Perhaps nothing is more unfortunate in today’s America than the fact that we have long since forgotten what our Founding Fathers certainly understood and clearly acknowledged. They realized, as should we, that no form of representative government can survive, much less succeed, apart from the populace’s practice of moral self-restraint. Furthermore, they understood that moral self-restraint would only be practiced by people who believed in God, the Judge of all the earth to whom all men must one day give an account. This explains why John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

 

Believing that representative government could only survive and succeed among a moral and religious people, our Founding Fathers made the Bible the bedrock of our Republic. As Andrew Jackson said, “The Bible is the Rock upon which this Republic rests.” President Jackson was not alone in his insistence that the Bible was the foundation upon which our nation was founded, as well as the only foundation upon which it can be maintained.

 

JAMES MADISON

 

“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

 

NOAH WEBSTER

 

“The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws.”

 

“All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”

 

“The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil, in human society; the best Book for regulating temporal concerns of men, and the only Book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity.”

 

DANIEL WEBSTER

 

“If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.”

 

“If the power of the Gospel is not felt through the length and breadth of the land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end.”

 

EDWARD EVERETT

 

“All the distinctive features and superiority of our republican institutions are derived from the teachings of Scripture.”

 

W. H. SEWARD

 

“The whole hope of the human progress is suspended on the ever-growing influence of the Bible.”

 

SALMON P. CHASE

 

“There came a time in my life when I doubted the divinity of the Scriptures, and I resolved as a lawyer and a judge I would try the Book as I would try anything in the courtroom, taking evidence for and against. It was a long, serious and profound study and using the same principles of evidence in this religious matter as I always do in secular matters, I have come to the decision that the Bible is a supernatural Book, that it has come from God, and that the only safety for the human race is to follow its teachings.”

 

F. C. MONFORT

 

“The morality of the Bible is the safety of society!”

 

DAVID JOSIAH BREWER

 

“No nation is better than its sacred book. In that book are expressed its highest ideals of life, and no nation rises above those ideals. No nation has a sacred book to be compared with ours. This American nation from its first settlement at Jamestown to the present hour is based upon and permeated by the principles of the Bible. The more this Bible enters into our national life the grander and purer and better will that life  become.”

 

WILLIAM MCKINLEY

 

“The more profoundly we study this wonderful Book [the Bible], and the more closely we observe its divine precepts, the better citizens we will become and the higher will be our destiny as a nation.”

 

CALVIN COOLIDGE

 

“The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country.”

 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

 

“It is necessary for the welfare of the nation that men's lives be based on the principles of the Bible. No man, educated or uneducated, can afford  to be ignorant of the Bible.”

 

RONALD REAGAN

 

“Of the many influences that have shaped the United States into a  distinctive nation and people, none may be said to be more fundamental  and enduring than the Bible.”

 

In Psalm 11:3, King David asked the question: “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” The obvious answer to David’s question is: “Nothing!” There is nothing that can be done when the foundation is destroyed. The structure is beyond repair. It is to be condemned.

 

As we have clearly shown above, the Bible is the foundation upon which America was built. This fact has been attested to throughout our history by our Founders, presidents, Supreme Court Justices, and prominent citizens. Yet, in today’s America, the Bible no longer serves as the bedrock of our republic. Instead, it has been tossed aside and trampled underfoot, treated as some antiquated old relic without contemporary relevance. What, therefore, can the righteous do to save our country, which has deliberately destroyed its own foundation and pulled out from under itself the very bedrock—the Bible—upon which it was established?

 

This edition of The Wilderness Voice is an excerpt from Chapter 17: The Rock of Our Republic from our book The Bible: The Book of Books.