Following is the transcript:

Remarks by the Honorable Henry J. Hyde September 9, 2002

It has been a year since the world watched the impossible happen, and yet it is difficult to believe that such a year has passed so quickly. The sense and feel of time have been altered, seemingly suspended even as the calendar's relentless progress has remained unaffected. On the eve of this first anniversary, we would only deceive ourselves if we were to believe that those events are now safely confined to the past. We will continue to live with them all of our lives.

Modern communications have brought us many new and wonderful things, but they have also made possible the communal experience of tragedy. In this new age, distance will no longer spare us, nor can an absence of ties insulate us from sorrow.

All who witnessed the events of September 11th still bear the scars of seeing inconceivable images and impossible events unfold in real time. But our own experiences, however painful, cannot compare with that of the innocents who bore the horror directly nor with that of their families and friends who were suddenly and violently severed from their former lives and from the touch of those deeply loved.

We Americans are a practical people. Instead of resigning ourselves to the difficulties of life, we instinctively seek to identify problems in order to focus our efforts and move toward solutions. And in the past year, we have done this. We have come to know our enemies and direct our determination and resources to uncovering their hiding places and plans. We are now engaged in designing and implementing measures to resist their ability to harm us. The challenge is an entirely new one, but one which gains in clarity with each day. I hope all of us are now aware that, in addition to our successes, we must prepare ourselves for the likelihood of failures in a struggle that may have no end.

By infusing purpose, action can thus fill many voids. But the need remains to understand what happened and to comprehend the meaning of the events of that day. Here, words give way to silence, for deep reflection is the predicate to understanding.

Our modern, rational world once promised, in time, to reveal all secrets to us. But can we still cling to that belief, now that we have been confronted with things we thought long past, vanquished and erased from the world by reason and light?

The modern world has seen many efforts to eliminate God from our lives. But we have not been able to eliminate evil. The last century was unparalleled in human history in its celebration of the savagery that human beings can wreak upon one another. We had hoped that we might escape that fate in this century, but now we know that we will not.

We have been forcibly awakened from our dreams of an earthly heaven by the bitter knowledge that evil still roams freely in our world.

We cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed with despair or fear, and neither can we permit our natural optimism to shield us from the realities of the world. If there is any useful thing to be drawn from this terrible experience, it is that we have been given an unmistakable warning that in this new century, unknown and fearsome challenges await us, challenges that will impose the severest test of our national character.

Knowing this, we have a duty to prepare ourselves to defend not only our lives and those of our children, not only our beloved country, not even our freedoms, but civilization itself. We are Rome, beset by new barbarians who are savagely motivated by their immense hatred of us, of our happiness and our success, of the promise America represents for the world. For our enemies have no aim but destruction, nothing to offer but a forced march back to a bleak and dismal past.

Theirs is a world without light, their all-encompassing hatred a repudiation of any saving grace. Their victory would impose a new Dark Age, but this time perhaps an endless one. They are enemies of the future itself.

As we resolve ourselves to our task, as we grieve for all those linked to us by tragedy, we may also see ourselves more truly and thereby understand that our great strengths are interwoven with many fragile things, and that being human, we have our faults and flaws to contend with as well. The threats we face have given us a greater sense of how rare and wonderful is the world we share and of our responsibility to protect it from the storms outside.

It is for these reasons that we remember those 3000 fellow citizens who, asking nothing other than to live their lives in peace, were brutally murdered by men without conscience or mercy. We know it is right to remember our dead and commend them to the mercy of God because, should we forget them, we would only invite new acts of terror. We remember because in Lincoln's haunting phrase "the mystic chords of memory" bind us to the victims and the heroes of September 11.

And we shall not break faith with their memory.

May those who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001 rest in the mercy of God. May those of us who remain be steadfast, courageous, and live lives worthy of their great sacrifice.