In his moving farewell address George
Washington said:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable.
. . . And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever
may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both
forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
In that same spirit John Adams made this legendary statement to the officers of the Massachusetts
militia in 1798:
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.
It was said of us a long time ago that “the Americans combine the notions of [religion] and of liberty
so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.”
May
it ever be so.
J. Reuben Clark Law Society, Conference Washington, D.C., February 15, 2013, Jeffrey R. Holland
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