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Quotes and
Excerpts
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Quotes and Excerpts
Transforming America
"One month after the Battle of Lexington [during the Revolutionary War], Rev. Samuel Langdon, President of Harvard, preached to the leaders of Massachusetts an Election Sermon entitled, "Government Corrupted By Vice and Recovered by Righteousness." He said that:
"Vice will increase with the riches and glory of an empire; and this generally tends to corrupt the Constitution and in time bring on its dissolution. This may be considered not only as the natural effect of vice, but a religious judgment from Heaven, especially upon a nation which has been favored with the blessings of religion and liberty and is guilty of undervaluing them..."
[America's Providential History by Mark A. Leliles and Stephen K. McDowell.Printed in Salem Massachusetts Bay by E. Russell, by Order of the Council, p. 143]
When the thirteen colonies were still a part of England, Professor Alexander Tyler wrote about the fall of the Athenian republic over two thousand years previous to that time:
"A democracy [or republic] cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.
"The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith,
from spiritual faith to great courage,
from courage to liberty,
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness,
from selfishness to complacency
from complacency to apathy,
from apathy to dependency,
from dependency back to bondage."