America

Forsaken

By

Prophet T. E. Deckard

 

 

CHAPTER 6

The Men and Their Beliefs

These men who had carried out the mandate that they themselves had made were men of incredible fortitude. They believed that God was divinely guiding this nation to His will.

We are going to take a look at some of these men and examine exactly what they did believe. We are going to add to our listing those men who came after our forefathers through the Civil War up to modern times. It is interesting to watch the change of dedication toward God as the time of remembrance fades. Because we were not there in the days of Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, and the rest of the great men of that time, it becomes very easy to forget what they must have gone through.

They and only they, knew exactly how important the principles of God's Word were to their success or failure. The later leaders of this nation, for the most part, have long forgotten the importance of Christ being the head of this nation. Maybe through this, we can have a better understanding of what being an American is really all about. To understand a people and their culture, one must go back to the beginning and understand the heart that establishment.

John Locke (1632-1704), was an English philosopher whose writings had a profound influence on our Founding Fathers, and in turn, the writing of the Constitution. Of nearly 15,000 items of the Founding Fathers which were reviewed; including books, newspaper articles, pamphlets, monographs, etc., John Locke was the third most frequently quoted author. In his Two Treatises of Government, 1690, he cited 80 references to the Bible in the first treatise and 22 references to the Bible in the second.

John Locke elaborated on fundamental concepts such as unalienable rights, government by consent, the social compact (a constitution between the people and the government), a separation of powers, parental authority, private property and the right to resist unlawful authority.

Thomas Jefferson was strongly influenced by John Locke, to the extent that his ideas can be seen in the Declaration of Independence. Locke wrote in The Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1690:

Thus the Law of Nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men's actions, must... Be conformable to the Law of Nature, i. E. To the will of God... No human sanction can be good, or valid against it.

Laws human must be made according to the general laws of Nature, and without contradiction to any positive law of Scripture, otherwise they are ill made.

In 1689, Locke published his treatise Of Civil Government in which he asserted:

[The] great and Chief End, therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the preservation of their property....

For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker: all the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his Order, and about his Business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's Pleasure....

Those Grants God made of the World to Adam, and to Noah, and his Sons... Has given the Earth to the Children of Men, given it to Mankind in common....

God, who hath given the World to Men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best Advantage of Life and Convenience.

In addition to writing paraphrases of the books of Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians and Ephesians, John Locke wrote a seldom mentioned book titled A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity. In it he writes:

He that shall collect all the moral rules of the philosophers and compare them with those contained in the New Testament will find them to come short of the morality delivered by our Saviour and taught by His disciples: a college made up of ignorant but inspired fishermen....

Such a law of morality Jesus Christ has given in the New Testament, but by the latter of these ways, by revelation, we have from Him a full and sufficient rule for our direction, and conformable to that of reason. But the word and obligation of its precepts have their force, and are past doubt to us, by the evidence of His mission.

He was sent by God: His miracles show it; and the authority of God in His precepts can not be questioned. His morality has a sure standard, that revelation vouches, and reason can not gainsay nor question; but both together witness to come from God, the great Lawgiver.

And such a one as this, out of the New Testament, I think, they would never find, nor can anyone say is anywhere else to be found....

To one who is persuaded that Jesus Christ was sent by God to be a King and a Saviour to those who believe in Him, all His commands become principles; there needs no other proof for the truth of what He says, but that He said it; and then there needs no more but to read the inspired books to be instructed.

Locke stated:

"The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men. It has God for its author; salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture for its matter. It is all pure, all sincere; nothing too much; nothing wanting."

Peter Bulkeley (1583-1659), the Puritan leader who founded the city of Concord, Massachusetts, stated in 1651:

"We are as a city set upon a hill, in the open view of all the earth.... We profess ourselves to be a people in covenant with God, and therefore... The Lord our God... Will cry shame upon us if we walk contrary to the covenant which we have promised to walk in. If we open the mouths of men against our profession, by reason of the scandalousness of our lives, we (of all men) shall have the greater sin."

Sir William Phipps (1651-1695), the Governor of Massachusetts and American colonial administrator, professed:

"I have divers times been in danger of my life; and I have been brought to see that I owe my life to Him who has given His precious life for me. I thank God He has led me to see myself altogether unhappy without an interest in the Lord Jesus Christ, and to close heartily with Him, desiring Him to execute all His offices on my behalf. I have now, for some time, been under serious resolution, that I should avoid whatever I knew to be displeasing to God, that I should serve Him all the days of my life....

I knew that if God had a people anywhere, it was here, and I resolved to rise or fall with them; neglecting very great advantages for my worldly interests, that I might come and enjoy the ordinances of the Lord Jesus here."

Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780), was the renowned English jurist who played a leading role in forming the basis of law in America. Blackstone lectured at Oxford, and between 1765 and 1770 published his highly influential work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, which by 1775 sold more copies in America than in England.

His Commentaries, which almost served as the "Bible" of American Lawyers, set the foundation for our great legal minds, including Chief Justice John Marshall. When scholars examined nearly 15,000 items written by the Founding Fathers between the years 1760 and 1805, (including books, newspapers articles, monographs, pamphlets, etc.), It was found that Sir William Blackstone was quoted more than any other author except one.

James Madison, the "Chief Architect of the Constitution," endorsed Blackstone, saying: "I very cheerfully express my approbation of the proposed edition of Blackstone's Commentaries."

Blackstone expressed the presuppositional base for law:

Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator, for he is entirely a dependent being.... And, consequently, as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should in all points conform to his Maker's will... This will of his Maker is called the law of nature.

These laws laid down by God are the eternal immutable laws of good and evil.... This law of nature dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this...

The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the holy scriptures... [And] are found upon comparison to be really part of the original law of nature. Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these.

Blasphemy against the Almighty is denying his being or providence, or uttering contumelious reproaches on our Savior Christ. It is punished, at common law by fine and imprisonment, for Christianity is part of the laws of the land.

If [the legislature] will positively enact a thing to be done, the judges are not at liberty to reject it, for that were to set the judicial power above that of the legislature, which would be subversive of all government.

To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence, of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once to contradict the revealed Word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testament.

The preservation of Christianity as a national religion is abstracted from its own intrinsic truth, of the utmost consequence to the civil state, which a single instance will sufficiently demonstrate.

The belief of a future state of rewards and punishments, the entertaining just ideas of the main attributes of the Supreme Being, and a firm persuasion that He superintends and will finally compensate every action in human life (all which are revealed in the doctrines of our Savior, Christ), these are the grand foundations of all judicial oaths, which call God to witness the truth of those facts which perhaps may be only known to Him and the party attesting;

All moral evidences, therefore, all confidence in human veracity, must be weakened by apostasy, and overthrown by total infidelity.

Wherefore, all affronts to Christianity, or endeavors to depreciate its efficacy, in those who have once professed it, are highly deserving of censure.

Roger Sherman (1721-1793), was an American Revolutionary patriot, politician and jurist, who was the only one of the Founding Fathers to sign all four of the major founding documents: The Articles of Association 1774, The Declaration of Independence 1776, The Articles of Confederation 1777, and The Constitution of the United States 1787.

He served on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, was a member of the Continental Congress and made 138 speeches at the Constitutional Convention. Roger Sherman was also a U.S. Congressman, 1789-91, a U.S. Senator, 1791-93, (elected at the age of 70), a state senator, a self-taught lawyer, superior court judge, as well as having served as a judge in Connecticut for fourteen years. Prior to his political career he was a surveyor, merchant and shoe cobbler.

During the almost fatal crisis at the Constitutional Convention, Thursday, June 28, 1787, Sherman seconded the motion to have Dr. Benjamin Franklin's famous request, that Congress be opened with prayer every day, enacted. (A practice which continues to this day.)

The extremely heated dispute which arose at the Constitutional Convention, was over how Congress would insure that the smaller states would be equally represented in comparison with the larger states. This debate grew so serious that it began to threaten the convention itself, as some delegates had already left.

Shortly after Franklin's call for prayer, Roger Sherman made the suggestion that state representation in the Senate be equal and that state representation in the House be based on population. This historic proposal, which came to be called the "Connecticut Compromise," was adopted and is the system in use today.

Roger Sherman was also on the committee which decided the wording of the First Amendment. He was originally opposed to the First Amendment, considering it unnecessary, since Congress had no authority delegated from the Constitution in such areas.

In February 1776, Roger Sherman, along with Adams and George Wythe of Virginia, were on the committee responsible to create instructions for the embassy headed for Canada. The instructions directed:

You are further to declare that we hold sacred the rights of conscience, and may promise to the whole people, solemnly in our name, the free and undisturbed exercise of their religion. And... That all civil rights and the right to hold office were to be extended to persons of any Christian denomination.

Roger Sherman also successfully worked to have President Washington officially declare a national Thanksgiving Day holiday. His remarks were recorded in the Journals of Congress:

Mr. Sherman justified the practice of thanksgiving, on any signal event, not only as a laudable one in itself, but as warranted by a number of precedents in Holy Writ: for instance, the solemn thanksgivings and rejoicings which took place in the time of Solomon, after the building of the temple, was a case in point. This example, he thought, worthy of Christian imitation on the present occasion.

In 1788, as a member of the White Haven Congregational Church, Sherman was asked to use his expertise in revising the wording of their creed. In his own handwriting, he wrote the following:

I believe that there is one only living and true God, existing in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the same in substance equal in power and glory.

That the scriptures of the old and new testaments are a revelation from God, and a complete rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him.

That God has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, so as thereby he is not the author or approver of sin.

That he creates all things, and preserves and govern all creatures and all their actions, in a manner perfectly consistent with the freedom of will in moral agents, and the usefulness of means.

That he made man at first perfectly holy, that the first man sinned, and as he was the public head of his posterity, they all became sinners in consequence of his first transgression, are wholly indisposed to that which is good and inclined to evil, and on account of sin are liable to all the miseries of this life, to death, and to the pains of hell forever.

I believe that God having elected some of mankind to eternal life, did send his own Son to become man, die in the room and stead of sinners and thus to lay a foundation for the offer of pardon and salvation to all mankind, so as all may be saved who are willing to accept the gospel offer:

Also by his special grace and spirit, to regenerate, sanctify and enable to persevere in holiness, all who shall be saved; and to procure in consequence of their repentance and faith in himself their justification by virtue of his atonement as the only meritorious cause.

I believe a visible church to be a congregation of those who make a credible profession of their faith in Christ, and obedience to him, joined by the bond of the covenant....

I believe that the souls of believers are at their death made perfectly holy, and immediately taken to glory: that at the end of this world there will be a resurrection of the dead, and a final judgement of all mankind, when the righteous shall be publicly acquitted by Christ the Judge and admitted to everlasting life and glory, and the wicked be sentenced to everlasting punishment.

Samuel Adams (1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution." Along with his cousin John Adams, Samuel Adams labored over 20 years as a patriot and leader. He instigated the Boston Tea Party, signed the Declaration of Independence, called for the first Continental Congress and served as a member of Congress until 1781.

He helped draft the Massachusetts Constitution, and served as Lieutenant Governor, under Governor John Hancock. He later became the Governor of Massachusetts.

Samuel Adams formed the Committees of Correspondence, which were largely responsible for the unity and cohesion of the Colonists preceding the Revolution. The original Committee, formed in Boston, had three goals: (1) To delineate the rights of Colonists as men, (2) To detail how these rights had been violated, (3) To publicize these rights and the violations thereof throughout the Colonies. His reports were spread like fire through the towns and parishes, many times by an early pony express system.

His work, The Rights of the Colonists, was circulated in 1772:

The right to freedom being the gift of the Almighty...

The rights of the colonists as Christians... May be best understood by reading and carefully studying the institution of The Great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament.

On September 7, 1774, on the second day of the congressional session, it was Samuel Adams who proposed that the meeting be opened with prayer, in spite of the various Christian sects represented:

Christian men, who had come together for solemn deliberation in the hour of their extremity, to say there was so wide a difference in their religious belief that they could not, as one man, bow the knee in prayer to the Almighty, whose advice and assistance they hoped to obtain.

As the Declaration of Independence was being signed, 1776, he declared:

"We have this day restored the Sovereign to Whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven and from the rising to the setting of the sun, let His kingdom come."

He further stated:

"A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.

Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.

He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man.... The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people."

On October 4, 1790, Samuel Adams wrote to his cousin, John Adams, who was then the Vice-President:

Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age, by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, of inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity and universal philanthropy, and, in subordination to these great principles, the love of their country; of instructing them in the art of self-government without which they never can act a wise part in the government of societies, great or small; in short, of leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system.

Samuel Adams, in 1794, while serving as Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, addressed the state legislature upon the death of Governor John Hancock:

In the supposed state of nature, all men are equally bound by the laws of nature, or to speak more properly, the laws of the Creator: They are imprinted by the finger of God on the heart of man. Thou shall do no injury to thy neighbor, is the voice of nature and reason, and it is confirmed by written revelation.

Adams declared:

"I conceive we cannot better express ourselves than by humbly supplicating the Supreme Ruler of the world....

That the confusions that are and have been among the nations may be overruled by the promoting and speedily bringing in the holy and happy period when the kingdoms of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ may be everywhere established, and the people willingly bow to the sceptre of Him who is the Prince of Peace."

In addressing the young man whom his daughter intended to marry, Adams remarked:

"I could say a thousand things to you, if I had leisure. I could dwell on the importance of piety and religion, of industry and frugality, of prudence, economy, regularity and even Government, all of which are essential to the well being of a family. But I have not time. I cannot however help repeating piety, because I think it indispensable. Religion in a family is at once its brightest ornament and its best security."

Samuel Langdon (1723-1797), the president of Harvard University, was a member of the New Hampshire Convention to ratify the U.S. Constitution in 1788, as well as an original member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In May of 1775, Harvard President Langdon was invited to give an address to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts. In it he stated:

"We have rebelled against God. We have lost the true spirit of Christianity, though we retain the outward profession and form of it.... By many, the Gospel is corrupted into a superficial system of moral philosophy, little better than ancient Platonism....

My brethren, let us repent and implore the divine mercy. Let us amend our ways and our doings, reform everything that has been provoking the Most High, and thus endeavor to obtain the gracious interpositions of providence for our deliverance....

May the Lord hear us in this day of trouble.... We will rejoice in His salvation, and in the name of our God, we will set up our banners!"

William Livingston (1723-1790), one of the signers of the Constitution of the United States of America, being 61 years old at the time, was also a member of the first and second Continental Congresses. He served as the first Governor of New Jersey, and was re-elected for fourteen years. Livingston had previously held the rank of a brigadier general in the militia.

Growing up on the frontier around Albany, Livingston grew up with missionaries among the Mohawks. He graduated first in his class from Yale and went on to study law. While living in New York, he published articles defending the faith, many of which were published in The Independent Reflector, such as No. 46:

I believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, without any foreign comments or human explanations... I believe that he who feareth God and worketh righteousness will be accepted of Him.... I believe that the virulence of some... Proceeds not from their affection to Christianity, which is founded on too firm a basis to be shaken by the freest inquiry, and the Divine authority of which I sincerely believe without receiving a farthing for saying so.

In 1768, he said:

"The land we posses is the gift of heaven to our fathers, and Divine Providence seems to have decreed it to our latest posterity."

On March 16, 1776, as recorded in the Journal of Congress, General William Livingston presented this resolution in Congress, which passed without dissent:

"We earnestly recommend that Friday, the 17th day of May next, be observed by the colonies as a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer, that we may with united hearts confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and by a sincere repentance and amendment of life appease God's righteous displeasure, and through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ obtain His pardon and forgiveness."

In a letter, Livingston wrote:

If the history (New Testament) be not true, then all the whole laws of nature were changed; all the motives and incentives to human actions that ever had obtained in this world have been entirely inverted; the wickedest men in the world have taken the greatest pains and endured the greatest hardship and misery to invent, practice, and propagate the most holy religion that ever was.

William Linn on May 1, 1789, was elected by the United States House of Representatives as its chaplain and was appropriated five hundred dollars from the Federal treasury to pay his salary. Being a respected minister in New York City, and the father of the famous poet John Blair Linn (1777-1804), William Linn alleged:

Let my neighbor once persuade himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck. If there be no God, there is no law, no future account; government then is the ordinance of man only, and we cannot be subject for conscience sake.

George Mason (1725-1792), was a famous American Revolutionary statesman and delegate from Virginia to the Constitutional Convention. He was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, a lawyer, judge, political philosopher and planter. He was the richest man in Virginia, owning 15,000 acres in Virginia and 80,000 acres in the Ohio area. George Mason was the author of the Virginia Constitution and the Virginia Bill of Rights.

He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of the United States, but refused to sign the Constitution as it did not sufficiently limit the government's power from infringing on the rights of citizens. George Mason disapproved strongly of the slave trade and mortally hated paper money. He disliked the idea of a strong federal government as he feared it would usurp the sovereignty of the individual states.

He is called the "Father of the Bill of Rights," as he insisted that Congress add the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments), to the Constitution. His influence has gone worldwide, as virtually all succeeding constitutions have incorporated the pattern he set forth.

The first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, limiting the power of the government, are practically his and may be found expressed in the Virginia Bill of Rights of June 12, 1776, in which he wrote:

Article XVI That Religion, or the Duty which we owe our Creator, and the Manner of discharging it, can be directed only by Reason and Convictions, not by Force or Violence; and therefore all Men are equally entitled to the free exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience; and that it is the mutual Duty of all to practice Christian Forbearance, Love, and Charity towards each other.

Mason, stated before the General Court of Virginia that "The laws of nature are the laws of God, whose authority can be superseded by no power on earth."

On August 22, 1787, Mason, one of the largest plantation owners in Virginia, stated his views on national accountability during the debates of the Constitutional Convention:

"Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgement of heaven upon a country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins, by national calamities."

William Samuel Johnson (1727-1819), one of the signers of the Constitution of the United States, was a distinguished lawyer, having received an honorary doctorate in civil law from Oxford in 1766. He was a delegate to the Stamp Act Convention, a Commissioner to England and a member of the Continental Congress. He also served as a state representative, a U.S. Senator and a Connecticut Supreme Court Justice.

He was the son of the well known Anglican minister, Samuel Johnson, President of Columbia College from 1787-1800. Johnson's great grandfather, Robert Johnson, came to America in 1638, in order To assist in founding a "Godly Commonwealth" at New Haven.

William Samuel Johnson, as president of Columbia University, (formerly King's College), gave these profound remarks to the first graduating class after the Revolutionary War:

"You this day, gentlemen, assume new characters, enter into new relations, and consequently incur new duties. You have, by the favor of Providence and the attention of friends, received a public education, the purpose whereof hath been to qualify you the better to serve your Creator and your country....

Your first great duties, you are sensible, are those you owe to Heaven, to your Creator and Redeemer. Let these be ever present to your minds, and exemplified in your lives and conduct.

Imprint deep upon your minds the principles of piety towards God, and a reverence and fear of His holy name. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and its consummation is everlasting felicity. Possess yourselves of just and elevated notions of the Divine character, attributes, and administration, and of the end and dignity of your own immortal nature as it stands related to Him.

Reflect deeply and often upon those relations. Remember that it is in God you live and move and have your being, that in the language of David He is about your bed and about your path and spieth out all your ways, that there is not a thought in your hearts, nor a word upon your tongues, but lo! He knoweth them altogether, and that he will one day call you to a strict account for all your conduct in this mortal life.

Remember, too, that you are the redeemed of the Lord, that you are bought with a price, even the inestimable price of the precious blood of the Son of God. Adore Jehovah, therefore, as your God and your Judge. Love, fear, and serve Him as your Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Acquaint yourselves with Him in His word and holy ordinances.

Make Him your friend and protector and your felicity is secured both here and hereafter. And with respect to particular duties to Him, it is your happiness that you are well assured that he best serves his Maker, who does most good to his country and to mankind.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an outstanding orator, author and leader in Great Britain during the time of the Revolutionary War. In his work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, he wrote in 1790:

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.

On January 9, 1795, in a letter to William Smith, Burke made the famous statement:

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke also wrote:

What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without restraint.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites....

Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Richard Stockton (1730-1781), a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a member of the Continental Congress, 1776, an associate justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, 1774-76, as well as a member of the Executive Council of New Jersey, 1768-76.

His son, Richard, was a U.S. Senator, 1796-99, and a U.S. Congressman, 1813-15. Another son, Robert, served with prominence as a U.S. Naval officer in the War of 1812, helped freed slaves found the country of Liberia, West Africa in 1821, and conquered California, proclaiming it a U.S. Territory, on August 17, 1846. Robert also served as a U.S. Senator, 1851-53, and was honored when Stockton, California, was named after him.

In his will, the elder Richard Stockton wrote:

As my children will have frequent occasion of perusing this instrument, and may probably be peculiarly impressed with the last words of their father, I think proper here, not only to subscribe to the entire belief of the great leading doctrine of the Christian religion... But also in the heart of a father's affection, to charge and exhort them to remember "that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794), a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was also a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, a delegate to the First Continental Congress and a U.S. Senator. On November 1, 1777, as recorded in the Journals of Congress, Richard Henry Lee along with the committee of Samuel Adams and General Daniel Roberdeau, recommended a resolution setting apart:

Thursday, the 18th of December next, for solemn thanksgiving and praise, that with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine Benefactor; and that, together with their sincere acknowledgments and offerings, they may join the penitent confession of their manifold sins, whereby they had forfeited every favor, and their humble and earnest supplication that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remenberance.

John Dickinson (1732-1808), was not only a signer of the Constitution of the United States of America, but was a member of the Continental Congress and the writer of the first draft of The Articles of Confederation. He served as the President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, in addition to being an accomplished lawyer, planter and state legislator.

He was the founder of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1773, and known for giving generously to the Friends (Quakers) in Philadelphia for their educational pursuits.

Dickinson wrote persuasive letters regarding the soundness of Christian evidences and the authority of Scripture. He campaigned for the passage of the Constitution by writing a series of letters which he signed "Fabius." This greatly contributed to Delaware and Pennsylvania being the first two states to ratify the Constitution.

John Dickinson is best remembered as "The Penman of the Revolution." His popular pamphlets gained wide circulation and became very influential in the cause of freedom. Some of his most famous ones were: Petition to the King, 1771, The Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, 1774, and The Declaration of the cause of taking up arms, 1775. His most stirring pamphlet was his Letter from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Within it, he states:

But while Divine Providence, that gave me existence in a land of freedom, permits my head to think, my lips to speak, and my hand to move, I shall so highly and gratefully value the blessing received as to take care that my silence and inactivity shall not give my implied assent to my act, degrading my brethren and myself from the birthright, wherewith heaven itself "hath made us free."...

I pray GOD that he may be pleased to inspire you and your posterity, to the latest ages, with a spirit of which I have an idea, that I find a difficulty to express.

I express it in the best manner I can, I mean a spirit that shall so guide you that it will be impossible to determine whether an American's character is most distinguishable for his loyalty to his Sovereign, his duty to his mother country, his love of freedom, or his affection for his native soil....

But, above all, let us implore the protection of that infinitely good and gracious Being [Proverbs 8: 15] "by whom kings reign, and princes decree justice...."

A communication of her rights in general, and particularly of that great one, the foundation of all the rest that their property, acquired with so much pain and hazard, should be disposed of by none but themselves or to use the beautiful and emphatic language of the sacred scriptures [Micah 4: 4] "that they should sit every man under his vine, and under his fig-tree, and NONE SHOULD MAKE THEM AFRAID...."

But whatever kind of minister he is, that attempts to innovate a single iota in the privileges of these colonies, him I hope you will undauntedly oppose; and that you will never suffer yourselves to be cheated or frightened into any unworthy obsequiousness.

On such emergencies you may surely, without presumption, believe that ALMIGHTY GOD himself will look upon your righteous contest with gracious approbation.

In the Continental Congress of 1776, John Dickinson courageously bid farewell to the government of England:

The happiness of these Colonies has been, during the whole course of this fatal controversy, our first wish; their reconciliation with Great Britain our next: ardently have we prayed for the accomplishment of both.

But if we must renounce the one or the other, we humbly trust in the mercies of the Supreme Governor of the universe that we shall not stand condemned before His throne if our choice is determined by that law of self-preservation which his Divine wisdom has seen fit to implant in the hearts of His creatures.

John Dickinson met with the other delegates from Pennsylvania less than two months before the Declaration of Independence was signed to suggest requirements for the members of the Convention to subscribe to before being seated. One of the recommended stipulations was the following declaration:

I do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ his Eternal Son the true God, and in the Holy Spirit, one God blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by Divine inspiration.

John Adams (1735-1826), was the 2nd President of the United States of America and the first president to live in the White House. He had also served as the Vice-President for eight years under President George Washington. The Library of Congress and the Department of the Navy were established under his presidency.

A graduate of Harvard, he became a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He is distinguished for having personally urged Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration, as well as having recommended George Washington as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. He was the main author of the Constitution of Massachusetts in 1780.

Adams was the U.S. Minister to France, and, along with John Jay and Benjamin Franklin, helped negotiate the treaty with Great Britain ending the Revolutionary War. Later he was U.S. Minister to Britain. During this time he greatly influenced the American states to ratify the Constitution by writing a three volume work entitled, A Defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States.

In his diary entry dated February 22, 1756, Adams wrote:

Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited! Every member would be obliged in conscience, to temperance, frugality, and industry; to justice, kindness, and charity towards his fellow men; and to piety, love, and reverence toward Almighty God... What a Eutopia, what a Paradise would this region be.

Adams wrote in his notes for, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, February of 1765:

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

In his diary, Sunday, February 9, 1772, John Adams wrote:

"If I would go to Hell for an eternal moment or so, I might be knighted" Shakespeare.

A Master requires of all who seek his favour an implicit resignation to his will and humor, and these require that he be soothed, flattered, and assisted in his vices and follies, perhaps the blackest crimes that men can commit.

The first thought of this will produce in a mind... A soliloquy, something like my [Shakespeare] motto as if he should say The Minister of State or the Governor would promote my interest, would advance me to places of honour and profit, would raise me to titles and dignities that will be perpetuated in my family, in a word would make the fortune of me and my posterity forever, if I would but comply with his desires and become his instruments to promote his measures....

We see every day that our imaginations are so strong and our reason so weak, the charms of wealth and power are so enchanting, and the belief of future punishments so faint that men find ways to persuade themselves to believe any absurdity, to submit to any prostitution, rather than forego their wishes and desires. Their reason becomes at last an eloquent advocate on the side of their passions, and [they] bring themselves to believe that black is white, that vice is virtue, that folly is wisdom and eternity a moment....

I dread the consequences. [A master] requires of me such compliances, such horrid crimes, such a sacrifice of my honour, my conscience, my friends, my country, my God, as the Scriptures inform us must be punished with nothing less than Hell fire, eternal torment. And this is so unequal a price to pay for the honours and emoluments in the power of a minister or Governor, that I cannot prevail upon myself to think of it. The duration of future punishment terrifies me. If I could but deceive myself so far as to think eternity a moment only, I could comply and be promoted.

On July 4, 1774, Adams wrote to his wife Abigail from Patten's at Arundel:

We went to meeting at Wells and had the pleasure of hearing my friend upon "Be not partakers in other men's sins. Keep yourselves pure..."

We... Took our horses to the meeting in the afternoon and heard the minister again upon "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." There is great pleasure in hearing sermons so serious, so clear, so sensible and instructive as these...

That same year, Adams wrote a commentary titled, Novanglus: A History of the Dispute with America, from its Origin, in 1754, to the Present Time. In it, he admonished the clergy to speak out regarding public errors, saying:

It is the duty of the clergy to accommodate their discourses to the times, to preach against such sins as are most prevalent, and recommend such virtues as are most wanted. For example, if exorbitant ambition and venality are predominant, ought they not to warn their hearers against those vices? If public spirit is much wanted, should they not inculcate this great virtue?

If the rights and duties of Christian magistrates and subjects are disputed, should they not explain them, show their nature, ends, limitations, and restrictions, how much soever it may move the gall of Massachusetts.

On June 21, 1776, he wrote:

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.

The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure, than they have it now, they may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.

On July 1, 1776, he profoundly spoke at the Continental Congress to the delegates from the Thirteen Colonies:

"Before God, I believe the hour has come. My judgement approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it. All that I have, and all that I am, and all that I hope in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it. And I leave off as I began, that live or die, survive or perish, I am for the Declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment. Independence now, and Independence for ever!"

On July 3, 1776, the day following the approval by Congress of the Declaration of Independence, Adams wrote to his wife Abigail regarding the gravity of the decision:

It is the will of heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever. It may be the will of heaven that America shall suffer calamities still more wasting and distresses yet more dreadful. If this is to be the case, it will have this good effect, at least: it will inspire us with many virtues which we have not, and correct many errors, follies and vices, which threaten to disturb, dishonor and destroy us... The furnace of affliction produces refinements in states, as well as individuals.

On June 2, 1778, John Adams made this journal entry while in Paris:

In vain are Schools, Academies, and Universities instituted, if loose Principles and licentious habits are impressed upon Children in their earliest years.... The Vices and Examples of the Parents cannot be concealed from the Children. How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers?

In concern for his sons, he advised his wife Abigail to "Let them revere nothing but Religion, Morality and Liberty."

John Adams, in a letter written from Holland on July 12, 1782, twice referred to politics as "A divine science."

In retorting Thomas Paine's assertions on July 26, 1796, then Vice President Adams stated in his diary:

The Christian religion is, above all the Religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of Wisdom, Virtue, Equity, and Humanity. Let the Blackguard Paine say what he will; it is Resignation to God, it is Goodness itself to Man.

On March 4, 1797, in his Inaugural Address, President John Adams declared:

"And may that Being who is supreme over all, the Patron of Order, the Fountain of Justice, and the Protector in all ages of the world of virtuous liberty, continue His blessings upon this nation."

On October 11, 1798, President Adams stated in his address to the military:

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

On March 6, 1799, President Adams called for a National Fast Day:

"As no truth is more clearly taught in the Volume of Inspiration, nor any more fully demonstrated by the experience of all ages, than that a deep sense and a due acknowledgment of the growing providence of a Supreme Being and of the accountableness of men to Him as the searcher of hearts and righteous distributer of rewards and punishments are conducive equally to the happiness of individuals and to the well-being of communities....

I have thought proper to recommend, and I hereby recommend accordingly, that Thursday, the twenty-fifth day of April next, be observed throughout the United States of America as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer;

That the citizens on that day abstain, as far as may be, from their secular occupation, and devote the time to the sacred duties of religion, in public and in private;

That they call to mind our numerous offenses against the most high God, confess them before Him with the sincerest penitence, implore his pardoning mercy, through the Great Mediator and Redeemer, for our past transgressions, and that through the grace of His Holy Spirit, we may be disposed and enabled to yield a more suitable obedience to his righteous requisitions in time to come; that He would interpose to arrest the progress of that impiety and licentiousness in principle and practice so offensive to Himself and so ruinous to mankind;

That He would make us deeply sensible that 'righteousness exalteth a nation but sin is a reproach to any people.' (Proverbs 14: 34)"

On November 2, 1800, Adams became the first president to move into the White House. As he was writing a letter to his wife, he composed a beautiful prayer, which was later engraved upon the mantel in the state dining room:

"I pray Heaven to bestow THE BEST OF BLESSINGS ON THIS HOUSE and All that shall hereafter Inhabit it, May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof."

In a letter to Judge F. A. Van der Kemp, February 16, 1809, he wrote:

The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation.... [God] ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe.... [Which is] to be the great essential principle of morality, and consequently all civilization.

He penned these words on August 28, 1811:

Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not only of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all governments and in all the combinations of human society.

In a letter to a Mr. Warren, Adams expounded:

[This] Form of Government... Is productive of every Thing which is great and excellent among Men. But its Principles are as easily destroyed, as human nature is corrupted.... A Government is only to be supported by pure Religion or Austere Morals. Private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.

In another letter to Judge Van der Kemp, December 27, 1816, he said:

As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on the opposite sides of several major political issues, many times in heated debates. John Adams, the 2nd President, was succeeded in office by Thomas Jefferson, who became the 3rd President. So strong were his feelings against Jefferson at the time, that Adams even left Washington, D. C. To avoid being at Jefferson's Inauguration.

Later in life, though, the two became the best of friends. Their correspondence reveals, not only their faith, but also their friendship.  Adams and Jefferson both died on the same day -- July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after they both had signed the Declaration of Independence. Once hardened political opponents, John Adams' last words were: "Thank God, Jefferson lives!"

On June 28, 1813, in a letter to Jefferson, Adams wrote:

The general principles, on which the Fathers achieved independence, were the only Principles in which that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite.... And what were these general Principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity, in which all these Sects were United: And the general Principles of English and American Liberty, in which all those young Men United, and which had United all Parties in America, in Majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her Independence.

Now I will avow, that I then believe, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God; and that those Principles of Liberty, are as unalterable as human Nature and our terrestrial, mundane System.

In another letter to Thomas Jefferson, he wrote:

Have you ever found in history, one single example of a Nation thoroughly corrupted that was afterwards restored to virtue?... And without virtue, there can be no political liberty.... Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry?

Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?... I believe no effort in favour of virtue is lost...

In a letter to Jefferson, December 25, 1813, Adams wrote:

I have examined all religions, as well as my narrow sphere, my straightened means, and my busy life, would allow; and the result is that the Bible is the best Book in the world. It contains more philosophy than all the libraries I have seen.

In a letter dated November 4, 1816, he said:

The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount contain my religion...

On April 19, 1817, he wrote to Jefferson saying:

Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company...

...The most abandoned scoundrel that ever existed, never yet wholly extinguished his Conscience and while Conscience remains, there is some religion.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of America's most instrumental statesman in forming our nation, was also an author, scientist and printer. He served as a diplomat to France and England, was the President (Governor) of Pennsylvania and founded the University of Pennsylvania, in addition to having signed the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.

Benjamin Franklin was the 15th of 17 children and, because his father's profession of candle-making did not provide enough funds for a formal education, he began his apprenticeship as a printer at the age of twelve.  He initially gained wide acclaim as a literary genius through the annual publication of his book, Poor Richard's Almanac (from 1732-1757).

In 1748, as Pennsylvania's Governor, Franklin proposed Pennsylvania's first Fast Day:

It is the duty of mankind on all suitable occasions to acknowledge their dependence on the Divine Being... [That] Almighty God would mercifully interpose and still the rage of war among the nations... [And that] He would take this province under His protection, confound the designs and defeat the attempts of its enemies, and unite our hearts and strengthen our hands in every undertaking that may be for the public good, and for our defence and security in this time of danger.

On June 6, 1753, Franklin wrote from Philadelphia to Joseph Huey:

I can only show my gratitude for these mercies from God, by a readiness to help his other children and my brethren. For I do not think that thanks and compliments, though repeated weekly, can discharge our real obligations to each other, and much less those to our Creator.

You will see in this my notion of good works, that I am far from expecting to merit heaven by them. By heaven we understand a state of happiness, infinite in degree, and eternal in duration. I can do nothing to deserve such rewards.... Even the mixed, imperfect pleasures we enjoy in this world, are rather from God's goodness than our merit; how much more such happiness of heaven!

For my part I have not the vanity to think I deserve it... But content myself in submitting to the will and disposal of that God who made me, who has hitherto preserved and blessed me, and in whose fatherly goodness I may well confide, that he will never make me miserable; and that even the afflictions I may at any time suffer shall tend to my benefit.

The faith you mention has certainly its use in the world. I do not desire to see it diminished, nor would I endeavor to lessen it in any man. But I wish it were more productive of good works, than I have generally seen it; I mean real good works; works of kindness, charity, mercy, and public spirit; not holiday-keeping, sermon-reading or hearing; performing church ceremonies, or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments...

 The worship of God is a duty; the hearing and reading of sermons may be useful; but, if men rest in hearing and praying, as too many do, it is as if a tree should value itself on being watered and putting forth leaves, though it never produce any fruit.

Benjamin Franklin founded the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751. In documenting the undertaking, Franklin records a  “Some Account of the Pennsylvania Hospital” from its first rise, to the beginning of the fifth month, called May 1754. In it he writes:

It would be a neglect of that justice which is due to the physicians and surgeons of this hospital, not to acknowledge that their care and skill, and their punctual and regular attendance, under the Divine Blessing, has been a principal means of advancing this charity to the flourishing state in which we have now the pleasure to view it.

Relying on the continuance of the Favour of Heaven, upon the future endeavors of all who may be concerned in the management of the institution, for its further advancement, we close this account with the abstract of a sermon, preached before the Governors...

The inscription which Franklin composed for the cornerstone of the Pennsylvania Hospital reads: In the year of Christ, 1755:... This building, by the bounty of the Government and of many private persons, was piously founded, for the relief of the sick and miserable. May the God of mercies bless the undertaking!

In 1757, Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay, titled The Ways to Wealth, while sailing to England to serve as Colonial Agent. In it he writes:

This doctrine, my friends, is reason and wisdom; but after all, do not depend too much upon your own industry, and frugality, and prudence, though excellent things, for they may all be blasted without the blessing of Heaven; and therefore, ask that blessing humbly, and be not uncharitable to those that at the present seem to want [lack] it, but comfort and help them. Remember, Job suffered, and was afterwards prosperous.

In his autobiography, Franklin comments on his religious views:

 I had been religiously educated as a Presbyterian; and though some of the dogmas of that persuasion, such as the eternal decrees of God, election, reprobation, etc., Appeared to me unintelligible, others doubtful, and I early absented myself from the public assemblies of the sect, Sunday being my studying day, I was never without religious principles.

I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the world, and governed it by his Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter. These I esteemed the essentials of every religion; and, being to be found in all the religions we had in our country, I respected them all, though with different degrees of respect, as I found them more or less mixed with other articles, which without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, served principally to divide us, and make us unfriendly to one another.

This respect of all... Induced me to avoid all discourse that might tend to lessen the good opinion another might have of his own religion; and as our province increased in people, and new places of worship were continually wanted, and generally erected by voluntary contribution, my mite for such purpose, whatever might be the sect, was never refused.

Though I seldom attended any public worship, I had still an opinion of its propriety, and of its utility when rightly conducted, and I regularly paid my annual subscription for the support of the only Presbyterian minister or meeting we had in Philadelphia. He used to visit me sometimes as a friend, and admonish me to attend his administration.

Franklin wrote in a letter to the French ministry, March 1778:

Whoever shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world.

A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district all studied and appreciated as they merit are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty.

In his pamphlet titled Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, written to Europeans who were considering a move to this country or intending to send their young people to seek their fortune in this land of opportunity, Franklin wrote:

Hence bad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be a comfortable consideration to parents. To this may be truly added, that serious religion, under its various denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practised.

Atheism is unknown there; Infidelity rare and secret; so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel.

And the Divine Being seems to have manifested his approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness with which the different sects treat each other; by the remarkable prosperity with which he has been pleased to favor the whole country.

In a letter dated April 17, 1787, Benjamin Franklin expounded:

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

On March 9, 1790, he wrote to Ezra Stiles, President of Yale University:

Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, the Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His Providence. That He ought to be worshipped.

That the most acceptable service we render to Him is in doing good to His other Children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound Religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever Sect I meet with them.

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, is the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see.

He listed topics and doctrines, which he considered of vital importance, to be shared and preached:

That there is one God Father of the Universe.

That He [is] infinitely good, powerful and wise.

That He is omnipresent.

That He ought to be worshipped, by adoration, prayer and thanksgiving both in publick and private.

That He loves such of His creatures as love and do good to others: and will reward them either in this world or hereafter.

That men's minds do not die with their bodies, but are made more happy or miserable after this life according to their actions.

That virtuous men ought to league together to strengthen the interest of virtue, in the world: and so strengthen themselves in virtue.

That knowledge and learning is to be cultivated, and Ignorance dissipated.

That none but the virtuous are wise. That man's perfection is in virtue.

Patrick Henry (1736-1799), was an American Revolutionary leader and orator, who spoke the now famous phrase, "Give me Liberty or give me death!" He was Commander-in-Chief of the Virginia Militia, a member of the Continental Congress, a member of the Virginia General Assembly and House of Burgesses, and he helped write the Constitution of the State of Virginia. He was the five-time Governor of the State of Virginia, (being the only governor in United States history to be elected and re-elected five times).

Patrick Henry was offered numerous positions by President George Washington and Congress, but declined them all, including: Secretary of State, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, U.S. Minister to Spain, U.S. Minister to France and U.S. Senator.

Prior to the Revolution, in 1768, Henry rode for miles on horseback to a trial in Spottsylvania County. He entered the rear of a courtroom where three Baptist ministers were being tried for having preached without the sanction of the Episcopalian Church. In the midst of the proceedings, he interrupted:

"May it please your lordships, what did I hear? Did I hear an expression that these men, whom you worships are about to try for misdemeanor, are charged with preaching the gospel of the Son of God?"

On March 23, 1775, the Second Virginia Convention had been moved from the House of Burgesses to St. John's Church in Richmond, because of the mounting tension between the Colonies and the British Crown. It was here that Patrick Henry delivered his fiery patriotic oration:

"For my own part I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery... It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country...

Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt....

An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!.... Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the Holy cause of Liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.

Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God who presides over the destiines of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battle for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

On June 12, 1776, as a member of the committee chosen to draft the first constitution of the commonwealth of Virginia, Henry helped champion article 16 of the Virginia Bill of Rights:

That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.

He boldly declared:

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here."

Once interrupted while engaged in Bible reading, Henry held up his Bible and said:

The Bible is worth all other books which have ever been printed.

John Hancock (1737-1793), an American merchant and Revolutionary leader, was the president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts. He became well known for having been the first member of the Continental Congress to sign the Declaration of Independence.

On April 15, 1775, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts declared “A Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer,” signed by the President of the Provincial Congress, John Hancock:

In circumstances dark as these, it becomes us, as Men and Christians, to reflect that, whilst every prudent Measure should be taken to ward off the impending Judgements.... All confidence must be withheld from the Means we use; and reposed only on that GOD who rules in the Armies of Heaven, and without whose Blessing the best human Counsels are but Foolishness and all created Power Vanity;

It is the Happiness of his Church that, when the Powers of Earth and Hell combine against it... That the Throne of Grace is of the easiest access and its Appeal thither is graciously invited by the Father of Mercies, who has assured it, that when his Children ask Bread he will not give them a Stone....

RESOLVED, That it be, and hereby is recommended to the good People of this Colony of all Denominations, that THURSDAY the Eleventh Day of May next be set apart as a Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer... To confess the sins... To implore the Forgiveness of all our Transgression...

And a blessing on the Husbandry, Manufactures, and other lawful Employments of this People; and especially that the union of the American Colonies in Defence of their Rights (for hitherto we desire to thank Almighty GOD) may be preserved and confirmed.... And that AMERICA man soon behold a gracious Interposition of Heaven. By Order of the [Massachusetts] Provincial Congress, John Hancock, President.

On November 8, 1783, John Hancock, Esquire Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, issued “A Proclamation for a Day of Thanksgiving,” celebrating the Revolutionary War:

Whereas... These United States are not only happily rescued from the Danger and Calamities to which they have been so long exposed, but their Freedom, Sovereignty and Independence ultimately acknowledged.

And whereas... The Interposition of Divine Providence in our Favor hath been most abundantly and most graciously manifested, and the Citizens of these United States have every Reason for Praise and Gratitude to the God of their salvation.

Impressed therefore with an exalted Sense of the Blessings by which we are surrounded, and of our entire Dependence on that Almighty Being from whose Goodness and Bounty they are derived;

I do by and with the Advice of the Council appoint Thursday the Eleventh Day of December next (the Day recommended by the Congress to all the States) to be religiously observed as a Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer, that all the People may then assemble to celebrate... That he hath been pleased to continue to us the Light of the Blessed Gospel;... That we also offer up fervent Supplications... To cause pure Religion and Virtue to flourish... And to fill the World with his glory.

Samuel Chase (1741-1811), who was appointed a Justice on the United States Supreme Court by George Washington, was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence and later served as the Chief Justice of the State of Maryland. In the case of Runkel v. Winemiller, 1799, Justice Chase gave the courts opinion:

"Religion is of general and public concern, and on its support depend, in great measure, the peace and good order of government, the safety and happiness of the people.

By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion; and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed upon the same equal footing, and are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty."

In 1799, a dispute arose over whether Thomas M'Creery, an Irish emigrant, had in fact become naturalized as an American citizen, and thereby able to leave an estate to a relative still living in Ireland. The court decided in M'Creery's favor based on a certificate executed before Justice Chase:

"Thomas M'Creery, in order to become... Naturalized according to the Act of Assembly... On the 30th of September, 1795, took the oath... Before the Honorable Samuel Chase, Esquire, then being the Chief Judge of the State of Maryland... And did then and there receive from the said Chief Judge, a certificate thereof...:

'Maryland; I, Samuel Chase, Chief Judge of the State of Maryland, do hereby certify all whom it may concern, that... Personally appeared before me Thomas M'Creery, and did repeat and subscribe a declaration of his belief in the Christian Religion, and take the oath required by the Act of Assembly of this State, entitled, An Act for Naturalization.'"

John Langdon (1741-1819), was a signer of the Constitution of the United States of America, a U.S. Senator, the President (Governor) of New Hampshire, as well as a merchant and soldier. John Langdon, a sixth generation American, was the first citizen of considerable wealth to put himself and his fortune in jeopardy during the Revolution. He not only supplied arms and money to the Continental Army, but fought as a colonel in the militia as well.

Langdon considered slothfulness the same as infidelity, as he stated in a speech before Congress:

"There was evidence in New Hampshire of an "infidel age" in which the indolent, extravagant and wicked may divide the blessings of life with the industrious, the prudent and the virtuous."

As President (Governor) of the State of New Hampshire, John Langdon issued A Proclamation for a Day of Public Fasting and Prayer on February 21, 1786:

Vain is the acknowledgement of a Supreme Ruler of the Universe, unless such acknowledgements influence our practice, and call forth those expressions of homage and adoration that are due to his character and providential government, agreeably to the light of nature, enforced by revelation, and countenanced by the practice of civilized nations, in humble and fervent application to the throne for needed mercies, and gratitude for favors received.

It having been the laudable practice of this State, at the opening of the Spring, to set apart a day for such denomination, to assemble together on said day, in their respective places of public worship;

That the citizens of this State may with one heart and voice, penitently confess their manifold sins and transgressions, and fervently implore the divine benediction, that a true spirit of repentance and humiliation may be poured out upon all orders and degrees of men, and a compeat and universal reformation take place:

That he who gave wisdom and fortitude in the scenes of battle, would give prudence and direction to extricate us from succeeding embarrassments, build up, support and establish this rising Empire;

Particularly, that he would be pleased to bless the great Council of the United-States of America, and direct their deliberations to the wise and best determinations, succeed our embassies at foreign Courts, bless our Allies, and national Benefactors:

That he would always be pleased, to keep this State under his most holy protection: that all in the legislature, executive and judicial departments, may be guided and supported by wisdom, integrity and firmness, that all the people through this State, and through the land, may be animated by a true estimation of their privileges, and taught to secure, by their patriotism and virtue, what they have acquired by their valour:

That a spirit of emulation, industry, economy and frugality, may be diffused abroad, and that we may all be disposed to lead quiet and peaceable lives, in all godliness and honesty:

That he would be graciously pleased to bless us in the seasons of the year, and cause the earth to yield her increase, prosper our husbandry, merchandise, navigation and fishery, and all the labour of our hands, and give us to hear the voice of health in our habitations, and enjoy plenty of our borders:

That unanimity, peace and harmony, may be promoted and continue, and a spirit of universal philanthropy pervade the land: that he would be pleased to smile upon the means of education, and bless every institution of useful knowledge;

And above all, that he would rain down righteousness upon the earth, revive religion, and spread abroad the knowledge of the true GOD, the Saviour of man, throughout the world.

And all servile labour and recreations are forbidden on said day.

GIVEN at the Council-Chamber in Portsmouth, this twenty-first day of February, in the year of our LORD, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-six, and in the tenth year of the Sovereignty and Independence of the United States of America.

John Langdon, as President (Governor) of New Hampshire, made this official Proclamation for a General Thanksgiving to the State on October 21, 1785:

THE munificent Father of Mercies, and Sovereign Disposer of Events, having been graciously pleased to relieve the UNITED STATES of AMERICA from the Calamities of a long and dangerous war: through the whole course of which, he continued to smile on the Labours of our Husbandmen, thereby preventing Famine (the almost inseparable Companion of War) from entering our Borders; eventually restored to us the blessings of Peace, on Terms advantageous and honourable:

And since the happy Period, when he silenced the Noise of contending Armies, has graciously smiled on the Labours of our Hands, caused the Earth to bring forth her increase in plentiful Harvests, and crowned the present Year with new and additional Marks of his unlimited Goodness:

It therefore becomes our indispensable Duty, not only to acknowledge, in general with the rest of Mankind, our dependence on the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, but as a People peculiarly favoured, to testify our Gratitude to the Author of all our Mercies, in the most solemn and public manner.

I DO therefore, agreeably to a Vote of the General Court, appointing Thursday the 24th Day of November next, to be observed and kept as a Day of GENERAL THANKSGIVING throughout this State, by and with the Advice of Council, issue this Proclamation, recommending to the religious Societies of every Denomination, to assemble on that Day, to celebrate the Praises of our divine Benefactor;

To acknowledge our own Unworthiness, confess our manifold Transgressions, implore his Forgiveness, and intreat the continuance of those Favours which he had been graciously pleaded to bestow upon us;

That he would inspire our Rulers with Wisdom, prosper our Trade and Commerce, smile upon our Husbandry, bless our Seminaries of Learning, and spread the Gospel of his Grace over all the Earth.

And all servile Labour is forbidden on said Day.

GIVEN at the Council-Chamber in Concord, this Twenty-first Day of October, in the Year of our LORD, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-five, and in the Tenth Year of the Independence of the UNITED STATES of AMERICA.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), an author, architect, educator and scientist, was the 3rd President of the United States of America. In 1774, while serving in the Virginia Assembly, he personally introduced a resolution calling for a Day of Fasting and Prayer.

He penned the words of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4th, 1776:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitles them...

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life...

We, Therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions...

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

During the period between 1779-1781, Jefferson served as the Governor of Virginia, where he decreed a day of Public and solemn thanksgiving and prayer to Almighty God.

In 1781, he made this statement in Query XVIII of his Notes on the State of Virginia. Excerpts of these statements are engraved on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.:

God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.

On August 19, 1785, Jefferson wrote in a letter to Peter Carr:

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

In 1798, Jefferson wrote at the occasion of the Kentucky Resolution:

No power over the freedom of religion... [Is] delegated to the United States by the Constitution.

In 1801, President Jefferson stated in his First Inaugural Address:

"And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions....

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and republican principles.... Enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them including honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter;

With all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens a wise and frugal government... Which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned....

And may that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe, lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity."

Thomas Jefferson, during his term as the 3rd President of the U.S. (1801-1809), chaired the school board for the District of Columbia, where he authored the first plan of education adopted by the city of Washington.  The Bible and Isaac Watts' Hymnal were used as the principle books to teach reading to students.

On March 23, 1801, Jefferson wrote from Washington, D. C., to Moses Robinson:

The Christian Religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.

On January 1, 1802, Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, calming their fears that Congress was not in the process of choosing any one single Christian denomination in order to make it the "state" denomination, as was the case with the Anglican Church in England and Virginia.

In his letter to the Baptists, who had experienced severe persecution for their faith, Jefferson borrowed phraseology from the famous Baptist minister, Roger Williams, who said:

 ... The hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall...

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

Thomas Jefferson's personal letter ensured that the government's hands were tied from interfering with, or in any way controlling, the affairs or decisions of the churches in America.

Jefferson did not sign the Constitution, nor was he present at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Neither was he present when the First Amendment and religious freedom were debated in the first session of Congress in 1789, as he was out of the country in France as a U.S. Minister.

On April 21, 1803, he wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush, (also a signer of the Declaration of Independence):

My views... Are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti-christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others...

On June 17, 1804, in a letter to Henry Fry, Jefferson writes:

I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented...

In a letter to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804, he wrote:

Nothing in the Constitution has given them [the federal judges] a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the Executive to decide for them.... But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature and executive also, in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch.

On March 4, 1805, in his Second Inaugural Address, President Thomas Jefferson declared:

"I shall now enter on the duties to which my fellow-citizens have again called me, and shall proceed in the spirit of those principles which they have approved....

I shall need, therefore, all the indulgence I have heretofore experienced...I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life, who has covered our infancy with His Providence and our riper years with His wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join with me in supplications that He will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils and prosper their measures, that whatever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship and approbation of all nations.

In matters of religion I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the General Government. I have therefore undertaken, on no occasion, to prescribe the religious exercise suited to it; but have left them, as the constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of state and church authorities by the several religious societies."

President Jefferson on March 4, 1805, offered A National Prayer for Peace:

"Almighty God, Who has given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech Thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of Thy favor and glad to do Thy will. Bless our land with honorable ministry, sound learning, and pure manners.

Save us from violence, discord, and confusion, from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitude brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues.

Endow with Thy spirit of wisdom those to whom in Thy Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that through obedience to Thy law, we may show forth Thy praise among the nations of the earth.

In time of prosperity fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in Thee to fail; all of which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen."

On January 23, 1808, Jefferson wrote to Samuel Miller:

I consider the government of the U.S. As interdicted [prohibited] by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the U.S. [10th Amendment].

Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. It must then rest with the states as far as it can be in any human authority.

The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

On September 28, 1820, he wrote to William Jarvis:

You seem... To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so.... And their power [is] the more dangerous, as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.

In 1821, Jefferson wrote to Mr. Hammond:

The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in... The federal judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little to-morrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States.

On June 12, 1823, in a letter to Justice William Johnson regarding the meaning to the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

In establishing the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson not only encouraged the teaching of religion, but set aside a place inside the Rotunda for chapel services. He also spoke highly of the use, in his home town, of the local courthouse for religious services.

While in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson attended Christ Church, along with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, Alexander Hamilton, Francis Hopkins and Betsy Ross. In Virginia, Jefferson attended Bruton Parish Church (Episcopalian) in Williamsburg, where also George and Martha Washington were members. His own Bible, a well-worn, four volume set, held preeminence in his personal library. In the catalog he had written, listing all the books in his library, Jefferson wrote this on the title page:

I am for freedom of Religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another...

Thomas Jefferson stated:

"A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian; that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.

Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus.

Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christians.

I have always said, I always will say, that the studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands."

The Jefferson Memorial, on the south banks of Washington D. C. 's Tidal Basin, has inscribed in marble Thomas Jefferson's words:

Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens... Are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.

No men shall... Suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion. I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively.

Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the Book of Life than that these people are to be free.

The precepts of philosophy and of the Hebrew code, laid hold of actions only. [Jesus] pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man, erected his tribunal in the regions of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head.

Jefferson declared that religion is:

Deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

William Paterson (1745-1806), one of the signers of the Constitution, was a member of the Continental Congress, a lawyer, a state attorney general and a U.S. Senator. He also served as Governor of New Jersey (after Governor Livingston died) and in 1793 he was appointed by President George Washington to be a justice of the United States Supreme Court. The people of his state esteemed him so much that they named the city of Paterson, New Jersey, after him.

William Paterson moved from Ireland with his strong Presbyterian family when he was two years old. He attended Princeton College, during a time when there was a strong evangelical movement, (of the 18 students in his class, 12 became ministers). The official motto of Princeton was: Under God's Power She Flourishes.

The first president of Princeton, Jonathan Dickinson declared, "Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ."

Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), was a physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, "father of public schools" and a principle promoter of the American Sunday School Union. He also served as the Surgeon General of the Continental Army, helped to write the Pennsylvania Constitution and was the treasurer of the U.S. Mint. In 1786, Dr. Benjamin Rush established the first free medical clinic and later helped found the first American anti-slavery society.

In 1798, after the adoption of the Constitution, Benjamin Rush declared:

"The only foundation for... A republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments."

In his work, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, published in 1798, Dr. Rush stated:

I know there is an objection among many people to teaching children doctrines of any kind, because they are liable to be controverted. But let us not be wiser than our Maker. If moral precepts alone could have reformed mankind, the mission of the Son of God into all the world would have been unnecessary. The perfect morality of the Gospel rests upon the doctrine which, though often controverted has never been refuted: I mean the vicarious life and death of the Son of God.

In describing himself, Benjamin Rush said:

I have alternately been called an Aristocrat and a Democrat. I am neither. I am a Christocrat.

Richard Bassett (1745-1815), one of the signers of the Constitution , was also instrumental in leading his state of Delaware to be the first to ratify the United States Constitution. In addition, he was a U.S. Senator, Governor of Delaware, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Delaware, Captain in the Revolutionary War, lawyer and planter. He helped write the Constitution of the State of Delaware and had been appointed by President John Adams as a U.S. Circuit Court Judge.

Bassett converted to Methodism during the Revolutionary War and became close personal friends with Francis Asbury, the famous circuit riding preacher. Richard Bassett personally contributed half the cost of building the First Methodist Church in Dover. He freed his slaves and then paid them as hired labor. On his way to the Methodist campmeetings, many times on his own plantation, he would ride joyfully with his former slaves sharing the enthusiasm of their singing as they went.

Major William Pierce of Georgia, the only delegate to the Constitutional Convention who recorded character sketches of each of the delegates, described Bassett as:

A religious enthusiast, lately turned Methodist, who serves his country because it is the will of the people that he should do so. He is a man of plain sense, and has modesty enough to hold his tongue. He is a gentlemanly man, and is in high estimation among Methodists.

Bassett participated in the writing of the Constitution of the State of Delaware, which states:

Article XXII Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house, or appointed to any office or place of trust... Shall... Make and subscribe the following declaration, to wit: "I, _____, do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration."

John Jay (1745-1829), was the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, having been appointed by President George Washington. He was a Founding Father, a member of the First and Second Continental Congresses and even served as the President of the Continental Congress. He was very instrumental in causing the Constitution to be ratified by writing the Federalist Papers, along with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.

In 1777, John Jay helped to write the Constitution of New York, and from 1795-1801 held the position of Governor of the State of New York. He negotiated the peace treaty to end the War with England (along with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin). He was Secretary of Foreign Affairs under the Articles of Confederation, minister to Spain, and in 1794 he authored the Jay Treaty which prevented the United States from getting involved in the war between France and England. On October 12, 1816, John Jay admonished:

Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.

In addition to being appointed by President George Washington as the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Jay was also elected president of the Westchester Bible Society in 1818 and president of the American Bible Society in 1821. On May 13, 1824, serving as its president, John Jay gave an address to the American Bible Society:

"By conveying the Bible to people thus circumstanced we certainly do them a most interesting kindness. We thereby enable them to learn that man was originally created and placed in a state of happiness, but, becoming disobedient, was subjected to the degradation and evils which he and his posterity have since experienced.

The Bible will also inform them that our gracious Creator has provided for us a Redeemer, in whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed; that this Redeemer has made atonement "for the sins of the whole world," and thereby reconciling the Divine justice with the Divine mercy has opened a way for our redemption and salvation; and that these inestimable benefits are of the free gift and grace of God, not of our deserving, nor in our power to deserve."

Jay stated:

"In forming and settling my belief relative to the doctrines of Christianity, I adopted no articles from creeds but such only as, on careful examination, I found to be confirmed by the Bible.... At a party in Paris, once, the question fell on religious matters. In the course of it, one of them asked me if I believed in Christ? I answered that I did, and that I thanked God that I did."

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1825), one of the signers of the Constitution of the United States, was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and helped to write the Constitution of the State of South Carolina. He was a Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidate, a lawyer, planter, statesman, soldier, as well as an aide-de-camp to General Washington and a brigadier general.

Pinckney turned down many offers from President Washington for positions within government, including several cabinet appointments and a place on the U.S. Supreme Court, though finally he accepted being made Minister to France. He helped found and served as the first president of the Charleston Bible Society.

He studied for his military career at the Royal Military Academy of France, after having studied law at the Westminster School at Oxford under Sir William Blackstone. Sir William Blackstone, the second most quoted legal authority by our Founding Fathers, gave evidence the views he taught, stating:

"Blasphemy against the Almighty is denying his being or providence, or uttering contumelious reproaches on our Savior Christ. It is punished, at common law by fine and imprisonment, for Christianity is part of the laws of the land.

And consequently, as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for every thing, it is necessary that he should, in all points, conform to his Maker's will. This will of his Maker, is called the law of nature."

Charles Pinckney was very involved in forming the Constitution of the State of South Carolina. The South Carolina Constitution contains the following article:

SOUTH CAROLINA, 1778. Article XXXVIII. That all persons and religious societies who acknowledge that there is one God, and a future state of rewards and punishments, and that God is publicly to be worshipped, shall be freely tolerated.... That all denominations of Christian [s]... In this State, demeaning themselves peaceably and faithfully, shall enjoy equal religious and civil privileges.

In a personal letter to a military friend, Pinckney wrote, The great art of government is not to govern too much.

Pinckney, as a child, had learned "to love Christ and the Church." As the first president of the Charleston Bible Society, he distributed Bibles to Negroes, putting aside finances to evangelize the slaves and teach them to read the Holy Scriptures.

James Madison (1751-1836), known as the "Chief Architect of the Constitution", was the 4th President of the United States, from 1809 till 1817. He was a member of the first United States Congress and was the original author and promoter of the Bill of Rights, of which he made religious freedom the first item.

He was appointed by President Thomas Jefferson as U.S. Secretary of State where he engineered the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. He was acting President and Commander-in-Chief during the War of 1812, where he had to flee the White House before it was captured and burned by the British.

Madison was an instrumental member of the Constitutional Convention, speaking 161 times, (more than any other founder except Gouverneur Morris). His records of the debates in the Constitutional Convention are the most accurate and detailed that exist.

In addition to being a lawyer and planter, he was a member of the House of Delegates. As a Virginia Legislator, he helped write the Constitution of Virginia.  Madison authored 29 of the 85 Federalist Papers, which argued successfully in favor of the ratification of the Constitution.

It was James Madison who made the motion, which was seconded by Roger Sherman, that Benjamin Franklin's famous appeal for prayer at the Constitutional Convention be enacted.

Home-schooled as a child, Madison attended Princeton University under the direction of Reverend John Witherspoon, one of the nations premier theologians and legal scholars. The college had declared, Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.

On June 20, 1785, Madison wrote in regards to the relationship between religion and civil government: Religion [is] the basis and Foundation of Government.

In the 1785 session of the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, James Madison explained in his Religious Freedom, A Memorial and Remonstrance, why he was against the Establishment of Religion by Law:

"It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage.... Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.

Because the policy of the bill is adverse to the diffusion of the light of Christianity. The first wish of those who ought to enjoy this precious gift, ought to be, that it may be imparted to the whole race of mankind. Compare the number of those who have as yet received it, with the number still remaining under the dominions of false religions, and how small is the former! Does the policy of the bill tend to lessen the disproportion?

No; it at once discourages those who are strangers to the light of Truth, from coming into the regions of it...

Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.

Earnestly praying, as we are in duty bound, that the Supreme Lawgiver of the Universe by illuminating those to whom it is addressed, may, on the one hand, turn their councils from every act which would affront His holy prerogative, or violate the trust committed to them; and, on the other, guide them into every measure which may be worthy of His blessing."

James Madison, on the future of America, wrote:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

In 1788, he said:

"The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities to be impressed with it."

On October 15, 1788, Madison wrote:

As the courts are generally the last in making the decision [on laws], it results to them, by refusing or not refusing to execute a law, to stamp it with its final character. This makes the Judiciary dept paramount in fact to the Legislature, which was never intended, and can never be proper.

On March 4, 1809, President James Madison explained in his Inaugural Address:

"We have all been encouraged to feel in the guardianship and guidance of that Almighty Being, whose power regulates the destiny of nations."

Madison, who outlived all of the other 54 founders of the American Republic, wrote on November 9, 1772 to his close college friend, William Bradford:

A watchful eye must be kept on ourselves lest while we are building ideal monuments of Renown and Bliss here we neglect to have our names enrolled in the Annals of Heaven.

[Bad health has] intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life, yet it may be better with me after some time tho I hardly dare expect it and therefore have little spirit and alacrity to set about any thing that is difficult in acquiring and useless in possessing after one has exchanged Time for Eternity.

Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), writer of the final draft of the Constitution of the United States, being the head of the Committee on Style, was the originator of the phrase "We the people of the United States." He was 35 years old when he served as one of the members of the Continental Congress and spoke 173 times during the Constitutional debates, (more than any other delegate).

He was the first U.S. Minister to France, a U.S. Senator and helped to write the New York Constitution. He was a graduate of King's College (Columbia University), and was a merchant, lawyer, planter, financier and pioneer promoter of the Erie Canal.

When France was in the process of establishing a new form of government, Gouverneur Morris offered to them his expertise in government formation by writing Observation on Government, Applicable to the Political State of France and Notes on the Form of a Constitution for France:

Religion is the only solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man toward God.

Edmund Jennings Randolph (1753-1813), was an American Revolutionary leader, member of the Continental Congress and delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He was the Governor of Virginia, U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Secretary of State.

On June 28, 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, following the historical address and appeal for prayer by Dr. Benjamin Franklin, (which ended the heated debates over state representation), Edmund Jennings Randolph of Virginia proposed a further motion:

"That a sermon be preached at the request of the convention on the 4th of July, the anniversary of Independence; & thenceforward prayers be used in ye Convention every morning."

On July 4th, according to the proposal by Edmund Jennings Randolph of Virginia, the entire Constitutional Convention assembled in the Reformed Calvinistic Church, and heard a sermon by Rev. William Rogers. His prayer was a reflection of the hearts of all the delegates following the convicting admonition of Dr. Franklin:

"We fervently recommend to the fatherly notice... Our federal convention.... Favor them, from day to day, with thy inspiring presence; be their wisdom and strength; enable them to devise such measures as may prove happy instruments in healing all divisions and prove the good of the great whole... That the United States of America may form one example of a free and virtuous government....

May we... Continue, under the influence of republican virtue, to partake of all the blessings of cultivated and Christian society."

James McHenry (1753-1816), one of the signers of the Constitution of the United States, was a member of the Continental Congress, a state legislator, a soldier and the U.S. Secretary of War who supervised the establishment of the United States Military Academy at West Point.

He was also a physician, having studied under the renowned Dr. Benjamin Rush, himself a signer of the Declaration of Independence. McHenry served with distinction under General Washington on the medical staff during the Revolutionary War. Fort McHenry, where, in 1812, the battle with Britain occasioned the writing of our national anthem, was named after him.

In 1813 he became the president of the first Bible society in Baltimore. He conveys the urgency of distributing Bibles to the public in an article to solicit funds for the society:

Neither, in considering this subject, let it be overlooked, that public utility pleads most forcibly for the general distribution of the Holy Scriptures.

The doctrine they preach, the obligations they impose, the punishment they threaten, the rewards they promise, the stamp and image of divinity they bear, which produces a conviction of their truths, can alone secure to society, order and peace, and to our courts of justice and constitutions of government, purity, stability and usefulness.

In vain, without the Bible, we increase penal laws and draw intrenchments around our institutions. Bibles are strong intrenchments. Where they abound, men cannot pursue wicked courses, and at the same time enjoy quiet conscience.

Consider also, the rich do not possess aught more precious than their Bible, and that the poor cannot be presented by the rich with anything of greater value. Withhold it not from the poor. It is a book of councils and directions, fitted to every situation in which man can be placed. It is an oracle which reveals to mortals the secrets of heavens and the hidden will of the Almighty....

It is an estate, whose title is guaranteed by Christ, whose delicious fruits ripen every season, survive the worm, and keep through eternity. It is for the purpose of distributing this divine book more effectually and extensively among the multitudes, whose circumstances render such a donation necessary, that your cooperation is most earnestly requested.

Abraham Baldwin (1754-1807), was a signer of the Constitution of the United States, member of Congress, U.S. Senator, statesman, lawyer and educator.

He graduated from Yale University and in 1781 was offered the professorship of divinity there. He served as chaplain in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and later studied law. In 1783 he was admitted to the bar, elected to the state assembly and later chosen as a representative from Georgia to the Constitutional Convention.

He was founder and first President of the University of Georgia, and through his far-sighted efforts, secured for the university 40,000 acres of land. His expertise in law and ministry was manifest in his writing of the Charter of the College of Georgia:

As it is the distinguishing happiness of free governments that civil order should be the result of choice and not of necessity, and the common wishes of the people become the laws of the land, their public prosperity and even existence very much depend upon suitably forming the minds and morals of their citizens.

When the minds of the people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled, and their conduct disorderly, a free government will be attended with greater confusions and evils more horrid than the wild, uncultivated state of nature.

It can only be happy when the public principles and opinions are properly directed, and their manners regulated.

This is an influence beyond the reach of laws and punishments, and can be claimed only by religion and education.

It should therefore be among the first objects of those who wish well to the national prosperity to encourage and support the principles of religion and morality, and early to place the youth under the forming hand of society, that by instruction they may be molded to the love of virtue and good order.

Sending them abroad to other countries for their education will not answer these purposes, is too humiliating an acknowledgement of the ignorance or inferiority of our own, and will always be the cause of so great foreign attachments that upon principles of policy it is inadmissible.

John Marshall (1755-1835), a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was appointed by President John Adams and held that position for 34 years. He had been a captain in the Revolutionary War and had served with General George Washington during the freezing Winter at Valley Forge in 1777-78.

Marshall was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses and strongly advocated the ratification of the Constitution. He turned down President Washington's offer to be the United States Attorney General, though later served as U. S. Minister to France, gaining recognition for his refusal to take French bribes during the "XYZ Affair."

After having been a U.S. Congressman, he was appointed Secretary of State, and finally Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1801. His influence helped form the judicial branch of the government. In the 1833 case of Barron v. Baltimore, Marshall emphasized that the Bill of Rights restricted only the national government. The country mourned at his death, and it was at his funeral in 1835 that the Liberty Bell cracked.

The Winchester Republican newspaper published the following occurrence involving Chief Justice John Marshall at McGuire's hotel in Winchester, after he had encountered trouble with his carriage along the road:

The shafts of his ancient gig were broken and "held together by switches formed from the bark of a hickory sapling"; he was negligently dressed, his knee buckles loosened. In the tavern a discussion arose among some young men concerning "the merits of the Christian religion." The debate grew warm and lasted "from six o'clock until eleven." No one knew Marshall, who sat quietly listening.

Finally one of the youthful combatants turned to him and said: Well, my old gentleman, what think you of these things?"

Marshall responded with a "most eloquent and unanswerable appeal." He talked for an hour, answering "every argument urged against" the teachings of Jesus. "In the whole lecture, there was so much simplicity and energy, pathos and sublimity, that not another word was uttered."

The listeners wondered who the old man could be. Some thought him a preacher; and great was their surprise when they learned afterwards that he was the Chief Justice of the United States.

Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), was not only a signer of the Constitution of the United States, but was known as the "Ratifier of the Constitution." It is probable that without his efforts the Constitution may not have been ratified by the states, particularly his own important state of New York.

Alexander Hamilton authored 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers, which were of immense consequence in influencing the ratification of the Constitution, (which needed to be passed in two-thirds of the states in order to go into effect).

During the Revolutionary War, he was captain of a New York artillery unit, then appointed by George Washington as his aide-de-camp and staff lawyer, and later promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. He was the first Secretary of the Treasury, founder of one of the first banks in New York, as well as the founder of the New York Post.

Shortly after the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Alexander Hamilton stated:

"For my own part, I sincerely esteem it a system which without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests."

Hamilton, who led his household regularly in the observance of family prayers, wrote to his friend James Bayard in April of 1802, revealing the important connection between Christianity and constitutional freedom:

In my opinion, the present constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banner bona fide must we combat our political foes, rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provided for amendments. By these general views of the subject have my reflections been guided.

I now offer you the outline of the plan they have suggested. Let an association be formed to be denominated "The Christian Constitutional Society," its object to be first: The support of the Christian religion. Second: The support of the United States.

Alexander Hamilton expounded:

I have carefully examined the evidences of the Christian religion, and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity I would unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor. I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.

In refuting those who had a misunderstanding of the nature of liberty, Hamilton explained:

The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms, and false reasoning, is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges.

You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator, to the whole human race; and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice.

Fisher Ames (1758-1808), was a Congressman from Massachusetts in the First Session of the Congress of the United States, during the time the Bill of Rights were being formulated. It was Fisher Ames who had suggested the wording of the First Amendment, which was adopted by the House:

Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience.

He shared his beliefs concerning education:

Should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a schoolbook? Its morals are pure, its examples are captivating and noble.... In no Book is there so good English, so pure and so elegant, and by teaching all the same they will speak alike, and the Bible will justly remain the standard of language as well as of faith.

James Monroe (1758-1831), who served in public office for fifty years, was elected the 5th President of the United States in 1825. Home schooled as a child by the Reverend William Douglas, he was a fellow student with John Marshall, who became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

 Beginning as a lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary Army, James Monroe served in the Virginia Assembly, the Constitutional Convention, the U.S. Senate, as governor of Virginia, and Minister to France, Great Britain, and Spain. He was appointed as Secretary of State, and also served as the U.S. Secretary of War. He helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, which doubled the size of the United States.

He also negotiated the acquiring of Florida from Spain, the addition of Maine, Illinois, Missouri, Alabama and Mississippi as states in the Union, as well as being responsible for the Monroe Doctrine, which forbade European powers from interfering with the independent nations of the Western Hemisphere. In his Inaugural Address on March 4, 1825, President James Monroe spoke of God's overruling providence, and added, "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh in vain."

Noah Webster (1758-1843), was a statesman, educator, lexicographer and the author of Webster's Dictionary. Known as "the Schoolmaster of the Nation," Noah Webster published the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language in November, 1828. It contained the greatest number of Biblical definitions given in any secular volume.

Noah Webster, who had served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, was also elected to the Connecticut General Assembly for nine terms, the Legislature of Massachusetts for three terms as well as serving as a judge. He was also largely responsible for Article I, Section 8, of the United States Constitution. During his tenure in the Massachusetts Legislature, Noah Webster labored to have funds appropriated for education. He declared government was responsible to:

Discipline our youth in early life in sound maxims of moral, political, and religious duties.

Webster's American Spelling Book, first written in the 1780's while teaching in New York, became the most popular book in American education. For the first time the English Language was given standardized spelling for words. The famous "blue-backed speller" set a publishing record of a million copies a year for one hundred years. Americans from north to south and from east to west learned their letters, morality and patriotism from Webster's dictionaries, spellers, catechisms, history books, etc.  His Early "blue-backed speller" even contained a "Moral Catechism" with rules from the scriptures upon which to base moral conduct.

In 1790, in his American Spelling Book Containing an easy Standard of Pronunciation, being the first part of a Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Webster writes on the second page a dedication to Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College:

This first part of a Grammatical Institute of the English Language, is, with permission, most humbly inscribed, as a testimony of my veneration, for the superior talents, piety and patriotism, which enable him to preside over that seat of literature, with distinguished reputation, which render him an ornament to the Christian Profession, and give him an eminent rank among the illustrious characters that adorn the revolution.

Noah Webster stated concerning education:

"Education is useless without the Bible. God's Word, contained in the Bible, has furnished all necessary rules to direct our conduct."

In 1823, he wrote in his textbook:

It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political stations. But the Scriptures teach a different doctrine. They direct that rulers should be men who rule in the fear of God, able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness.

But if we had no divine instruction on the subject, our own interest would demand of us a strict observance of the principle of these injunctions. And it is to the neglect of this rule of conduct in our citizens, that we must ascribe the multiplied frauds, breeches of trust, peculations and embezzlements of public property which astonish even ourselves; which tarnish the character of our country; which disgrace a republican government; and which will tend to reconcile men to monarchs in other countries and even our own.

In 1828, Webster completed his 26 year project of writing An American Dictionary of the English Language with pronouncing vocabularies of Scripture, classical and geographical names. It contained 70,000 entries and 12,000 new definitions. For the first time in English speaking history, English vocabulary words had a standardized spelling. In the preface to this great work, Noah Webster writes:

In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed.... No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.

To that great and benevolent Being, who, during the preparation of this work, has sustained a feeble constitution amidst obstacles and toils, disappointments, infirmities and depression; who has borne me and my manuscripts in safety across the Atlantic, and given me strength and resolution to bring the work to a close, I would present the tribute of my most grateful acknowledgements.

And if the talent which He entrusted to my care, has not been put to the most profitable use in his service, I hope it has not been "kept laid up in a napkin" and that any misapplication of it may be graciously forgiven.

Noah Webster's 1828 edition of the American Dictionary contained a profuse amount of Holy Scripture, as he would use verses from the Old and New Testaments to clarify the context in which a word was to be used. In Webster's Dictionary, the definition of the word “faith” includes the following sentences:

Being justified by faith. Rom. V.

Without faith it is impossible to please God. Heb. Xi.

For we walk by faith, not by sight. 2Cor. V.

With the heart man believeth to righteousness. Rom. X.

Your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. Rom. I.

Hast thou faith? Have it to thyself before God. Rom. Xiv.

Children in whom is no faith. Deut. Xxxii.

In Webster's Dictionary, the definition of the word “property” is given as:

The exclusive right of possessing, enjoying and disposing of a thing; ownership. In the beginning of the world, the Creator gave to man dominion over the earth, over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air, and over every living thing. This is the foundation of man's property in the earth and all its productions.... The labor of inventing, making or producing any thing constitutes one of the highest titles to property...

It is one of the greatest blessings of civil society that the property of citizens is well secured.

In Webster's Dictionary, the definition of the word “providence” is given as:

The care and superintendence which God exercises over his creatures.... Some persons admit a general providence, but deny a particular providence, not considering that a general providence consists of particulars. A belief in divine providence is a source of great consolation to good men. By divine providence is understood God himself.

In 1832, Noah Webster published his History of the United States, in which he wrote:

The brief exposition of the constitution of the United States, will unfold to young persons the principles of republican government; and it is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.

The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and His apostles, which enjoins humility, piety, and benevolence; which acknowledges in every person a brother, or a sister, and a citizen with equal rights. This is genuine Christianity, and to this we owe our free Constitutions of Government.

The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all of our civil constitutions and laws.... All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.

When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers just men who will rule in the fear of God. The preservation of a republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty;

If the citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made not for the public good so much as for the selfish or local purposes;

Corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizens will be violated or disregarded.

If a republican government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the divine commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the laws.

In 1832, he published Advice to the Young, in which he stated:

The ' {Advice to the Young,} '... Will be useful in enlightening the minds of youth in religious and moral principles, and serve... To restrain some of the common vices of our country.... To exterminate our popular vices is a work of far more importance to the character and happiness of our citizens than any other improvements in our system of education.

In 1833, Webster translated the Common Version of the Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testament, with Amendments of the Language. In the Preface he writes:

The Bible is the Chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil, in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal concerns of men, and the only book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity.... It is extremely important to our nation, in a political as well as religious view, that all possible authority and influence should be given to the scriptures, for these furnish the best principles of civil liberty, and the most effectual support of republican government.

The principles of genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations, are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man, therefore, who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that Book may be accessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer....

There are two powers only, sufficient to control men and secure the rights of individuals and a peaceable administration; these are the combined force of religion and law, and the force or fear of the bayonet. Noah Webster New Haven 1833.

In his dictionary, published 1848, Webster wrote in the preface:

If the language can be improved in regularity, so as to be more easily acquired by our own citizens and by foreigners, and thus be rendered a more useful instrument for the propagation of science, arts, civilization and Christianity....

He stated:

For this reason society requires that the education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention. Education, in a great measure, forms the moral characters of men, and morals are the basis of government.

Education should therefore be the first care of a legislature; not merely the institution of schools, but the furnishing of them with the best men for teachers. A good system of education should be the first article in the code of political regulations; for it is much easier to introduce and establish an effectual system for preserving morals, than to correct by penal statutes the ill effects of a bad system.

The goodness of a heart is of infinitely more consequence to society than an elegance of manners; nor will any superficial accomplishments repair the want of principle in the mind. It is always better to be vulgarly right than politely wrong....

The education of youth [is] an employment of more consequence than making laws and preaching the gospel, because it lays the foundation on which both law and gospel rest for success.

Republican government loses half of its value, where the moral and social duties are....Negligently practised. To exterminate our popular vices is a work of far more importance to the character and happiness of our citizens, than any other improvements in our system of education.

James Kent (1763-1847), was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New York and the Head of the Court of Chancery for nine years. Considered the premier jurist in the development of the legal practice in the United States, Kent authored the Commentaries on American Law. In the case of The People v. Ruggles, 1811, Kent rendered the opinion of the Court:

"The defendant was indicted... In December, 1810, for that he did, on the 2nd day of September, 1810... Wickedly, maliciously, and blasphemously, utter, and with a loud voice publish, in the presence and hearing of divers good and Christian people, of and concerning the Christian religion, and of and concerning Jesus Christ, the false, scandalous, malicious, wicked and blasphemous words following: 'Jesus Christ was a bastard, and his mother must be a whore,' in contempt of the Christian religion...the defendant was tried and found guilty, and was sentenced by the court to be imprisoned for three months, and to pay a fine of $500.

Such words uttered with such a disposition were an offense at common law. In Taylor's case the defendant was convicted upon information of speaking similar words, and the Court... Said that Christianity was parcel of the law, and to cast contumelious reproaches upon it, tended to weaken the foundation of moral obligation, and the efficacy of oaths.

And is the case of Rex v. Woolston, on a like conviction, the Court said... That whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government.... The authorities show that blasphemy against God and... Profane ridicule of Christ or the Holy Scriptures (which are equally treated as blasphemy), are offenses punishable at common law, whether uttered by words or writings... Because it tends to corrupt the morals of the people, and to destroy good order.

Such offenses have always been considered independent of any religious establishment or the rights of the Church. They are treated as affecting the essential interests of civil society....

We stand equally in need, now as formerly, of all the moral discipline, and of those principles of virtue, which help to bind society together.

The people of this State, in common with the people of this country, profess the general doctrines of Christianity, as the rule of their faith and practice; and to scandalize the author of these doctrines is not only... Impious, but... Is a gross violation of decency and good order.

Nothing could be more injurious to the tender morals of the young, than to declare such profanity lawful...

The free, equal, and undisturbed enjoyment of religious opinion, whatever it may be, and free and decent discussions on any religious subject, is granted and secured; but to revile... The religion professed by almost the whole community, is an abuse of that right....

We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity, and not upon the doctrines or worship of those impostors [other religions]....

[We are] people whose manners are refined and whose morals have been elevated and inspired with a more enlarged benevolence, by means of the Christian religion. Though the constitution has discarded religious establishments, it does not forbid judicial cognizance of those offenses against religion and morality which have no reference to any such establishment....

This [constitutional] declaration (noble and magnanimous as it is, when duly understood) never meant to withdraw religion in general, and with it the best sanctions of moral and social obligation from all consideration and notice of the law....

To construe it as breaking down the common law barriers against licentious, wanton, and impious attacks upon Christianity itself, would be an enormous perversion of its meaning....

Christianity in its enlarged sense, as a religion revealed and taught in the Bible, is part and parcel of the law of the land....

Nor are we bound by any expression of the Constitution, as some have strangely supposed, either not to punish at all, or to punish indiscriminately like attacks upon the religion of Mahomet and the Grand Lama; and for this plain reason, that we are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity, and not upon the doctrines or worship of these impostors....

The Court is accordingly of the opinion that the judgement... Must be affirmed."

In an address before the American Bible Society, Chief Justice Kent expressed:

"The Bible is equally adapted to the wants and infirmities of every human being....

It brings life and immortality to light, which until the publication of the Gospel, were hidden from the scrutiny of the ages. The gracious Revelation of a future state is calculated to solve the mysteries of Providence in the dispensations of this life, to reconcile us to the inequalities of our present condition, and to inspire unconquerable fortitude and the most animating consolations when all other consolations fail....

The Bible also unfolds the origin and deep foundations of depravity and guilt, and the means and hopes of salvation through the mediation of our Redeemer.

Its doctrines, its discoveries, its code of morals, and its means of grace are not only overwhelming evidence of its Divine origin, but they confound the pretensions of all other systems by showing the narrow range of and the feeble efforts of human reason, even when under the sway of the most exalted understanding, and enlightened by the accumulated treasures of science and learning."

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), was the 6th President of the United States, and son of John Adams, the 2nd President. At the age of eleven, his mother, Abigail Adams, sent him to be with his father who was serving as the U.S. Minister in France. He became so adept, that in three years, at the age of fourteen, he received the Congressional appointment to the Court of Catherine the Great in Russia.

He was a U.S. Senator, U. S. Minister to France and U.S. Minister to Britain, where he negotiated the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812. He was Secretary of State for President James Monroe and in that position obtained Florida (1819) and promulgated the Monroe Doctrine.

John Quincy Adams, the only President to re-enter politics after having served as President, became a Congressman in 1831, where he adamantly opposed slavery. Being nicknamed the "Hell-Hound of Slavery," he singlehandedly led the fight to lift the Gag Rule which had prohibited discussion of the slavery issue in Congress. When asked why he never seemed discouraged or depressed over championing such an unpopular fight, John Quincy Adams replied, "Duty is ours; results are God's."

In September, 1811, he wrote a letter to his son from St. Petersburg, Russia, while serving for the second time as an ambassador to that country:

My dear Son:

In your letter of the 18th January to your mother, you mentioned that you read to your aunt a chapter in the Bible or a section of Doddridge's Annotations every evening. This information gave me real pleasure;

For so great is my veneration for the Bible, and so strong my belief, that when duly read and meditated on, it is of all books in the world, that which contributes most to make men good, wise, and happy that the earlier my children begin to read it, the more steadily they pursue the practice of reading it throughout their lives, the more lively and confident will be my hopes that they will prove useful citizens of their country, respectable members of society, and a real blessing to their parents....

I have myself, for many years, made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year....

My custom is, to read four to five chapters every morning immediately after rising from my bed. It employs about an hour of my time....

It is essential, my son, in order that you may go through life with comfort to yourself, and usefulness to your fellow-creatures, that you should form and adopt certain rules or principles, for the government of your own conduct and temper....

It is in the Bible, you must learn them, and from the Bible how to practice them. Those duties are to God, to your fellow-creatures, and to yourself. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thy self." On these two commandments, Jesus Christ expressly says, "hang all the law and the prophets"; that is to say, the whole purpose of Divine Revelation is to inculcate them efficaciously upon the minds of men....

Let us, then, search the Scriptures.... The Bible contains the revelation of the will of God. It contains the history of the creation of the world, and of mankind; and afterward the history of one peculiar nation, certainly the most extraordinary nation that has ever appeared upon the earth.

It contains a system of religion, and of morality, which we may examine upon its own merits, independent of the sanction it receives from being the Word of God....

I shall number separately those letters that I mean to write you upon the subject of the Bible.... I wish that hereafter they may be useful to your brothers and sisters, as well as to you.

As you will receive them as a token of affection for you, during my absence.... From your affectionate Father,

John Quincy Adams

After negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, on December 24, 1814, Adams wrote several times from London in response to the false doctrines which were being promulgated among the intellectuals back in Boston:

I perceive that the Trinitarians and the Unitarians in Boston are sparring together.... Most of the Boston Unitarians are my particular friends, but I never thought much of the eloquence or the theology of Priestly. His Socrates and Jesus Compared is a wretched performance. Socrates and Jesus! A farthing candle and the sun! I pray you to read Massilon's sermon on the divinity of Christ, and then the whole New Testament, after which be a Socinian if you can.

I find in the New Testament, Jesus Christ accosted in His own presence by one of His disciples as God, without disclaiming the appellation. I see Him explicitly declared by at least two other of the Apostles to be God, expressly and repeatedly announced, not only as having existed before the worlds, but as the Creator of the worlds without beginning of days or end of years. I see Him named in the great prophecy of Isaiah concerning him to be the mighty God!...

The texts are too numerous, they are from parts of the Scriptures too diversified, they are sometimes connected by too strong a chain of argument, and the inferences from them are, to my mind, too direct and irresistible, to admit of the explanations which the Unitarians sometimes attempt to give them, or the evasions by which, at others, they endeavor to escape from them.

You ask me what Bible I take as the standard of my faith the Hebrew, the Samaritan, the old English translation, or what? I answer, the Bible containing the Sermon on the Mount any Bible that I can... Understand. The New Testament I have repeatedly read in the original Greek, in the Latin, in the Geneva Protestant, in Sacy's Catholic French translations, in Luther's German translation, in the common English Protestant, and in the Douay Catholic translations.

I take any one of them for my standard of faith.... But the Sermon on the Mount commands me to lay up for myself treasures, not upon earth, but in Heaven. My hopes of a future life are all founded upon the Gospel of Christ.... You think it blasphemous that the omnipotent Creator could be crucified. God is a spirit. The spirit was not crucified. The body of Jesus of Nazareth was crucified.

The Spirit, whether external or created, was beyond the reach of the cross. You see, my orthodoxy grows on me, and I still unite with you in the doctrine of toleration and benevolence.

On July 4, 1821, he declared:

"The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.

From the day of the Declaration... They (the American people) were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of The Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledge as the rules of their conduct."

On July 4, 1837, in a speech celebrating the 61st Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, Adams proclaimed to the inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport:

"Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day.

Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the Progress of the Gospel dispensation?

Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer's mission upon earth?

That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity and gave to the world the first irrevocable pledge of the fulfillment of the prophecies announced directly from Heaven at the birth of the Saviour and predicted by the greatest of the Hebrew prophets 600 years before."

John Quincy Adams revealed his convictions and philosophy in the following quotations:

"The first and almost the only Book deserving of universal attention is the Bible."

"I speak as a man of the world to men of the world; and I say to you, Search the Scriptures! The Bible is the book of all others, to be read at all ages, and in all conditions of human life; not to be read once or twice or thrice through, and then laid aside, but to be read in small portions of one or two chapters every day, and never to be intermitted, unless by some overruling necessity."

"In what light soever we regard the Bible, whether with reference to revelation, to history, or to morality, it is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue."

"It is no slight testimonial, both to the merit and worth of Christianity, that in all ages since its promulgation the great mass of those who have risen to eminence by their profound wisdom and integrity have recognized and reverenced Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of the living God."

"Posterity you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."

On February 27, 1844, at the age of 77, Adams was not only a U.S. Congressman, but also the chairman of the American Bible Society. In addressing that organization, he proclaimed:

"I deem myself fortunate in having the opportunity, at a stage of a long life drawing rapidly to its close, to bear at this place, the capital of our National Union, in the Hall of representatives of the North American people, in the chair of the presiding officer of the assembly representing the whole people, the personification of the great and mighty nation - to bear my solemn testimonial of reverence and gratitude to that book of books, the Holy Bible...."

"The Bible carries with it the history of the creation, the fall and redemption of man, and discloses to him, in the infant born at Bethlehem, the Legislator and Saviour of the world."

On December 3, 1844, after nearly eight years of anti-slavery effort, Adams’ motion succeeded in rescinding the infamous Gag Rule, which had forbidden the discussion of slavery in the Congress. His recognition as a national hero came after a long, lonely and unpopular struggle against powerful slavery interests. He wrote in his diary: "Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God!"

As written in The Churchman, John Quincy Adams said:

"There are two prayers that I love to say - the first is the Lord's Prayer, and because the Lord taught it; and the other is what seems to be a child's prayer: "Now I lay me down to sleep," and I love to say that because it suits me. I have been repeating it every night for many years past, and I say it yet, and I expect to say it my last night on earth if I am conscious.

But I have added a few words more to the prayer so as to express my trust in Christ, and also to acknowledge what I ask, for I ask as a favor, and not because I deserve it. This is it:

'Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep;

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take;

For Jesus' sake. Amen.'"

Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), was the 7th President of the United States of America. He was a lawyer, a Congressman, a U.S. Senator and a judge on the Tennessee Supreme Court. He also has the credit for proposing the state's name, "Tennessee," while being a member of the state's first convention which adopted its constitution. Known as "Old Hickory," he was a victorious major-general in the army, winning the Battle of New Orleans as well as capturing Florida.

On March 4, 1833, in his Second Inaugural Address, President Jackson stated:

"Finally, it is my fervent prayer to that Almighty Being... That He will so overrule all my intentions and actions and inspire the hearts of my fellow-citizens that we may be preserved from dangers of all kinds and continue forever a united happy people."

On March 4, 1837, President Jackson delivered his Farewell Address:

"You have the highest of human trusts committed to your care. Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number, and has chosen you as the guardians of freedom, to preserve it for the benefit of the human race. May He who holds in His hands the destinies of nations, make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed, and enable you, with pure hearts and hands and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time, the great charge He has committed to your keeping."

Andrew Jackson, on June 8, 1845, said in reference to the Bible:

"That book, Sir, is the Rock upon which our republic rests."

William Henry Harrison (1773-1841), the 9th President of the United States of America, was the grandson of Benjamin Harrison, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Later his son, Benjamin Harrison, became the 23rd President of the United States. President William Henry Harrison served only one month in office before he died. In his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1841, he left this admonition for America:

"I deem the present occasion sufficiently important and solemn to justify me in expressing to my fellow citizens a profound reverence for the Christian religion, and a thorough conviction that sound morals, religious liberty, and a just sense of religious responsibility are essentially connected with all true and lasting happiness."

Joseph Story (1779-1845), a U.S. Congressman, 1808-9, was appointed in 1811 as a Justice to the United States Supreme Court by President James Madison (" The Chief Architect of the Constitution").

Being the youngest person ever to serve in that position, Joseph Story continued on the bench for 34 years, until his death in 1845. He was instrumental in establishing federal supremacy, Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, 1816, and in establishing the illegality of the slave trade in the Amistad case.

A professor at the Harvard Law School, 1821-45, Joseph Story wrote tremendously influential works, including: Bailments, 1832, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 1833, Equity Jurisprudence, 1836, and A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States, 1840, in which he stated:

"We are not to attribute this prohibition of a national religious establishment [in the First Amendment] to an indifference to religion in general, and especially to Christianity (which none could hold in more reverence that the framers of the Constitution)....

Probably, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and of the Amendment to it now under consideration, the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience and the freedom of religious worship.

Any attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation."

In Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Vol. III, Justice Story declared:

"It yet remains a problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free government can be permanent, where the public worship of God, and the support of religion, constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable shape."

In the 1844 case of Vidal v. Girard's Executors, Story delivered the United States Supreme Court's unanimous opinion:

"Christianity... Is not to be maliciously and openly reviled and blasphemed against, to the annoyance of believers or the injury of the public....

It is unnecessary for us, however, to consider the establishment of a school or college, for the propagation of... Deism, or any other form of infidelity. Such a case is not to be presumed to exist in a Christian country....

Why may not laymen instruct in the general principles of Christianity as well as ecclesiastics.... And we cannot overlook the blessings, which such [lay] men by their conduct, as well as their instructions, may, nay must, impart to their youthful pupils.

Why may not the Bible, and especially the New Testament, without note or comment, be read and taught as a Divine Revelation in the [school] its general precepts expounded, its evidences explained and its glorious principles of morality inculcated?

What is there to prevent a work, not sectarian, upon the general evidences of Christianity, from being read and taught in the college by lay teachers? It may well be asked, what is there in all this, which is positively enjoined, inconsistent with the spirit or truths of the religion of Christ? Are not these truths all taught by Christianity, although it teaches much more?

Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?"

In his commentary of the First Amendment's original meaning, Justice Story clarified:

"The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects [denominations] and to prevent any national ecclesiastical patronage of the national government."

John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), served as a Congressman and Senator from South Carolina. He was the Secretary of War under President James Monroe, Secretary of State under President John Tyler, and Vice-President under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He was a prominent supporter of "states rights," and in 1850, the same year that he died, he gave his last speech to the Senate regarding the civil war that lay ahead:

"The cords that bind the States together are not only many, but various in character.... The strongest of those of a spiritual and ecclesiastical nature, consisted in the unity of the great religious denominations, all of which originally embraced the whole Union. All these denominations, with the exception, perhaps, of the Catholics, were organized very much upon the principle of our political institutions.

Beginning with smaller meetings, corresponding with the political divisions of the country, their organization terminated in one great central assemblage, corresponding very much with the character of Congress. At these meetings the principal clergymen and lay members of the respective denominations, from all parts of the Union, met to transact business relating to their common concerns.

  It was not confined to what appertained to the doctrines and discipline of the respective denominations, but extended to plans for disseminating the Bible, establishing missions, distributing tracts, and of establishing presses for the publications of tracts, newspapers, and periodicals, with a view of diffusing religious information, and for the support of their respective doctrines and creeds.

All this combined contributed greatly to strengthen the bonds of the Union. The ties which held each denomination together formed a strong cord to hold the whole Union together; but, powerful as they were, they have not been able to resist the explosive effect of slavery agitation..."

Daniel Webster (1782-1852), was a famous American politician and diplomat. He is considered one of the greatest orators in American history. He served as a U.S. Congressman, a U.S. Senator and as the Secretary of State for three different Presidents: William Henry Harrison, John Tyler and Millard Fillmore. His political career spanned almost four decades.

Daniel Webster stated:

"If there is anything in my thoughts or style to commend, the credit is due to my parents for instilling in me an early love of the Scriptures. If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity."

In speaking at the bicentennial celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Webster declared December 22, 1820:

"Lastly, our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be trusted on any other foundation than religious principle, nor any government be secure which is not supported by moral habits.... Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.

Cultivated mind was to act on uncultivated nature; and more than all, a government and a country were to commence, with the very first foundations laid under the divine light of the Christian religion. Happy auspices of a happy futurity! Who would wish that his country's existence had otherwise begun?

Finally, let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.

Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in full conviction that that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity."

On June 17, 1825, 50 years after the battle, the cornerstone for the Bunker Hill Monument was laid. As the guest speaker, Daniel Webster spoke to a crowd of 20,000 people, of whom the General Marquis de Lafayette was a part:

"We wish that this column, rising towards heaven among the pointed spires of so many temples dedicated to God, may contribute also to produce in all minds a pious feeling of dependence and gratitude.

Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. And by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument not of oppression and terror, but of Wisdom, of Peace, and of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration forever."

On August 2, 1826, in a discourse commemorating Adams and Jefferson at Faneuil Hall, Boston, Webster declared:

"It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, Independence now and Independence forever."

Daniel Webster delivered these words in his second speech on Foote's Resolution, January 26, 1830:

"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States disevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood.

Behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured....

[It does not bear the motto] 'Liberty first and Union afterwards,' but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"

On April 6, 1830, in presenting argument on the murder of Captain White, Webster spoke:

"A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us."

In a speech on June 3, 1834, Webster exclaimed, "God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."

In 1837, speaking on the Constitution, he made an appeal for the Union that soon became famous:

"I regard it as the work of the purest patriots and wisest statesmen that ever existed, aided by the smiles of a benignant Providence; for when we regard it as a system of government growing out of the discordant opinions and conflicting interests of thirteen independent States, it almost appears a Divine interposition in our behalf.... The hand that destroys the Constitution rends our Union asunder forever."

On June 17, 1843, Daniel Webster spoke of the founding father's regard for the Bible in a speech at the Bunker Hill Monument, Charleston, Massachusetts:

"The Bible came with them. And it is not to be doubted, that to free and universal reading of the Bible, in that age, men were much indebted for right views of civil liberty.

The Bible is a book of faith, and a book of doctrine, and a book of morals, and a book of religion, of special revelation from God; but it is also a book which teaches man his own individual responsibility, his own dignity, and his equality with his fellow-man.

Thank God! I also am an American!"

Webster stated:

"If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, error will be;

If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendancy; If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will;

If the power of the Gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end.

If we work on marble, it will perish; if on brass, time will efface it; if we rear up temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and imbue them with principles, with the just fear of God and the love of our fellow men, we engrave on those tablets something that will brighten to all eternity.

The Lord's Day is the day on which the Gospel is preached... And although we live in a reading age and in a reading community, yet the preaching of the Gospel is the human agency which has been and still is most efficaciously employed for the spiritual good of men. That the poor had the Gospel preached to them was an evidence of His mission which the Author of Christianity Himself proclaimed.

I believe that the Bible is to be understood and received in the plain and obvious meaning of its passages; for I cannot persuade myself that a book intended for the instruction and conversion of the whole world should cover its true meaning in any such mystery and doubt that none but critics and philosophers can discover it.

I shall stand by the Union, and by all who stand by it. I shall do justice to the whole country... In all I say, and act for the good of the whole country in all I do. I mean to stand upon the Constitution. I need no other platform. I shall know but one country. The ends I aim at shall be my country's, my God's, and Truth's. I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American; and I intend to perform the duties incumbent upon me in that character to the end of my career."

In a discussion, being seated in a drawing-room, Daniel Webster laid his hand on a copy of the Holy Scriptures and proclaimed:

"This is the Book. I have read the Bible through many times, and now make it a practice to read it through once every year. It is a book of all others for lawyers, as well as divines; and I pity the man who cannot find in it a rich supply of thought and of rules for conduct. It fits man for life... it prepares him for death.

My brother knew the importance of Bible truths. The Bible led him to prayer, and prayer was his communion with God. On the day he died he was engaged in an important cause in the courts then in session. But this cause, important as it was, did not keep him from his duty to God. He found time for prayer; for on his desk which he had just left was found a prayer written by him on that day, which for fervent piety, a devotedness to his heavenly Master, and for expressions of humility I think was never excelled."

In stating his convictions, Webster declared:

"The Gospel is either true history, or it is a consummate fraud; it is either a reality or an imposition. Christ was what He professed to be, or He was an imposter. There is no other alternative. His spotless life in His earnest enforcement of the truth His suffering in its defense, forbid us to suppose that He was suffering an illusion of a heated brain. Every act of His pure and holy life shows that He was the author of truth, the advocate of truth, the earnest defender of truth, and the uncompromising sufferer for truth.

Now, considering the purity of His doctrines, the simplicity of His life, and the sublimity of His death, is it possible that he would have died for an illusion? In all His preaching the Saviour made no popular appeals; His discourses were always directed to the individual.

Christ and His apostles sought to impress upon every man the conviction that he must stand or fall alone he must live for himself, and die for himself, and give up his account to the omniscient God as though he were the only dependent creature in the universe.

The Gospel leaves the individual sinner alone with himself and his God. To his own Master he stands or falls. He has nothing to hope from the aid and sympathy of associates. The deluded advocates of new doctrines do not so preach. Christ and His apostles, had they been deceivers, would not so have preached. If clergymen in our days would return to the simplicity of the Gospel, and preach more to individuals and less to the crowd, there would not be so much complaint of the decline of true religion.

Many of the ministers of the present day take their text from St. Paul, and preach from the newspapers. When they do so, I prefer to enjoy my own thoughts rather than to listen. I want my Pastor to come to me in the spirit of the Gospel, saying: "You are mortal! Your probation is brief; your work must be done speedily; you are immortal, too. You are hastening to the bar of God; the Judge standeth at the door." When I am thus admonished, I have no disposition to muse or to sleep."

In a speech, July 4, 1851, Webster expounded:

"Let the religious element in man's nature be neglected, let him be influenced by no higher motives than low self-interest, and subjected to no stronger restraint than the limits of civil authority, and he becomes the creature of selfish passion or blind fanaticism.

On the other hand, the cultivation of the religious sentiment represses licentiousness... Inspires respect for law and order, and gives strength to the whole social fabric, at the same time that it conducts the human soul upward to the Author of its being."

When asked the question "What is the greatest thought that ever passed through your mind?" Daniel Webster responded, "My accountability to God."

On October 10, 1852, just two weeks before he died, Mr. Webster dictated what he desired to be engraved as an epitaph upon his tomb: "LORD, I BELIEVE; HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF."

Lewis Cass (1782-1866), was an American soldier, lawyer, politician and diplomat. After serving in the War of 1812, he became the Governor-General of the Territory of Michigan, where he made treaties with the Indians, organized townships and built roads. He was a United States Senator, Secretary of State under President James Buchanan and the Democratic Candidate for the Presidency in 1848. Cass stated:

"Independent of its connection with human destiny hereafter, the fate of republican government is indissolubly bound up with the fate of the Christian religion, and a people who reject its holy faith will find themselves the slaves of their own evil passions and of arbitrary power."

In a letter dated at Washington, 1846, he adds:

God, in His providence, has given us a Book of His revealed will to be with us at the commencement of our career in this life and at its termination; and to accompany us during all chances and changes of this trying and fitful progress, to control the passions, to enlighten the judgment, to guide the conscience, to teach us what we ought to do here, and what we shall be hereafter.

James Knox Polk (1795-1849), was the 11th President of the United States of America. In his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1845, President James Knox Polk expressed:

"I enter upon the discharge of the high duties which have been assigned to me by the people, again humbly supplicating that Divine Being, who has watched over and protected our beloved country from its infancy to the present hour, to continue His gracious benedictions upon us, that we may continue to be prosperous and happy people....

I fervently invoke the aid of that Almighty Ruler of the Universe in whose hands are the destinies of nations."

Zachary Taylor (1784-1850), the 12th President of the United States, was a military hero of both the Mexican War and the War of 1812. On February 14, 1849, a delegation of ladies from Frankfurt, Kentucky presented President Taylor with a beautifully bound Bible and a copy of the Constitution of the United States. He sent a message acknowledging their kindness, which was printed in the Frankfort Commonwealth, February 21, 1849:

I accept with gratitude and pleasure your gift of this inestimable Volume. It was for the love of the truths of this great Book that our fathers abandoned their native shores for the wilderness. Animated by its lofty principles they toiled and suffered till the desert blossomed as a rose.

The same truths sustained them in their resolutions to become a free nation; and guided by the wisdom of this Book they founded a government under which we have grown from three millions to more than twenty millions of people, and from being but a stock on the borders of this Continent we have spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

I trust that their principles of liberty may extend, if without bloodshed, from the northern to the southern extremities of the Continent. If there were in that Book nothing but its great precept, "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them," and if that precept were obeyed, our government might extend over the whole Continent.

Accept... My sincere thanks for the kind manner in which you have discharged this duty; and expressing again my hearty gratitude to the ladies for their beautiful gift, I pray that health, peace, and prosperity may long be continued to them.

John McLean (1785-1861), was a Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1829 until 1861. He had previously served as a U.S. Congressman from Ohio, an Ohio Supreme Court Judge, and the U.S. Postmaster General.

On November 4, 1852, in a letter from Chapel Wood, McLean wrote to the American Bible Society:

No one can estimate or describe the salutary influence of the Bible. What would the world be without it? Compare the dark places of the earth, where the light of the Gospel has not penetrated, with those where it has been proclaimed and embraced in all its purity. Life and immortality are brought to light by the Scriptures.

Aside from Revelation, darkness rests upon the world and upon the future. There is no ray of light to shine upon our pathway; there is no star of hope. We begin our speculations as to our destiny in conjecture, and they end in uncertainty. We know not that there is a God, a heaven, or a hell, or any day of general account, when the wicked and the righteous shall be judged.

The Bible has shed a glorious light upon the world. It shows us that in the coming day we must answer for the deeds done in the body. It has opened us to a new and living way, so plainly marked out that no one can mistake it. The price paid for our redemption shows the value of our immortal souls.

Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), one the greatest American preachers of the early 19th century, was an educator, author and the president of Oberlin College, Ohio. He believed every human life was valuable and strongly supported giving freedom to the slaves. Under his direction as president, Oberlin College was the first university in America to award college degrees to women and to blacks, as well as being a busy station on the Underground Railroad, which secretly brought slaves to freedom.

His college also graduated the first black woman ever in the United States with a bachelor's degree, Mary Jane Patterson. His famous Lectures on Revivals, 1835, had a powerful impact in England, profoundly affecting George Williams, who went on to found the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), 1844, as well as inspiring William and Catherine Booth, who founded The Salvation Army, 1865.

Charles G. Finney helped form the Benevolent Empire, which was a great network of volunteer societies organized to aid in solving social problems.

Among them were the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810, American Bible Society, 1816, American Sunday School Union, 1817, American Tract Society, 1826, American Home Mission Society, 1826, and American Temperance Society, 1826. By 1834, the budget of these organizations was almost as large as the federal budget of that time.  Charles Finney said concerning the Kingdom of God: "Every member must work or quit. No honorary members."

He declared:

"The church must take right ground in regards to politics.... The time has come for Christians to vote for honest men, and take consistent ground in politics or the Lord will curse them...

God cannot sustain this free and blessed country, which we love and pray for, unless the Church will take right ground. Politics are a part of a religion in such a country as this, and Christians must do their duty to their country as a part of their duty to God...

God will bless or curse this nation according to the course Christians take in politics."

Francis Wayland (1796-1865), was the president of Brown University, 1827-55, and the 1st president of the American Institute of Instruction, 1830, having been instrumental in devising the school system for Providence, Rhode Island. A graduate of Union College and Harvard University, Francis Wayland wrote: Elements of Moral Science, 1835, Elements of Political Economy, 1837, Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States, 1842, and A Memoir of the Life of the Rev. Adoniram Judson, D. D., 1842.

As a well recognized American clergyman, Francis Wayland stated:

"That the truths of the Bible have the power of awakening an intense moral feeling in every human being; that they make bad men good, and send a pulse of healthful feeling through all the domestic, civil, and social relations;

That they teach men to love right, and hate wrong, and seek each other's welfare as children of a common parent; that they control the baleful passions of the heart, and thus make men proficient in self government;

And finally that they teach man to aspire after conformity to a being of infinite holiness, and fill him with hopes more purifying, exalted, and suited to his nature than any other book the world has ever known these are facts as incontrovertible as the laws of philosophy, or the demonstrations of mathematics."

Franklin Pierce (1804-1869), the 14th President of the United States, asserted in his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1853:

"Recognizing the wisdom of the broad principles of absolute religious toleration proclaimed in our fundamental law, and rejoicing in the benign influence which it has exerted upon our social and political condition, I should shrink from a clear duty if I failed to express my deepest conviction that we can place no secure reliance upon any apparent progress if it be not sustained by national integrity, resting upon the great truths affirmed and illustrated by Divine Revelation."

He concluded the address at his inauguration by acknowledging his, "Dependence upon God and His overruling providence."

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865, assassinated), was the 16th President of the United States of America. Under his courageous leadership, America survived the Civil War and remained the "United States."

A man of highest moral character, nicknamed "Honest Abe," Abraham Lincoln never lost touch with the common people. From being raised in a log cabin, clearing land and splitting rails, Lincoln taught himself law, gained a respected reputation as a lawyer, and became the Eighth Circuit Judge in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln had been elected to the Illinois State Legislature, to the United States Congress, and, after becoming a national figure through debating against Stephen A. Douglas' pro-slavery bill, he was nominated as the Republican candidate for President.

Only one week after being inaugurated as President, the southern states formed the Confederacy, and within a month the Civil War had begun, with the Confederate Army firing on Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861. The Civil War ended four years later, April 9, 1865, with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. By the conclusion of the war, over a half million men had died, which is more than the combined casualties of all other wars America has been in to date.

In 1846, when Lincoln was running for Congress from the seventh district of Illinois, a rumor began to spread that Lincoln was not a Christian. In response to this, Lincoln made a public statement, published in the Illinois Gazette, August 15, 1846, which read:

"That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.... I do not think I could, myself, be brought to support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at religion."

On July 10, 1858, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in a debate with Stephen A. Douglas:

"It is said in one of the admonitions of our Lord, "As your Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect." The Saviour, I suppose, did not expect that any human being could be perfect as the Father in Heaven; but He said, "As your Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect." He set that up as a standard, and He who did most toward reaching that standard attained the highest degree of moral perfection."

On September 11, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Edwardsville, Illinois:

"Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you."

On February 11, 1861, newly elected President Abraham Lincoln delivered a farewell speech to his home state in Springfield, Illinois as he left for Washington, D. C.:

"I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well."

On February 23, 1861, Abraham Lincoln replied to William Dodge:

With the support of the people and the assistance of the Almighty, I shall undertake to perform it....

Freedom is the natural condition of the human race, in which the Almighty intended men to live. Those who fight the purpose of the Almighty will not succeed. They always have been, they always will be, beaten.

In his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, President Lincoln commented on his disagreement with the recent 1857 Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, wherein Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decided that slaves were not persons or citizens, but were the property of the owner, the same as their body, horse, cattle, etc., And the owner had the freedom of choice to decide what they wanted to do with their own property:

"I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court.... At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made... The people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having... Resigned their Government into the hands of the eminent tribunal....

Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty."

In December of 1862, President Lincoln related to J. A. Reed:

I hold myself in my present position and with the authority vested in me as an instrument of Providence. I have my own views and purposes, I have my convictions of duty, and my notions of what is right to be done. But I am conscious every moment that all I am and all I have is subject to the control of a Higher Power, and that Power can use me or not use me in any manner, and at any time, as in His wisdom and might may be pleasing to Him.

Near the end of December, 1862, Lincoln spoke with Reverend Byron Sunderland, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Washington, D.C., where Lincoln had attended. He shared:

"The ways of God are mysterious and profound beyond all comprehension 'Who by searching can find Him out?' God only knows the issue of this business. He has destroyed nations from the map of history for their sins. Nevertheless, my hopes prevail generally above my fears for our Republic. The times are dark, the spirits of ruin are abroad in all their power, and the mercy of God alone can save us."

On March 30, 1863, President Lincoln issued an historic Proclamation Appointing a National Fast Day:

Whereas, the Senate of the United States devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation:

And whereas, it is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history: that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord:

And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisement in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.

Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Now, therefore, in compliance with the request and fully concurring in the view of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer.

And I do hereby request all the people to abstain on that day from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.

All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high and answered with blessing no less than the pardon of our national sins and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. By the President: Abraham Lincoln.

In June of 1863, just weeks before the Battle of Gettysburg, a college President asked Lincoln if he thought the country would survive. President Lincoln replied:

"I do not doubt that our country will finally come through safe and undivided. But do not misunderstand me.... I do not rely on the patriotism of our people... The bravery and devotion of the boys in blue... (Or) the loyalty and skill of our generals....

But the God of our fathers, Who raised up this country to be the refuge and asylum of the oppressed and downtrodden of all nations, will not let it perish now. I may not live to see it... I do not expect to see it, but God will bring us through safe."

On October 3, 1863, President Lincoln issued a formal proclamation, passed by an Act of Congress, initiating the first annual National Day of Thanksgiving:

No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy...

I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.... [It is] announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord....

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people.

On November 19, 1863, Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address. The Battle of Gettysburg, consisting of three intense days of fighting with over 50,000 deaths, was the beginning of the end for the valiant Confederate Army. His ten line speech of 267 words, has become world renowned and is engraved in stone in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.:

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged on a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

On October 21, 1864, President Lincoln issued the second annual Day of National Thanksgiving on the last Thursday, in November:

And I do further recommend to my fellow-citizens aforesaid, that on that occasion they do reverently humble themselves in the dust, and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the great Disposer of events for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land which it has pleased Him to assign as a dwelling-place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations.

In his Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, just 45 days before his assassination, Lincoln gave his historic speech reflecting on the War between the North and the South:

"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained....

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.'

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God will that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

On April 14, 1865, just five days after the Civil War had ended, Abraham Lincoln went to Ford's theatre with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. She recalled his last words as they sat there:

He said he wanted to visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footprints of the Saviour. He was saying there was no city he so much desired to see as Jerusalem.

And with the words half spoken on his tongue, the bullet of the assassin entered the brain, and the soul of the great and good President was carried by the angels to the New Jerusalem above.

Various statements made by Abraham Lincoln are as follows:

"Here without contemplating consequences, before High Heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love.... Let none falter, who thinks he is right, and we may succeed."

"I have always taken Counsel of Him, and referred to Him my plans, and have never adopted a course of proceeding without being assured, as far as I could be, of His approbation."

"Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day. No, no, man was made for immortality."

"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."

"The only assurance of our nation's safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion."

"Whenever any church will inscribe over its altar as a qualification for membership the Savior's statement of the substance of the law and gospel, 'Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and soul."

"The character of the Bible is easily established, at least to my satisfaction. We have to believe many things which we do not comprehend. The Bible is the only history that claims to be God's Book to comprise His laws, His history. It contains an immense amount of evidence as to its authenticity....

Now let us treat the Bible fairly. If we had a witness on the stand whose general story was true, we would believe him even when he asserted the facts of which we have no other evidence. We ought to treat the Bible with equal fairness. I decided long ago that it was less difficult to believe that the Bible was what it claimed to be than to disbelieve it."

"No man is poor who has had a godly mother."

William Henry Seward (1801-1872), was Governor of the State of New York, 1839-43, a U.S. Senator 1849-61, and Secretary of State under President Lincoln during the War between the States, 1861-65.

Lincoln's assassins also attempted to kill him, as one of John Wilkes Booth's accomplices broke into Seward's home and wounded him. He later served as Secretary of State under President Andrew Johnson, 1865-69, when he worked to implement the "reconstruction" in the South.

Among his accomplishments was the negotiation of the purchase of Alaska from Russia, 1867, which was at the time mockingly called "Seward's Folly", as the land was thought to be of no use, though later it proved to be of tremendous benefit.

William Henry Seward stated:

"I do not believe human society, including not merely a few persons in any state, but whole masses of men, ever have attained, or ever can attain, a high state of intelligence, virtue, security, liberty, or happiness without the Holy Scriptures; even the whole hope of human progress is suspended on the ever-growing influence of the Bible."

Seward gave an oration titled, “The Destiny of America,” in which he stated:

"Shall we look to the sacred desk? Yes, indeed; for it is of Divine institution, and is approved by human experience. The ministers of Christ, inculcating Divine morals, under Divine authority, with Divine sanction, and sustained and aided by special cooperating influences of the Divine Spirit, are now carrying further and broadly onward the great work of the renewal of the civilization of the world, and its emancipation from superstition and despotism."

In 1836, as vice-president of the American Bible Society, William Henry Seward expressed:

"I know not how long a republican government can flourish among a great people who have not the Bible; the experiment has never been tried; but this I do know: that the existing government of this country never could have had existence but for the Bible.

And, further, I do, in my conscience, believe that if at every decade of years a copy of the Bible could be found in every family in the land its republican institutions would be perpetuated."

Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), the 17th President of the United States, 1865-1869, had been President Abraham Lincoln's Vice-President, assuming the office when Lincoln was shot. He continued Lincoln's plan of Reconstruction of the South and pardoned those who had seceded. Johnson had also been a state representative, a U.S. Congressman, Governor of Tennessee and a U.S. Senator.  He stated:

"I do believe in Almighty God! And I believe also in the Bible. Duties have been mine; consequences are God's.

Let us look forward to the time when we can take the flag of our country and nail it below the Cross, and there let it wave as it waved in the olden times, and let us gather around it and inscribed for our motto: "Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever," and exclaim, Christ first, our country next!

Is there a crusade to be commenced against the Church to satiate disappointed party vengeance? Are the persecutions of olden times to be revived? Are the ten thousand temples that have been erected, based upon the sufferings and atonement of our crucified Saviour, with their glittering spires wasting themselves in the very heavens, all to topple and to fall, crushed and buried beneath the ravings of party excitement? Is man to be set upon man, and in the name of God lift his hand against the throat of his fellow?...

Are the fires of heaven that have been lighted up by the Cross, and now burning upon so many altars consecrated to the true and living God, to be quenched in the blood of their innocent and defenseless worshipers, and the gutters of our streets made to flow with human gore? This is but a faint reality of what is shadowed forth in the gentleman's speech."

Salmon Portland Chase (1808-1873), the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Lincoln, also served as the Governor of Ohio, a U.S. Senator and was appointed by President Lincoln as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was a strong opponent of slavery, defending so many escaped slaves when he first started practicing law, that he was given the nickname "attorney-general of fugitive slaves."

On November 20, 1861, Secretary of the Treasury Chase wrote to the Director of the Mint in Philadelphia:

No nation can be strong except in the strength of God or safe except in His defense. The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins.

You will cause a device to be prepared without unnecessary delay with a motto expressing in the fewest and tersest words possible this national recognition.

On December 9, 1863, Secretary of the Treasury, S. P. Chase, wrote again to the Director of the Mint, James Pollock:

I approve your mottos, only suggesting that on that with the Washington obverse, the motto should begin with the word "Our," so as to read:

"Our God and our Country." And on that with the shield, it should be changed so as to read: "In God We Trust."

On March 3, 1865, the Congress of the United States of America, approved the Treasury Secretary Salmon Portland Chase's instruction to the U.S. Mint to prepare a "device" to inscribe US coins with the motto: In God We Trust.

Chase declared:

Give me solid and substantial religion; give me an humble, gentle lover of God and man; a man full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy; a man laying himself out in the works of faith, the patience of hope, the labor of love. Let my soul be with those Christians, wheresoever they are, and whatsoever opinion they are of.

When shall I be thoroughly imbued with a humble, self-denying, holy spirit? O Lord, my Saviour, do Thou assist and teach me!...

Today I rose too late; attended private and family prayers; afterwards read several chapters in Leviticus, having again began to read the Scriptures in course, intending to read the Old Testament in private, and the New with the family. It is my deliberate opinion that all the writings of all moral and political writers do not contain so much practical wisdom, whether applicable to state or persons.

Jeremiah Sullivan Black (1810-1883), the United States Attorney General under President Buchanan, who, in August, 1881, wrote in the North American Review:

As a matter of fact, Jesus Christ died that sinners might be reconciled to God, and in that sense He died for them; that is, to furnish them with the means of averting Divine justice, which their crimes had provoked.

A man who, by any contrivance, causes his own offense to be visited on the head of an innocent person is unspeakably depraved. But are Christians guilty of this baseness, because they accept the blessings of an institution which their great Benefactor died to establish?

Loyalty to the King who erected a most magnificent government for us at the cost of His life fidelity to the Master who bought us with His blood is not the fraudulent substitution in place of the criminal.

Henry Wilson (1812-1875), was a U.S. Senator, 1855-72, and Vice-President under Ulysses S. Grant, 1873-75. He took a strong stand against slavery, and in 1848 he helped found the Free Soil Party. Henry Wilson declared:

"Men who see not God in our history have surely lost sight of the fact that, from the landing of the Mayflower to this hour, the great men whose names are indissolubly associated with the colonization, rise, and progress of the Republic have borne testimony to the vital truths of Christianity."

On December 23, 1866, in speaking at Natick, Massachusetts to the Young Men's Christian Association, Wilson said:

"God has given us an existence in this Christian republic, founded by men who proclaim as their living faith, amid persecution and exile: 'We give ourselves to the Lord Jesus Christ and the Word of His Grace, for the teaching, ruling and sanctifying of us in matters of worship and conversation.'

Privileged to live in an age when the selectest influences of the religion of our fathers seem to be visibly descending upon our land, we too often hear the Providence of God, the religion of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the inspiration of the Holy Bible doubted, questioned, denied with an air of gracious condescension.

Remember ever, and always, that your country was founded, not by the 'most superficial, the lightest, the most irreflective of all European races,' but by the stern old Puritans who made the deck of the Mayflower an altar of the living God, and whose first act on touching the soil of the new world was to offer on bended knees thanksgiving to Almighty God.

John Armor Bingham (1815-1900), was a U.S. Congressman during the periods of 1855-1863 and 1865-1873. He served as the Judge Advocate at the Trial of President Lincoln's assassin. As well as one of the managers of President Johnson's Impeachment Trial. John Armor Bingham was also the U.S. Minister to Japan from 1873-1885. He stated:

"I was instructed in early youth by precept and example of my father and mother. I hereby became convinced of the truth of Christ's teaching, and of the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. My convictions on this subject must suffice for me; I will not surrender them to any man.

I do not hesitate to say, however, as a strong belief of mine, that Christ, by His living and His dying and His reappearance after crucifixion brought life and immortality to light. It seems to me not to be a question that the Christ of the New Testament lived and will live forevermore.

My inner consciousness teaches me that in His discourse on the Mount He is chiefly revealed to be more than a man, and that He was and is Divine."

Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), was the 18th President of the United States of America and Union General-in-Chief during the Civil War. He received General Robert E. Lee's surrender in 1865.

On June 6, 1876, President Grant wrote from Washington to the Editor of the Sunday School Times in Philadelphia:

Your favor of yesterday asking a message from me to the children and the youth of the United States, to accompany your Centennial number, is this morning received.

My advice to Sunday schools, no matter what their denomination, is: Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts, and practice them in your lives.

To the influence of this Book are we indebted for all the progress made in true civilization, and to this must we look as our guide in the future. "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people."

General Grant stated:

"I believe in the Holy Scriptures, and whoso lives by them will be benefitted thereby. Men may differ as to the interpretation, which is human, but the Scriptures are man's best guide....

I did not go riding yesterday, although invited and permitted by my physicians, because it was the Lord's day, and because I felt that if a relapse should set in, the people who are praying for me would feel that I was not helping their faith by riding out on Sunday....

Yes, I know, and I feel very grateful to the Christian people of the land for their prayers in my behalf. There is no sect or religion, as shown in the Old or New Testament, to which this does not apply."

John Jay (1817-1894), was a lawyer, diplomat, the son of Judge William Jay. His grandfather , John Jay, was a Founding Father who became the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was the manager of the New York Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, secretary of the Irish Relief Commission during the potato famine in 1847, U.S. Minister to Austria, 1869-75, and the vice-president of the Civil Service Reform Association of the State of New York.

He served as the president of the American Historical Society, 1890, as well as being an active member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design. Jay authored many papers, including: "America Free or America Slave," 1856, "On the Passage of the Constitutional Amendment," 1864, and "Abolishing Slavery," 1864.

In 1887, being the president of the Westchester County Bible Society, John Jay delivered his message "National Perils and Opportunities":

"'It is high time to wake out of sleep!' This gathering of citizens from distant parts, representing the millions who hold to the Bible, and cherish the institutions founded upon its inspired truths, shows that the nation is awakening to the perils, foreign and domestic, which threatens the purity of its Christian civilization.

Its intellectual and moral strength in our Revolutionary struggle were recognized by the world, and Burke rightly attributed that strength to the character of the emigrants from various lands exhibiting 'the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.'

They brought with them the best and most heroic blood of the peoples of Europe of the Hollanders, the Waloons of Flanders, the Huguenots of France, the English, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish, of the Norwegians and Swedes, the Germans and the Swiss, of the Bohemian followers of John Hus, of the Albigenses and Waldenses of the Italian Alps, of the Salzbury exiles, the Moravian brothers, with refugees from the Pallatinate, Alsace and southern Germany.

They all brought the Bible, for which they and their ancestors had been ready to suffer and to die; and their devotion to that Book descended to the Continental Congress, which, a week before it was driven from Philadelphia, ordered an importation of twenty thousand Bibles.

At the Centennial celebration, at Philadelphia, of the Declaration of Independence, the Acting Vice-President, Ferry, said that the American statesmen who had to choose between the royal authority or popular sovereignty had been inspired by the truth uttered on Mars Hill, and repeated in the opening prayer of the morning, that 'God hath made of one blood all nations of men.'"

Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822-1893), the 19th President of the United States, had served as a major-general in the Civil War, a U.S. Congressman and a three-term governor of Ohio. In his Inaugural Address, March 5, 1877, Hayes acknowledged he was:

Looking for the guidance of that Divine Hand by which the destinies of nations and individuals are shaped.

President Hayes declared:

"I am a firm believer in the Divine teachings, perfect example, and atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. I believe also in the Holy Scriptures as the revealed Word of God to the world for its enlightenment and salvation."

Schuyler Colfax (1823-1885), who was the Vice-President under Ulysses S. Grant, had also served seven terms as a U.S. Congressman, as Speaker of the House from 1863-1869 and founded the Daughters of Rebekah.  He said:

"Man derives his greatest happiness not by that which he does for himself, but by what he accomplishes for others. This is a sad world at best a world of sorrow, of suffering, of injustice, and falsification; men stab those whom they hate with the stiletto of slander, but it is for the followers of our Lord to improve it, and to make it more as Christ would have it. The most precious crown of fame that a human being can ask is to kneel at the bar of God and hear the beautiful words, 'Well done, good and faithful servant.'

Just fifty years ago this fall, in a large city by the seashore, nearly a thousand miles from here, a lady, whose husband was dead, took her little boy by the hand, and led him to the Sabbath-school.

For thirty years afterwards he was a scholar or a teacher of the Sabbath-school, and he has never forgotten those instructions of youth. The lady who took her little boy to that Sunday-school is now in a happier land, but the boy is still living.

That lady was my beloved mother, who is with her Father and Saviour in heaven, and that little boy was myself. Today I come to this school with my little boy, and his mother with us, that we may place his imperfect steps in the path in which my mother placed my little feet half a century ago.

Alfred Holt Colquitt (1824-1894), was a U.S. Senator and Governor of Georgia, as well as an orator and statesman. On December 7, 1887, in Washington, Alfred Holt Colquitt remarked at the Evangelical Alliance:

"I believe it is the mission of the ministers today, and of Christian laymen in this land, to go out into the fields and highways and meet the enemies that are seeking to place barriers in the way of Christian civilization to meet the foe as he comes.

Religion and politics ought to be wedded like a loving pair. The spirit of our Master, who preached peace, should preside at our diplomatic councils. The love of our neighbor and of our friends these should be the bases, not only of our Christianity and our patriotism, but of our daily politics.

I like to hear learned sermons and magnificent discourses appeals purely to the intellect abstract and abstruse ideas, and all that. But looking at the masses of mankind, and reviewing from the standpoint which I occupy, it is clear to me that there is a mission given to every lover of Christ to stand forth as the propagator of that religion which tempers the politics and statesmanship of this country."

James Abram Garfield (1831-1881 assassinated), was the 20th President of the United States of America, and after only serving four months he was shot, becoming the fourth President to die in office.

James Garfield had been a remarkable teacher at Hiram College in Ohio and, at the age of 26, he was chosen as the College's president. It was there that he studied law and preached an occasional sermon for the Disciples of Christ, the church of which he was a member. Garfield was strongly anti-slavery, and at the outbreak of the Civil War was made a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army. After a defeating a superior Confederate force, he was promoted to brigadier general, then to major-general.

While still in the military, he was elected to Congress, taking the position at the wishes of President Lincoln. On April 15, 1865, after overcoming the shock of Lincoln's assassination, James Garfield exhorted his countrymen in a speech given in New York:

"Fellow citizens! God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives!"

After serving in Congress 18 years, Garfield was elected as a senator from Ohio. A truly unusual turn of circumstances occurred when he was asked to give the nomination speech for John Sherman at the opening of the Republican Convention in 1880. His speech received such a standing ovation, that the convention decided to nominate him instead of John Sherman. James Abram Garfield, who was elected President in 1881, proclaimed:

"Now more that ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature....

If the next centennial does not find us a great nation... It will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces."

Francis Marion Cockrell (1834-1915), was a U.S. Senator from Missouri for five consecutive terms, from 1875 to 1910. He declared in 1875:

"Christianity is a reality, not an appearance. Were it a myth devised by cunning impostors, it would have come to naught before this. It has done more to fraternize the races than all human systems of religion together. The Bible is supreme over all books. Beside it there is none other. Its Divine truths meet the wants of a world-wide humanity."

Stephen Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), served as both the 22nd and 24th President of the United States, the Governor of New York and the Mayor of Buffalo. In his Inaugural Address on March 4, 1885, he stated:

"And let us not trust to human effort alone, but humbly acknowledge the power and goodness of Almighty God who presides over the destiny of nations, and who has at all times been revealed in our country's history, let us invoke His aid and His blessings upon our labors.... I know there is a Supreme Being who rules the affairs of men."

Charles W. Skelton reported President Cleveland's response to a conflict with the Indians:

At the close of the Mohonk Conference, our Committee went to President Cleveland to petition him regarding certain methods. He said that he sympathized with our plans and ideas; "but," he continued, "gentlemen, you may do all you can at Mohonk; I may do all I can here in the White House, and Congress may do all it can over there, but," (and he then turned and picked up a Bible on his desk,) "gentlemen, after all, that Book has got to settle the Indian Problem."

In The Writings and Speeches of Grover Cleveland, Cleveland is quoted saying:

"The citizen is a better business man if he is a Christian gentleman, and, surely, business is not the less prosperous and successful if conducted on Christian principles....

All must admit that the reception of the teachings of Christ results in the purest patriotism, in the most scrupulous fidelity to public trust, and in the best type of citizenship.

Those who manage the affairs of government are by this means reminded that the law of God demands that they should be courageously true to the interests of the people, and that the Ruler of the Universe will require of them a strict account of their stewardship.

The teachings of both human and Divine law thus merging into one word, duty, form the only union of Church and state that a civil and religious government can recognize."

Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901), the 23rd President of the United States of America, was the grandson of the 9th President, William Henry Harrison and the great-grandson of the signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Harrison. He had fought in the Civil War with General Sherman, and was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. He was also a successful lawyer, a Republican party leader and a U.S. Senator. President Benjamin Harrison prayed for: "Favor and help from Almighty God."

He once wrote to his son Russell:

It is a great comfort to trust God even if His providence is unfavorable. Prayer steadies one, when he is walking in slippery places even if things asked for are not given.

David Josiah Brewer (1837-1910), who was a Justice of the United State Supreme Court, gave the court's opinion in the 1892 case of Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, (143 U.S. 457-458, 465-471, 36 L ed 226):

Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.

No purpose of action against religion can be imputed to any legislation, state or national, because this is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation.

The commission to Christopher Columbus.... [Recited] that it is hoped that by God's assistance some of the continents and islands in the ocean will be discovered...

The first colonial grant made to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584.... And the grant authorizing him to enact statutes for the government of the proposed colony provided that they be not against the true Christian faith...

The first charter of Virginia, granted by King James I in 1606.... Commenced the grant in these words: "... In propagating of Christian Religion to such People as yet live in Darkness..."

Language of similar import may be found in the subsequent charters of that colony.... In 1609 and 1611; and the same is true of the various charters granted to the other colonies. In language more or less emphatic is the establishment of the Christian religion declared to be one of the purposes of the grant. The celebrated compact made by the Pilgrims in the Mayflower, 1620, recites:

"Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith.... A voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia..."

The fundamental orders of Connecticut, under which a provisional government was instituted in 1638-1639, commence with this declaration: ".... And well knowing where a people are gathered together the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union.... There should be an orderly and decent government established according to God.... To maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus which we now profess.... Of the said gospel [which] is now practiced amongst us."

In the charter of privileges granted by William Penn to the province of Pennsylvania, in 1701, it is recited: ".... No people can be truly happy, though under the greatest enjoyment of civil liberties, if abridged of.... Their religious profession and worship..."

Coming nearer to the present time, the Declaration of Independence recognizes the presence of the Divine in human affairs in these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.... Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.... And for the support of this Declaration, with firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

...We find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth.... Because of a general recognition of this truth [that we are a Christian nation], the question has seldom been presented to the courts...

There is no dissonance in these declarations. There is a universal language pervading them all, having one meaning; they affirm and reaffirm that this is a religious nation. These are not individual sayings, declarations of private persons: they are organic utterances; they speak the voice of the entire people.

While because of a general recognition of this truth the question has seldom been presented to the courts, yet we find that in Updegraph v. The Commonwealth, it was decided that, Christianity, general Christianity, is, and always has been, a part of the common law.... Not Christianity with an established church.... But Christianity with liberty of conscience to all men.

And in The People v. Ruggles, Chancellor Kent, the great commentator on American law, speaking as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, said:

The people of this State, in common with the people of this country, profess the general doctrines of Christianity, as the rule of their faith and practice.... We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity, and not upon the doctrines or worship of those impostors [other religions].

And in the famous case of Vidal v. Girard's Executors, this Court.... Observed:

It is also said, and truly, that the Christian religion is a part of the common law...

If we pass beyond these matters to a view of American life as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs and its society, we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. Among other matters note the following: The form of oath universally prevailing, concluding with an appeal to the Almighty; the custom of opening sessions of all deliberative bodies and most conventions with prayer; the prefatory words of all wills,...

"In the name of God, amen"; the laws respecting the observance of the Sabbath, with the general cessation of all secular business, and the closing of courts, legislatures, and other similar public assemblies on that day; the churches and church organizations which abound in every city, town and hamlet; the multitude of charitable organizations existing everywhere under Christian auspices; the gigantic missionary associations, with general support, and aiming to establish Christian missions in every quarter of the globe.

These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.... We find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth.

The happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality.

Religion, morality, and knowledge [are] necessary to good government, the preservation of liberty, and the happiness of mankind.

Associate Justice David Josiah Brewer sharing his views, declared:

"I Believe in Jesus Christ as the great Helper, Comforter and Saviour of humanity, and the Holy Bible as bearing to us the story of his mission, the rules of duty, the revelation of Eternal Life, and also the conditions under which the attainment of that life are possible.

  No Book contains more truths, or is more worthy of confidence than the Bible; none brings more joy to the sorrowing, more strength to the weak, or more stimulus to the nobly ambitious; none makes life sweeter, or death easier or less sad."

William McKinley (1843-1901, assassinated), was the 25th President of the United States of America. His administration was responsible for America becoming a world power after the victory of the Spanish-American War, through annexing of the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine Islands. Under his administration the United States was given the permanent lease of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the Panama Canal was being planned, and the Boxer Rebellion was put down in China.

McKinley had a reputation for honesty, as well as great tact, personal charm and a marked religious attitude. He began his career as a Union major in the Civil War, became a lawyer, was elected to the U.S. Congress, and in 1891 became the governor of Ohio. The nation mourned when he was assassinated shortly after the beginning of his second term as president.

On July 4, 1892, in an address to the Baptist Young People's Union in Lakeside, Ohio, Governor William McKinley shared:

"Lincoln, like Washington, illustrated in his administration faith in God. On March 4, 1861, he said: 'Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance upon Him who has never forgotten this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulties.'"

On June 29, 1893, before the First International Convention of the Epworth League in Cleveland, Governor McKinley declared:

"We live to make our Church a power in the land while we love every other Church that exalts our Christ. That broad Christian liberality lies at the basis of your work.... Every organization of this kind demonstrates that Christian character is helpful in every avenue or emergency of life.... The demand of the time is the young man thoroughly grounded in Christianity and its Book."

On July 14, 1894, in Cleveland, Ohio, Governor McKinley stated in a speech to the Christian Endeavor's International Convention:

"There is no currency in this world that passes at such a premium anywhere as good Christian character.... The time has gone by when the young man or the young woman in the United States has to apologize for being a follower of Christ.... No cause but one could have brought together so many people, and that is the cause of our Master."

President William McKinley stated:

"The Christian religion is no longer the badge of weaklings and enthusiasts, but of distinction, enforcing respect."

In respect to the Bible, President McKinley announced:

"The more profoundly we study this wonderful Book, and the more closely we observe its divine precepts, the better citizens we will become and the higher will be our destiny as a nation."

Francis Bellamy (1856-1931), was a minister from Boston, who was ordained in the Baptist Church of Little Falls, New York. He was a member of the staff of The Youth's Companion, which first published his Pledge of Allegiance on September 8, 1892. Public-school children first recited it during the National School Celebration on the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America October 21, 1892, at the dedication of the 1892 Chicago World's Fair. The Pledge was adopted by the 79th Congress on December 28, 1945, as Public Law 287.

The words "under God," taken from Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address -- "... That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth ..." -- were added to the Pledge of Allegiance on June 14, 1954, by a Joint Resolution of Congress, No. 243 (Public Law 83-396). Signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower on June 14, 1954, the pledge states:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

President Eisenhower gave his support to the Congressional Act, which added the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, saying:

"In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource in peace and war."

Eisenhower then stood on the steps of the Capitol Building and recited the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time with the phrase, "one nation under God."

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), the 26th President of the United States, was a soldier, author and Nobel Prize Winner (1906). In his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1901, he expressed, "I reverently invoke for my guidance the direction and favor of Almighty God."

President Theodore Roosevelt stated:

"The true Christian is the true citizen, lofty of purpose, resolute in endeavor, ready for a hero's deeds, but never looking down on his task because it is cast in the day of small things; scornful of baseness, awake to his own duties as well as to his rights, following the higher law with reverence, and in this world doing, all that in his power lies, so that when death comes he may feel that mankind is in some degree better because he lived.

A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education."

On March 4, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in his Second Inaugural Address:

"No people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with the gratitude to the Giver of good who has blessed us."

President Roosevelt, in 1909, said:

"After a week on perplexing problems... It does so rest my soul to come into the house of The Lord and to sing and mean it, 'Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty'.... (My) great joy and glory that, in occupying an exalted position in the nation, I am enabled, to preach the practical moralities of The Bible to my fellow-countrymen and to hold up Christ as the hope and Savior of the world."

In 1909, with grave intuition, he gave this ominous warning:

"Progress has brought us both unbounded opportunities and unbridled difficulties. Thus, the measure of our civilization will not be that we have done much, but what we have done with that much. I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism. The thought of modern industry in the hands of Christian charity is a dream worth dreaming. The thought of industry in the hands of paganism is a nightmare beyond imagining. The choice between the two is upon us."

In 1910, President Theodore Roosevelt gave his message on The New Nationalism:

"The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all citizens. Just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest, capable_ of sound judgement and high ideals, active in public affairs but, first of all, sound in their home life, and, the father and mother of healthy children whom they bring up well just so far, and no further, we may count our civilization a success.

We must have I believe we have already a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything."

President Theodore Roosevelt explained:

"Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally impossible for us to figure ourselves what that life would be if these standards were removed. We would lose almost all the standards by which, we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards towards which we, with more or less resolution, strive to raise ourselves."

In a letter to Sir Edward Grey, written November 15, 1913, Theodore Roosevelt declared:

There is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with "the money touch," but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), was the 28th President of the United States, after having served as the Governor of New Jersey. He was an educator and author, having been the president of Princeton University. In his Inaugural Addresses, March 4, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson recognized God in such expressions as:

"God's own presence.... God helping me.... In God's Providence...."

Woodrow Wilson remarked:

"A man had deprived himself of the best there is in the world who has deprived himself of this, a knowledge of the Bible. When you have read the Bible, you will know it is the Word of God, because you will have found it the key to your own heart, your own happiness and your own duty.

I am sorry for the men who do not read the Bible every day. I wonder why they deprive themselves of the strength and of the pleasure."

On July 4, 1913, President Wilson said, "Here is the nation God has builded by our hands."

Later in 1913, he said:

"A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about...

The Bible... Is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God and spiritual nature and needs of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in the way of peace and salvation.

America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture."

President Wilson stated:

"The history of Liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the powers of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.

There are a good many problems before the American people today, and before me as President, but I expect to find the solution to those problems just in the proportion that I am faithful in the study of the Word of God."

On March 5, 1917, President Wilson said in his Second Inaugural Address:

"I pray God that I may be given the wisdom and prudence to do my duties in the true spirit of this great people."

In 1917, Wilson gave his War Message to Congress. He concluded it by saying:

"To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other."

Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923), was the 29th President of the United States of America. He had been a prominent newspaper editor in Ohio, a state senator and a U.S. Senator. In his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1921, President Harding recognized:

What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

I have always believed in the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, whereby they have become the expression to man of the Word and Will of God.

John Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), was the 30th President of the United States of America during the era known as the "Roaring Twenties," from 1923 until 1929. He held many political offices, first being the mayor of Northhampton, then elected to the state senate, followed by lieutenant governor and, in 1918, he became the governor of Massachusetts. He gained popularity by refusing to allow the police to join unions and go on strike, which would jeopardize public security.  Coolidge was elected Vice-President under Warren G. Harding in the election of 1921.

On Memorial Day, 1923, Vice-President Coolidge, spoke on the motives of the Puritan forefathers:

"They were intent upon establishing a Christian commonwealth in accordance with the principle of self-government. They were an inspired body of men. It has been said that God sifted the nations that He might send choice grain into the wilderness.... Who can fail to see in it the hand of destiny? Who can doubt that it has been guided by a Divine Providence?"

August 3, 1923, upon receiving the news that President Warren G. Harding had died, Vice-President Coolidge, who was visiting his family, was immediately sworn in as President. The official who gave the oath was his father, who happened to be the Justice of the Peace in that township. In his Inaugural address, March 4, 1925, President Coolidge spoke of cherishing:

"The higher state to which she [America] seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not human, but of Divine origin. She cherishes no purpose, save to merit the favor of Almighty God.

America seeks no empires built on blood and forces... She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God."

Concerning America's destiny, Calvin Coolidge once stated:

"If there be a destiny, it is of no avail for us unless we work with it. The ways of Providence will be of no advantage to us unless we proceed in the same direction. If we perceive a destiny in America, if we believe that Providence has been the guide, our own success, our own salvation require that we should act and serve in harmony and obedience.

The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country."

Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964), the 31st President of the United States, was the first president elected out of a business career. He had made a fortune as a mining engineer, and then, at the outbreak of World War I, became the food administrator of the United States. From there he accepted a post on President Harding's cabinet, followed by the presidential nomination by the Republican party. In his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1929, President Herbert Clark Hoover entreated, "I ask the help of Almighty God in this service."

In The Challenge of Liberty, 1934, Herbert Clark Hoover declared:

"While I can make no claim for having introduced the term, "rugged individualism," I should be proud to have invented it. It has been used by American leaders for over a half-century in eulogy of those God-fearing men and women of honesty whose stamina and character and fearless assertion of rights led them to make their own way in life."

Herbert Hoover, in 1943, issued a joint statement along with Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Mrs. William H. Taft, Mrs. Benjamin Harrison, Mrs. Grover Cleveland, Alfred Smith, Alfred Landon, James M. Cox, and John W. Davis:

Menaced by collectivist trends, we must seek revival of our strength in the spiritual foundations which are the bedrock of our republic. Democracy is the outgrowth of the religious conviction of the sacredness of every human life. On the religious side, its highest embodiment is The Bible; on the political side, the Constitution.

President Hoover stated:

"The whole inspiration of our civilization springs from the teachings of Christ and the lessons of the prophets. To read the Bible for these fundamentals is a necessity of American life."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), the 32nd President of the United States, addressed the nation, which had just entered the Great Depression, in his First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933:

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.... We face arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values....

In this dedication of a nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us! May He guide me in the days to come!"

On December 6, 1933, in his address to the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated:

"If I were asked to state the great objective which Church and State are both demanding for the sake of every man and woman and child in this country, I would say that that great objective is ‘a more abundant life.’ "

In a 1935 radio broadcast, Roosevelt declared:

"We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic.... [W] here we have been the truest and most consistent in obeying its precepts, we have attained the greatest measure of contentment and prosperity."

In his Second Inaugural Address on January 20, 1937, he said, "I shall do my utmost... Seeking Divine guidance."

On January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt gave his Four Freedoms Speech to Congress:

"Today, thank God, one hundred and thirty million Americans, in forty-eight States, have forgotten points of the compass in our national unity....

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression....

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way....

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God."

In his Third Inaugural Address on January 20, 1941, he said, "We go forward in the service of our country by the will of God."

On January 25, 1941, President Roosevelt inscribed a moving prologue to a special edition New Testament published by The Gideons. This New Testament (& Psalms), printed by the National Bible Press, Philadelphia, was distributed to the soldiers as they left for service during World War II. The prologue stated:

THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON January 25, 1941

To the Armed Forces:

As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength and now, as always, an aid in attaining the highest aspirations of the human soul.

Very sincerely yours,

(Signed) Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On June 6, 1944, in his address to the nation on the occasion of the famous D-Day invasion of Normandy, France, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated:

  "Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith....

And for us at home - fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them - help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice."

On January 20, 1945, in his Fourth Inaugural Address President Roosevelt said:

"So we pray to Him now for the vision to see our way clearly... To the achievement of His will, to peace on earth."

Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific during World War II, was celebrated for having liberated the Philippine Islands from oppression and for having received the surrender of the Japanese forces in Tokyo Bay on the U.S.S. Missouri, September 3, 1945. A five star general and Commander of the U.N. Forces during the Korean War, General MacArthur recounted:

"History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster."

Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), the 33rd President of the United States of America, made many references to God and the Scriptures in his Inaugural Address, January 20, 1949:

"With God's help the future of mankind will be assured in a world of justice, harmony and peace."

In his first address to Congress, President Truman declared:

"At this moment I have in my heart a prayer. As I have assumed my heavy duties, I humbly pray to Almighty God in the words of King Solomon, "Give therefore Thy servant an understanding heart to judge Thy people that I may discern between good and bad; for who is able to judge this Thy so great a people?" I ask only to be a good and faithful servant of my Lord and my people."

In writing to Pope Pius XII in 1947, President Truman said of America, “This is a Christian nation.”

On January 20, 1949, in his Second Inaugural Address, President Truman declared, "We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God."

In 1950, he stated:

"But all of us at home, at war, wherever we may be are within the reach of God's love and power. We all can pray. We all should pray. We should ask the fulfillment of God's will. We should ask for courage, wisdom, for the quietness of soul which comes alone to them who place their lives in His hands."

President Truman commented on peace:

"Peace is the goal of my life. I'd rather have lasting peace in the world than be President. I wish for peace, I work for peace and I pray for peace continually."

President Truman recorded his favorite prayer:

O Almighty and Everlasting God, Creator of Heaven, Earth and the Universe:

Help me to be, to think, to act what is right, because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me. Give me the ability to be charitable, forgiving and patient with my fellow men help me to understand their motives and their shortcomings even as thou understandest mine! Amen, Amen, Amen.

Truman gave this admonition:

"The fundamental basis of this nation's laws was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don't think we emphasize that enough these days. If we don't have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State!"

William Orville Douglas (1898-1980), was a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In the 1952 case of Zorach v. Clauson, 343 US 306 307 313, Justice Douglas asserted:

"We are a religious people and our institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.... No constitutional requirement makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion and to throw its weight against the efforts to widen the scope of religious influence. The government must remain neutral when it comes to competition between sects...

The First Amendment, however, does NOT say that in every respect there shall be a separation of Church and State. Rather, it studiously defines the manner, the specific ways, in which there shall be no concert or union or dependency one on the other.

That is the common sense of the matter. Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other hostile, suspicious, and even unfriendly....

Municipalities would not be permitted to render police or fire protection to religious groups. Policemen who helped parishioners into their places of worship would violate the Constitution.

Prayers in our legislative halls; the appeals to the Almighty in the messages of the Chief Executive; the proclamation making Thanksgiving Day a holiday; 'so help me God' in our courtroom oaths ---

These and all other references to the Almighty that run through our laws, our public rituals, our ceremonies, would be flouting the First Amendment.

A fastidious atheist or agnostic could even object to the supplication with which the Court opens each session: 'God save the United States and this Honorable Court.'"

Warren Earl Burger (1907- 1995), the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who, on July 5, 1983, delivered the courts opinion in regard to chaplains opening the Legislative sessions with prayer:

"The men who wrote the First Amendment religion clause did not view paid legislative chaplains and opening prayers as a violation of that amendment... The practice of opening sessions with prayer has continued without interruption ever since that early session of Congress.

It can hardly be thought that in the same week the members of the first Congress voted to appoint and pay a chaplain for each House and also voted to approved the draft of the First Amendment... (That) they intended to forbid what they had just declared acceptable.

[Chaplains and prayer] are deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country."

In a 1984 opinion, Chief Justice Burger upheld that the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, did not violate the Constitution by displaying a Nativity scene. Noting that presidential orders and proclamations from Congress have designated Christmas as a national holiday in religious terms since 1789, he wrote:

There is an unbroken history of official acknowledgement by all three branches of government of the role of religion in American life.... The Constitution does not require a complete separation of church and state. It affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions and forbids hostility towards any.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963, assassinated), the 35th President of the United States of America, was the youngest man ever elected to that position. A graduate from Harvard, he served in World War II as a PT boat commander in the Pacific. He was elected as a U.S. Congressman, then as a U.S. Senator. Nominated as the Democratic candidate for president, John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic ever to be elected to the highest executive office. In his Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961, President Kennedy proclaimed, "The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God."

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed in an assassination plot. The speech he was about to deliver concluded with these words:

We in this country, in this generation, are by destiny rather than choice the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of peace on earth, goodwill toward men. That must always be our goal.... For as was written long ago, "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

President Kennedy stated:

"The question for our time is not whether all men are brothers. That question has been answered by God who placed us on this earth together. The question is whether we have the strength and the will to make the brotherhood of man the guiding principle of our daily lives."

Robert C. Byrd (1918-), on June 27, 1962, as a United States Senator from West Virginia, delivered a message in Congress just two days after the Supreme Court declared prayer in schools unconstitutional:

"Inasmuch as our greatest leaders have shown no doubt about God's proper place in the American birthright, can we, in our day, dare do less?...

In no other place in the United States are there so many, and such varied official evidences of deep and abiding faith in God on the part of Government as there are in Washington....

Every session of the House and the Senate begins with prayer. Each house has its own chaplain.

The Eighty-third Congress set aside a small room in the Capitol, just off the rotunda, for the private prayer and meditation of members of Congress. The room is always open when Congress is in session, but it is not open to the public. The room's focal point is a stained glass window showing George Washington kneeling in prayer. Behind him is etched these words from Psalm 16: 1: 'Preserve me, O God, for in Thee do I put my trust.'

Inside the rotunda is a picture of the Pilgrims about to embark from Holland on the sister ship of the Mayflower, the Speedwell. The ship's revered chaplain, Brewster, who later joined the Mayflower, has open on his lap the Bible. Very clear are the words, 'the New Testament according to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.' On the sail is the motto of the Pilgrims, 'In God We Trust, God With Us.'

The phrase, 'In God We Trust,' appears opposite the President of the Senate, who is the Vice-President of the United States. The same phrase, in large words inscribed in the marble, backdrops the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Above the head of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court are the Ten Commandments, with the great American eagle protecting them. Moses is included among the great lawgivers in Herman A MacNeil's marble sculpture group on the east front. The crier who opens each session closes with the words, 'God save the United States and the Honorable Court.'

Engraved on the metal on the top of the Washington Monument are the words: 'Praise be to God.' Lining the walls of the stairwell are such biblical phrases as 'Search the Scriptures,' 'Holiness to the Lord,' 'Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.'

Numerous quotations from Scripture can be found within its [the Library of Congress] walls. One reminds each American of his responsibility to his Maker: 'What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with thy God' (Micah 6: 8).

Another in the lawmaker's library preserves the Psalmist's acknowledgment that all nature reflects the order and beauty of the Creator, 'The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork' (Psalm 19: 1). And still another reference: 'The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not' (John 1: 5).

Millions have stood in the Lincoln Memorial and gazed up at the statue of the great Abraham Lincoln. The sculptor who chiseled the features of Lincoln in granite all but seems to make Lincoln speak his own words inscribed into the walls.

'... That this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.'

At the opposite end, on the north wall, his Second Inaugural Address alludes to 'God,' the 'Bible,' 'providence,' 'the Almighty,' and 'divine attributes.'

It then continues:

As was said 3000 years ago, so it still must be said, 'The judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

On the south banks of Washington's Tidal Basin, Thomas Jefferson still speaks:

'God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.'

These words of Jefferson are a forceful and explicit warning that to remove God from this country will destroy it."

Gerald Rudolph Ford (1913-), became the 38th President of the United States, after replacing the vice-president who resigned, and then the president who resigned. He was the only person to succeed to that office without being elected. Upon assuming office on August 9, 1974, President Gerald Ford entreated:

"I ask you to confirm me as your president with your prayers... God helping me, I will not let you down."

President Gerald Ford, on December 5, 1974, upheld that:

"Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first the most basic expression of Americanism. Thus the founding fathers of America saw it, and thus with God's help, it will continue to be."

James Earl "Jimmy" Carter (1924-), the 39th President of the United States of America, spoke in his Inaugural Address, January 20, 1977, saying:

"Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me just a few years ago, opened to the timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: 'He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God' (Micah 6: 2)..."

On March 16, 1976, in an interview with Robert L. Turner, Jimmy Carter explained:

"We believe that the first time we're born, as children, it's human life given to us; and when we accept Jesus as our Savior, it's a new life. That's what "born again' means."

Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911- ), the 40th President of the United States of America, and the most loved President in modern times said in 1980:

"The time has come to turn to God and reassert our trust in Him for the healing of America... Our country is in need of and ready for a spiritual renewal...."

President Reagan, October 4, 1982, as authorized and requested by a Joint Resolution of the 97th Congress of the United States, designated 1983 as the national "Year of the Bible," stating:

In recognition of both the formative influence the Bible has been for our Nation, and our national need to study and apply the teachings of the Holy Scripture....

The Resolution, Public Law 97-280, declared:

Whereas that renewing our knowledge of and faith in God through Holy Scripture can strengthen us as a nation and a people.... The Bible, the Word of God, has made a unique contribution in shaping the United States as a distinctive and blessed nation.... Deeply held religious convictions springing from the Holy Scriptures led to the early settlement of our Nation.... Biblical teaching inspired concepts of civil government that are contained in our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

In his profound work, titled “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation,” first published in The Human Life Review, 1983, President Ronald Reagan stated:

Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide.

My administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.

On January 25, 1984, in his Second Inaugural Address, President Ronald Reagan explained:

"America was founded by people who believe that God was their rock of safety. I recognize we must be cautious in claiming that God is on our side, but I think it's all right to keep asking if we're on His side."

President Reagan, in December of 1984, gave an address on the occasion of the enactment of the "Equal Access Bill of 1984":

"In 1962, the Supreme Court in the New York prayer case banned the... Saying of prayers. In 1963, the Court banned the reading of the Bible in our public school. From that point on, the courts pushed the meaning of the ruling ever outward, so that now our children are not allowed voluntary prayer.

We even had to pass a law — pass a special law in the Congress  just a few weeks ago —  to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes that a Young Marxist Society, for example, would already enjoy with no opposition....

The 1962 decision opened the way to a flood of similar suits. Once religion had been made vulnerable, a series of assaults were made in one court after another, on one issue after another.

Cases were started to argue against tax-exempt status for churches. Suits were brought to abolish the words 'Under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance, and to remove 'In God We Trust' from public documents and from our currency.

Without God there is no virtue because there is no prompting of the conscience....

Without God there is a coarsening of the society; without God democracy will not and cannot long endure.... If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a Nation gone under.

On January 25, 1988, the 100th Congress of the United States of America, by a Joint Resolution, declared that the first Thursday of each May to be recognized as a National Day of Prayer. Wholly concurring with Congress, President Ronald Reagan placed the bill into law:

{PUBLIC LAW 100-307} MAY 5, 1988 One Hundredth Congress of the United States of America

AT THE SECOND SESSION

Begun and held at the City of Washington on Monday, the twenty-fifth day of January, one thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight

AN ACT

To provide for setting aside the first Thursday in May as the date on which the National Day of Prayer is celebrated.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the joint resolution entitled "Joint Resolution to provide for setting aside an appropriate day as a National Day of Prayer," approved April 17, 1952 (Public Law 82-324; 66 Stat. 64), is amended by striking "a suitable day each year, other than a Sunday," and inserting in lieu thereof "the first Thursday in May in each year."

Speaker of the House of Representatives

President of the Senate Pro Tempore

APPROVED May-5 1988

President Reagan, in his 1988 National Day of Prayer Proclamation, expressed:

"Let us, young and old, join together, as did the First Continental Congress, in the first step humble, heartfelt prayer. Let us do so for the Love of God and His great goodness, in search of His guidance, and the grace of repentance, in seeking His blessings, His peace, and the resting of His kind and holy hands on ourselves, our Nation, our friends in the defense of freedom, and all mankind, now and always."

He declared:

"There are times when I'm in church, I think God might recognize the magnitude of my responsibility and give me an extra portion of His grace... And I don't feel guilty for feeling that way."

President Reagan wrote:

The family has always been the cornerstone of American society. Our families nurture, preserve, and pass on to each succeeding generation the values we share and cherish, values that are the foundation for our freedoms. In the family we learn our first lessons of God and man, love and discipline, rights and responsibilities, human dignity and human frailty.

Our families give us daily examples of these lessons being put into practice. In raising and instructing our children, in providing personal and compassionate care for the elderly, in maintaining the spiritual strength of religious commitment among our people in these and other ways, America's families make immeasurable contributions to America's well-being.

Today more than ever, it is essential that these contributions not be taken for granted and that each of us remember that the strength of our families is vital to the strength of our nation.

We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life the unborn without diminishing the value of all human life.... There is no cause more important.

William Hubbs Rehnquist (1924-), an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, stated in the 1985 case of Wallace v. Jafree, 472 U. S. 38, 99:

"It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of Constitutional history.... The establishment clause had been expressly freighted with Jefferson's misleading metaphor for nearly forty years....

There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the framers intended to build a wall of separation [between church and state].... The recent court decisions are in no way based on either the language or intent of the framers."

George Herbert Walker Bush (1924-), the 41st President of the United States of America, on May 3, 1990, reaffimed a National Day of Prayer:

"The great faith that led our Nation's Founding Fathers to pursue this bold experience in self-government has sustained us in uncertain and perilous times; it has given us strength and inspiration to this very day.

Like them, we do very well to recall our 'firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,' to give thanks for the freedom and prosperity this Nation enjoys, and to pray for continued help and guidance from our wise and loving Creator."

President Bush, in his National Day of Prayer Proclamation in 1992. stated:

"Whatever our individual religious convictions may be, each of us is invited to join in this National Day of Prayer. Indeed, although we may find our own words to express it, each of us can echo this timeless prayer of Solomon, the ancient king who prayed for, and received, the gift of wisdom:

The Lord our God be with us, as He was with our fathers; may He not leave us or forsake us; so that He may incline our hearts to Him, to walk in all His ways... That all the peoples of the earth may know that the Lord is God; there is no other."

H. Norman Schwarzkopf (1934-present), was commander-in-chief of the Coalition Forces in Operation Desert Storm. Having acknowledged during an interview in 1991 that he kept a Bible by his bed, General Scharwzkopf was asked if he had a favorite verse. He replied:

"Actually, it's a prayer of St. Francis: 'Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.'"

One of the key decisions of General Schwarzkopf's was an extreme flanking maneuver of the 101st Airborne, nicknamed Hail Mary, which cut off the retreat of the Iraqi Republican Guard. He commented:

"I began to believe that, when my forward commander radioed, that they had reached the Euphrates River ahead of schedule. I waited for the other shoe to fall. 'General,' he said, 'I've got to tell you about the casualties.' I braced myself. 'One man was slightly wounded.' That's when I knew God was with us."

Henry J. Hyde (1924-), a U.S. Representative from Illinois, delivered a powerful speech after receiving the "Defender of Life" Award at the Constitutional Litigation Conference, July 16, 1993:

"'That all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator.' Human beings upon creation, not upon birth. That is where our human dignity comes from. It comes from the Creator. It is an endowment, not an achievement.

By membership in the human family, we are endowed by our Creator with 'inalienable rights.' They can't be voted away by a jury or a court.

'Among which are life' the first inalienable right, the first endowment from the Creator. That is mainstream America, the predicate for our Constitution, our country's birth certificate. To respect the right to life as an endowment from the Creator....

It is the unborn who are the least of God's creatures. We have been told that whatsoever we do for the least of these we do unto Jesus."

 

 America Forsaken Chapter 5

 

 America Forsaken Chapter 7