AFR News: American Minute with Bill Federer MAR. 22 - 'If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it...'

American Minute with Bill Federer

MAR. 22 - 'If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it...' - Yale President Timothy Dwight

On MARCH 22, 1758, Princeton University President Jonathan Edwards died from a smallpox inoculation.

He had been the valedictorian of his class at Yale.

He was ordained in 1727 as a minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, serving as assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard.

That same year, Jonathan Edwards married Sarah Pierpont, whose father, James Pierpont, was the founder of Yale University.

Sarah's great-grandfather was Thomas Hooker who founded Connecticut.

Rev. George Whitefield preached in Jonathan Edwards' church during a revival tour in 1739-1740.

In 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon, "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" which began the Great Awakening, a revival so widespread history credits it with uniting the colonies prior to the Revolution.

Of the revival, Jonathan Edwards wrote:

"God made it, I suppose, the greatest occasion of awakening to others, of anything that ever came to pass in the town.

I have had abundant opportunity to know the effect it had, by my private conversation with many.

The news of it seemed to be almost like a flash of lighting upon the hearts of young people all over the town, and upon many others."

Ben Franklin wrote of the awakening:

"It was wonderful to see...From being thoughtless or indifferent...it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk thro' the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in...every street."

Get the book, America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations

Jonathan Edwards' grandson was 4th Yale President Timothy Dwight.

Timothy Dwight helped check the spread of French infidelity.

He explained how Voltaire's atheism laid the groundwork for the French Revolution's bloody Reign of Terror, 1793-1794, where 40,000 people were beheaded.

Timothy Dwight wrote July 4, 1798:

"In societies of Illuminati...the being of God was denied and ridiculed....The possession of property was pronounced robbery.

Chastity and natural affection were declared to be nothing more than groundless prejudices.

Adultery, assassination, poisoning, and other crimes of the like infernal nature, were taught as lawful...provided the end was good....

The good ends proposed by the Illuminati...are the overthrow of religion, government, and human society, civil and domestic.

These they pronounce to be so good that murder, butchery, and war, however extended and dreadful, are declared by them to be completely justifiable..."

Timothy Dwight added:

The means...were...the education of youth...every unprincipled civil officer...every abandoned clergyman...books replete with infidelity, irreligion, immorality, and obscenity...

Where religion prevails, Illumination cannot make disciples, a French directory cannot govern, a nation cannot be made slaves...

To destroy us therefore, in this dreadful sense, our enemies must first destroy our Sabbath and seduce us from the house of God....

Timothy Dwight concluded:

"Without religion we may possibly retain the freedom of savages, bears, and wolves, but not the freedom of New England.

If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it and nothing would be left which would be worth defending."