In deciding to write The Public Square, we did not know where it would lead. But it has been a privilege to do so for three years. Fortunately, our columns have mostly written themselves.

We felt a need had come to frame things anew - by seeking to offer, in this time of partisan fault lines, greater equidistance in perspective. But no words should intrude upon readers forever, and so today's column is our final one. Though one venue of The Public Square ends, we feel sure others await.

The notion of a public square is not new. Early on, we gave thought to where the idea took root, what brought it to bear, what form it should take, how powerful it should be. Even more, what makes it unique in America today, how can it endure, and why should it?

Over three years, we have been struck by how much our country seems without order, how there must be a point of reference and anchor for society, and how the public square is, therefore, a realm we really cannot do without.

The American public order is unlike any to grace the globe, a vision not confined to time, able to be forever enlarged. It secures for us our freedom, daily choice, and remarkable fulfillment. As our national tether, it reminds us we all belong to common humanity, but not at the expense of any individual.

But our internal public square may now matter most. This is our citizen balloon - and uses society's tether to wed to pillars of individual betterment. These can range from liberating ourselves from the dreary clouds of life having at times no rain in them, to sorting false winds of doctrine which compete in us, to facing our lives constantly more spirit-ward.

So especially in less secure moments like our own, The Public Square reaffirms seven principles we believe are vital to the future of our American citizen order, among them:

How character is yet a presiding presence in life which creates a basis for citizens to grow, else why are we free?;

How our nation founded the rule of law, for the people to have morality, so the government could create a system of law over men;

How virtue and liberty must work hand in hand to organize and sustain our public temper; but also form the oxygen that allows the aspiring circle of citizen belief and its prevailing synergies to move our democracy forward;

How the open door of freedom, as the castle of character and steady conversion of the human soul, is an active path of progression, where conscience is the root, and courage the home, and both the crown jewel of liberty and the individual;

How the right of conscience forever seals, inside the Declaration and outside the Constitution, a permanent guarantee from the prerequisites of power; yet, how power can emerge as a thinly disguised tool in history to build a public square, then, void of purpose, potentially tear it down;

How union in America super-cedes statehood because, in its founding integrity and surviving aspirations, its vision does. Our rights are the mere scaffolding of citizenship. More magically, democratic thought lifts and enables society to avoid a scattering of purpose, secure a better leavening of truth, and form the atmospheric and moral terrain which guide the corners of our thought, and give us new sovereignty of mind; and finally

How the soul of America, in a steadily more perfect union, prevents the filing of citizen expectations down by letting us walk a ladder of hope; permitting us, together, in the public square within each of us, and collectively for the nation, to shake the past, locate the mind, and elevate the soul.

This, then - tether and balloon - is the American public square. One coin with two sides, its fullness stems from how each part defines, sharpens, and propels the other. Yet it beckons, as never before, for freer breath and fuller thought. The public square is a spacious domain. As Lincoln reminded us, we can all be "slow walkers, but never walk back."

The American Dream courses like a river. It continually pushes ahead of its time. It lets us covet a spirit of truth to overcome the downward gravities of fragmentation. As we become truer sculptors of our destiny, we all have an enduring framework for making the most of our time on earth.