Godly Meditations from America’s Founding Fathers
John Adams:
“The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal code as well as a moral and religious code. These are laws essential to the existence of men in society and most of which have been enacted by every Nation which ever professed any code of laws. Vain indeed would be the search among the writings of secular history to find so broad, so complete and so solid a basis of morality as the Ten Commandments lay down.”
George Washington:
“It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible. Of all dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, our religion and morality are indispensable supporters.”
Henry Laurens:
“I had the honor of being one who framed the Constitution. In order to effectually accomplish these great constitutional ends, it is especially the duty of those who bear rule to promote and encourage respect for God and virtue.”
Patrick Henry:
“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.”
John Adams:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Thomas Jefferson:
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
John Quincy Adams:
“No book in the world deserves to be so unceasingly studied, and so profoundly meditated upon as the Bible.”
Benjamin Franklin:
“God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”
Theodore Roosevelt:
“In this actual world, a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at, or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid down-grade.”
Abraham Lincoln:
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven… 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.”
~Quoted in W. Cleon Skousen, The 5000 Year Leap: The 28 Great Ideas that Changed the World
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