American Minute for May 28th:
He left Yale for four years to fight in the Revolutionary War. After graduation, he became a lawyer and taught school in New York. Dissatisfied with the children's spelling books, he wrote the famous Blue-Backed Speller, which sold over one hundred million copies. After twenty-six years of work, he published the first American Dictionary of the English Language. His name was Noah Webster, and he died MAY 28, 1843. In his 1788 essay, "On the Education of Youth in America," printed in Webster's American Magazine, Noah Webster wrote: "Select passages of Scripture...may be read in schools, to great advantage. In some countries the common people are not permitted to read the Bible at all. In ours, it is as common as a newspaper and in schools is read with nearly the same degree of respect." Noah Webster continued: "My wish is not to see the Bible excluded from schools but to see it used as a system of religion and morality." In his History of the United States, 1832, Noah Webster wrote: "The brief exposition of the Constitution of the United States, will unfold to young persons the principles of republican government...The genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion." Noah Webster continued in The History of the United States, 1832: "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."
Endnotes
Webster, Noah. 1832. The History of the United States (New Haven: Durrie & Peck, 1832), p. 309, paragraph 53. Gary DeMar, God & Government, A Biblical & Historical Study (Atlanta, GA: American Vision Press, 1984), p. 4. "Our Christian Heritage," Letter from Plymouth Rock (Marlborough, NH: The Plymouth Rock Foundation), p. 5. Noah Webster, The American Dictionary of the English Language (NY: S. Converse, 1828; reprinted, San Francisco: Foundation for American Christian Education, facsimile edition, 1967), preface, p. 22. Gary DeMar, God & Government - A Biblical & Historical Study (Atlanta: American Vision Press, 1982), p. 4. Robert Flood, The Rebirth of America (The Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation, 1986), p. 33. Noah Webster, History of the United States, p. 307. Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Glory of America (Bloomington, MN: Garborg's Heart'N Home, Inc., 1991), 6.24. Stephen K. McDowell and Mark A. Beliles, America's Providential History (Charlottesville, VA: Providence Press, 1988), p. 6. D.P. Diffine, Ph.D., One Nation Under God-How Close a Separation? (Searcy, Arkansas: Harding University, Belden Center for Private Enterprise Education, 6th edition, 1992), p. 10.
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