FredFlash
New Member
Is the U. S. Constitution defective because it does not once name God? The National Reform Movement believed it was.
Do you agree or disagree with the view that there is a religious defect in the Constitution?
Presented below is an excerpt from a “HISTORY OF THE MOVEMENT TO SECURE THE RELIGIOUS AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES” BY T. P. STEVENSON, Corresponding Secretary of the National Association, Published in 1873.
Do you agree or disagree with the view that there is a religious defect in the Constitution?
Presented below is an excerpt from a “HISTORY OF THE MOVEMENT TO SECURE THE RELIGIOUS AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES” BY T. P. STEVENSON, Corresponding Secretary of the National Association, Published in 1873.
The religious defect of the Constitution of the United States was not unnoticed at the beginning. Luther Martin, a delegate from Maryland to the Convention which framed it, said: "There were some of the members so' unfashionable as to think that a belief of the existence of a Deity, and of a future state of rewards and punishments, would be some security for the good conduct of our rulers, and that in a Christian country it would be at least decent to hold some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity and paganism."
On the 28th of October, 1789, the First Presbytery Eastward in Massachusetts and New Hampshire presented a loyal and patriotic address to President Washington, in which, after expressing their satisfaction in beholding how easily the entire confidence of the people in the man first entrusted with the administration of the new Constitution had eradicated every remaining objection to its form, they add: "Among these [objections] we never considered the want of a religious test-that grand engine of persecution in every tyrant's hand but we should not have been alone in rejoicing to have seen some explicit acknowledgment of the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom He hath sent, inserted somewhere in the Magna Charta of our country."
In the early part of the present century the eminent Dr. John M. Mason, of New York, employed these words: "One would imagine that no occasion of making a pointed and public acknowledgment of the Divine benignity could have presented itself so obviously as the framing an instrument of government which, in the nature of things, must be closely allied to our happiness or our ruin; and yet that very Constitution, which the singular goodness of God enabled us to establish, does not so much as recognize His being."
In the admirable treatise on "The Oath," by the Rev. D. X. Junkin, D. D., published in 1845, the writer says: "The oath of the President of the United States could as well be taken by a pagan or a Mohammedan as by the Chief Magistrate of a Christian people: it excludes the name of the Supreme Being. Indeed, it is negatively atheistical, for no God is appealed to at all. In framing many of our public formularies, greater care seems to have been taken to adapt them to the prejudices of the infidel few than to the consciences of the Christian millions. In these things the minority in our country has hitherto managed to govern the majority. We look on the designed omission of it [the name of God in the oath] as an attempt to exclude from civil affairs Him who is the Governor among the nations."
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...orm+Association&frm=frameset&view=image&seq=3
On the 28th of October, 1789, the First Presbytery Eastward in Massachusetts and New Hampshire presented a loyal and patriotic address to President Washington, in which, after expressing their satisfaction in beholding how easily the entire confidence of the people in the man first entrusted with the administration of the new Constitution had eradicated every remaining objection to its form, they add: "Among these [objections] we never considered the want of a religious test-that grand engine of persecution in every tyrant's hand but we should not have been alone in rejoicing to have seen some explicit acknowledgment of the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom He hath sent, inserted somewhere in the Magna Charta of our country."
In the early part of the present century the eminent Dr. John M. Mason, of New York, employed these words: "One would imagine that no occasion of making a pointed and public acknowledgment of the Divine benignity could have presented itself so obviously as the framing an instrument of government which, in the nature of things, must be closely allied to our happiness or our ruin; and yet that very Constitution, which the singular goodness of God enabled us to establish, does not so much as recognize His being."
In the admirable treatise on "The Oath," by the Rev. D. X. Junkin, D. D., published in 1845, the writer says: "The oath of the President of the United States could as well be taken by a pagan or a Mohammedan as by the Chief Magistrate of a Christian people: it excludes the name of the Supreme Being. Indeed, it is negatively atheistical, for no God is appealed to at all. In framing many of our public formularies, greater care seems to have been taken to adapt them to the prejudices of the infidel few than to the consciences of the Christian millions. In these things the minority in our country has hitherto managed to govern the majority. We look on the designed omission of it [the name of God in the oath] as an attempt to exclude from civil affairs Him who is the Governor among the nations."
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...orm+Association&frm=frameset&view=image&seq=3
