That alliterative title I owe to today’s Peggy Noonan column in the Wall Street Journal, Lessons From the Recovery of 2001. The subtitle is “Not so long ago, there were heroes on Wall Street.”

Noonan tells about how the New York Stock Exchange got itself back on its feet in only 5 days after the towers came down on Sept. 11, 2001. I don’t think I ever heard that story, but more likely it disappeared down my every growing memory-hole.

The exchange never opened that morning, and by the end of the day no one knew when it would. Downtown New York looked like a battlefield, the World Trade Center still burning. There was heavy debris on the roof of the exchange. The entire building was coated in ash. Catherine Kinney, a vice president at the NYSE, thought the facade looked “like nuclear winter.”

As interesting as the story of how the impossible technical and physical recovery feat was accomplished, that’s not all of what Ms. Noonan has to say. She says that the new generation of business leaders must restore the nation’s confidence in Wall Street in particular and the morality of American business in general.

This will, in fact, be the great work of a generation of American business leaders.

More is at stake than their standing. At stake is the standing of a free-market system that has flourished since America’s founding and made it the wealthiest nation in the history of man.

She quotes Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, making the case that business is, or should be, a high calling, a deeply serious vocation. Living up to its high calling requires a culture having a strong sense of right and wrong, “a sense of sin.” Unfortunately, as Noonan points out, the past eight months has pretty much destroyed the foundation that business needs to be a “high calling.”

To Mr. Novak, business is a vocation, a deeply serious one. But it cannot exist in a void. It requires an underlying moral edifice, a knowledge of right and wrong, “a sense of sin.” Greed is not good. Wall Street is a stage, a platform on which men and women can each day take actions that are ethical or not, constructive or not. When their actions are marked by high moral principle, they heighten their calling—they are not just “in business” but part of a noble endeavor that adds to the sum total of human happiness. The work they do strengthens the ground on which democracy and economic freedom stand. “The calling of business is to support the reality and reputation of capitalism.”

Noble. Constructive. Admirable.

When was the last time anyone thought of Wall Street like that?

It is too early to evaluate how much damage was done to our business system, but I believe Noonan’s article may contribute to the beginning of the healing process. I wish I could reasonably hope to be around to hear “the end of the story,” but the process may take decades.

Dave, who always considered his business career a calling.