, Henry Hyde, whose dignified composure during the entire spectacle had never altered for a moment said: "Would the gentle lady from California like an extension of her time to continue her attack on me?"

And of course she would. And continued her assault until the next gaveling shut her up.

It seemed to me a summary moment of the predicament in which we find ourselves as a culture and a nation, and one of the reasons why Henry Hyde is a hero to us.

We live in a time of boundless personal cynicism, ideological partisanship, and public savagery, a time as Yeats’ famously put it when things fall apart and the center cannot hold, when the ceremony of innocence is drowned and the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

In the midst of this, our cultural disorder, Henry Hyde stands among us as a Gibraltar of conviction, an avatar of grace, a leader able in his very carriage as a man to rekindle in us the flame of reverence for a nation and a culture, which ever since the 1960s have seemed to be under permanent siege.

In preparing these remarks, I called Henry’s congressional office to obtain the text of the first speech I ever heard him give. Its central image had made a profound impression on me at the time because of the way in which it expressed this power. A young staffer whom I spoke to in his office recognized the speech from my description as one Henry had given many times. But he told me there was no such text, that Henry had crafted it as he spoke it. The staffer, too, had been touched by the same passage, and been touched so deeply that he offered to reconstruct it from memory. This is his reconstruction:

"In 1972, the Chinese leader Deng Shao Bing visited the United States. It was the first ever visit by a leader from the People’s Republic of China. The Illinois delegation was asked to serve as honor guard at the Lincoln Memorial when Deng, ‘the leader of the greatest slave state in history’ placed a wreath at the tomb of the greatest emancipator.

"I looked at this little man," Henry Hyde recalled, "the leader of a nation of a billion people with 6,000 years of culture as his legacy, and I asked myself: What does the leader of this ancient nation want from little up-start America, that was founded only two-hundred years ago, that lacks the homogeneity of China and its culture, that is made up of Englishmen and Greeks, Asians and Hispanics, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. What he wants, I realized, is recognition. From us. What he wants is technology. What he wants is access to the greatest universities in the world. What he wants is economic aid from the greatest industrial power on earth. He wants little up-start America to drag his ancient country into the modern age. And you wonder:—Why is it that ‘little up-start America,’ which is a mere 200 years old, which is a polyglot nation made up of all these different peoples and languages and cultures—why is it that we have it, and they don’t? Looking at him I realized it is that we have freedom. We have freedom that attracts human talent and intelligence from all over the world. We have freedom that gives opportunity to the human imagination and the human spirit to flourish. We have freedom to grow and to prosper and to create."

I can’t tell how close that is to Henry’s actual speech. I’m sure it is less felicitous of phrase, and less elegant in tone, but it makes the point. Here is a man who can reach down into the depths of his soul and come up with the image of who we are, and why that is worth cherishing and defending. Who can recall us to ourselves and inspire us to be worthy of our heritage. It is exactly what we need to hear at this troubled crossroads of our national journey.

The greatest sin of human beings, the origin of all others, is the taking of things and persons for granted, of not appreciating who we are and what we have been given. This lack of appreciation was really the sin of our fore-parents in the Garden of Eden. Paradise wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more. And that was the beginning of all our trials. America’s trials are from a similar source. We do not live in paradise, but we have been blessed in our inheritance. There are improvements to be made, and we will work to see that they are. But what makes us conservatives is our appreciation for what we already have in this great nation and, therefore, for what we can lose. And no conservative articulates this truth, or exemplifies it, better than Henry Hyde.

The Elizabethans had the idea that there was a Great Chain of Being, and that man was poised at the very center of the chain. That through the exercise of our free will we can descend down the chain to the level of beasts or worse, or that we can ascend upwards to the realm of angels. Ascent is made possible through the manners, morals, and orders that civilize and humanize us. The American founders created their own framework of constitutional order that was designed to bring out the better angels of our political nature. We live in a time of open assault on that constitutional order, and on all the orders—moral, religious, and social—that can move us up the Great Chain of Being.

In these difficult times, Henry Hyde is an ascendant force among us, defending and embodying those orders, lifting us towards civilization and grace. And that is why we love him as we do.