"...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. Living under the heavenly light of revelation, they hoped to find all the social dispositions, all the duties which men owe to each other and society, enforced and performed. Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens...
"We are bound to maintain public liberty, and, by the example of our own systems, to convince the world that order and law, religion and morality, the rights of conscience, the rights of persons, and the rights of property, may all be preserved and secured, in the most perfect manner, by a government entirely and purely elective. If we fail in this, our disaster will be signal, and will furnish an argument, stronger than has yet been found, in support of those opinions which maintain that government can rest safely on nothing but power and coercion..." (excerpted from "The Works of Daniel Webster" -1851, Vol. 1)
I believe Mr. Webster was much more attuned to the spirit of our nation's founding than are those today who would try to tell us that we must separate religion and state.
John Quincy Adams, our 6th President, had this to say: "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."
Do you think Mr. Adams would have agreed that the schools of America are no place for prayer or Bible reading?
John Adams, our 2nd President, wrote these words on June 21, 1776: "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." Then on July 26, 1796, he wrote 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."
Does that sound like an atheist or a deist speaking? Does it sound like a man who would ban Bibles and prayer, even the Ten Commandments, from the public schools of a nation? Not hardly!
The writings of our Founding Fathers are filled with such statements. No one who studies them could ever come away with the idea that they wanted to separate education, or any other function of government from Biblical-based Christianity. They did want to avoid establishing any particular Christian denomination as the official church of the nation. Their knowledge of the problems in England with the Anglican Church had made them well aware of the kind of corruption that could proceed from such. No, the lie concerning the separation of church and state comes right out of the pit, and to buy into it is to play into the hands of the Devil himself.
Yet, there are pastors in our community who argue that the school is no place for prayer or the
teachings of religious morality.