In the midst of recession and war, this dawns as a great day in America. Today is foremost about the goodness of the nation and its system of democratic government.

To be sure, one set of ideas will replace another, one party will assume power and another step aside, but that is the practical result of any inauguration and not the essence of this day's greatness.

For when Barack Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States at noon, the words of the Pledge of Allegiance will be affirmed as never before. In truth, we are one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

As history shakes loose the bonds of the past, it is hard not to believe in the power of divine providence. In the living memory of some assembled in Washington, D.C., racial prejudice was enforced by law and custom.

Yet today a black man will use Abraham Lincoln's Bible to swear the oath of office -- a black man, moreover, with a foreign-sounding first and last name and a middle name that in recent years was shared by a national bogeyman.

This history-making day would have seemed beyond unlikely just a few years ago, but the point underscored by today's inauguration is that in America anything is possible. Barack Obama is living proof.

Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, believed that all men are created equal, but it took generations for the promise of his words to be realized. They were still just words when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Washington, D.C., 46 years ago. He had a dream that one day his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

In November, Americans did just that -- and some were for him and some were not. Yet even those who did not vote for him can understand that something good is happening today, something that says as much about the nation as the new president himself. The whole world understands.

Let freedom ring, Dr. King said, and it did. God bless America.