John
Adams
1735-1826
—
2nd President of US (1797-1801)...
First Vice President under Washington... As a delegate to the First and Second
Continental Congresses, he led in the movement for independence... During the
Revolutionary War he served in France and Holland in diplomatic roles, and helped
negotiate the treaty of peace... Minister to the Court of St. James's (1785-1788).
Excerpt
from a letter to Benjamin Rush:
"The Christian religion
. . . is the brightness of the glory and the express portrait of the character
of the eternal, self-existent, independent, benevolent, all powerful and all merciful
creator, preserver, and Father of the universe, the first good, first perfect,
and first fair. It will last as long
as the world. Neither savage nor civilized man, without a revelation, could ever
have discovered or invented it. Ask me not, then, whether I am a Catholic or Protestant,
Calvinist or Arminian. As far as they are Christians, I wish to be a fellow disciple
with them all." (Adam's Dairy, July 26, 1796, Christianity and the Constitution,
John Eidsmoe, p. 285)[43]
In
November 1800, in his second evening in the White House, he wrote his wife:
"Before I end my letter, I pray Heaven to bestow the best
of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but
honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof."[35]
Other
statements:
"If
we make religion our business, God will make it our blessedness."[7]
"If 'Thou shalt not covet,' and 'Thou shalt not steal,'were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free."[9]
Fast
and Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, issued at a time when the nation appeared to
be on the brink of a war with France:
Adams
urged the citizens to "acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions
with which we are justly chargeable as individuals and as a nation; beseeching
Him at the same time, of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the World,
freely to remit all our offenses, and to incline us, by His Holy Spirit, to that
sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for His
inestimable favor and heavenly benediction."[14]
On
April 19, 1817, Adams wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson in which he recounted
a conversation between Joseph Cleverly and Lemuel Bryant; a schoolmaster and a
minister he had known. Disgusted by the petty religious bickering displayed by
those two, Adams declared: (The italicized
portion is often quoted out of context by revisionist historians.)
"Twenty times
in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, 'This
would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!'
But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly.
Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite
company, I mean hell."[9]