Early America
Richard Furman
"Consider what multitudes around you need converting grace; and what a change will soon be made in their state and circumstances as well as in your own, when they, with you, will be arrested by the strong hand of death, and summoned to the bar of God."
Benjamin Rush
“The only foundation for a useful education in 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....We waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws.”
Manasseh Cutler
"It is not possible, in the nature of things, that human laws, or principles of honor, can be adequate substitutes for religion. … Infidelity is a formidable enemy to the true principles of liberty. It erases from their foundation the main pillars that can support a free government. Freedom deigns not to dwell with general immorality: It cannot be enjoyed without virtue, nor can virtue be maintained without religion."
Isaac Backus
"The scheme we oppose evidently tends to destroy the purity and life of religion; for the inspired apostle assures us, that the church is espoused as a chaste virgin to Christ, and is obliged to be subject to him in every thing, as a true wife is to her husband."
Francis Asbury
"Whither am I going? To the New World. What to do? To gain honor? No, if I know my own heart. To get money? No: I am going to live to God, and to bring others so to do."
George Whitefield
"You may have orthodox heads, and yet you may have the devil in your hearts."
Jonathan Edwards
"Godliness in the heart has as direct a relation to practice, as a fountain has to a stream, or as the luminous nature of the sun has to beams sent forth, or as life has to breathing…"