HOLINESS OUGHT TO BE THE END

 

The victories of Trenton and Princeton were important ones, not so much because they were strategic places in America, but because they showed that the Americans could beat the enemy after all.

The victories led to badly needed enlistments.

Six years later, on May 8, 1783, Rev. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, gave a speech before the leadership of Connecticut. 

Keep in mind, here was a Christian headmaster addressing a Christian legislature.

Note his reference to biblical faith undergirding the American experiment.

Said the president of Yale: 

“All the forms of civil polity have been tried by mankind, except one, and that seems to have been reserved in Providence to be realized in America....

[O]ur system of dominion and civil polity would be imperfect without the true religion [emphasis added];

or that from the diffusion of virtue among the people of any community would arise their greatest secular happiness:

which will terminate in this conclusion, that holiness ought to be the end [i.e., the goal] of all civil government.

‘That thou mayest be a holy people unto the Lord thy God.’”