The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest', one of C.L. Franklin's best-known sermons, offers a critique of the United States, a nation predicated as much on exploitation and oppression as on liberty and democracy. The eagle of the title is not only the central image of the sermon, but emblem of the American Republic, and metaphor of divine presence and protection. The piece begins as exegesis, listing, then expounding the characteristics shared by the eagle and the divine: strength, speed and vision. It subsequently slips into an apparently unrelated folk narrative of a captive eagle being raised on a poultry farm. His difference from the rest of the birds is soon evident, and the eagle is confined to a cage in order to prevent his escape. As the eagle ages, he begins to outgrow his cage, as he does all subsequent cages built for him, until finally, in pity, he is released by the farmer. The correspondence with the initial biblical tale becomes clear in a final analogy between the eagle's release and a Christian prophecy of freedom and resurrection: