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Noah Webster (1758-1843), the "Father of American Scholarship and Education," said education was "useless without the Bible." In the Preface to his Dictionary of 1828, Webster wrote: "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." |
John Adams, the 2nd President of the United States, declared: “…we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
If you think the “morality and religion” Adams had in mind could
be something other than morality and religion as defined by the Bible and Christianity,
you may be under the age of 25.
Adams realized the future of the American system rested upon
the continuing existence of a body of people who practice self-government under
the God of the Bible.
Noah Webster, Founding Father called, “The
Schoolmaster of the Nation,” once wrote: “…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.”
Webster recognized the Bible is “that book which the
benevolent Creator has furnished for the express purpose of guiding human
reason in the path of safety, and the only book which can remedy, or
essentially mitigate, the evils of a licentious world.”
In a letter written on October 25, 1836, to David McClure, Webster
wrote:
“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….The foundation of all free government
and all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth.
Young persons must not only be furnished with knowledge, but they must be
accustomed to subordination and subjected to the authority and influence of
good principles.…And any system of education…which limits instruction to the
arts and sciences, and rejects the aids of religion in forming the character of
citizens, is essentially defective.”
Many people are asking, “What has happened to America?” Noah
Webster gave us clues.
In 1787, when the Constitution was first drafted, it was not
unreasonable to think U.S. citizens could be the kind of “moral
and religious people” necessary for the American Republic to work. In the church-established
schools of the day (nearly all schools were church-established then), early Americans
became Bible-conscious, and they learned what “self-government under God” is all about.
Where are the Noah Websters of today?
You’ll be hearing from them in the days ahead.
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