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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/1/2003 4:05 AM (GMT -6) |   | The Intent Of The Founders
I have to thank Bob J. for this link, which I believe goes far to prove my point that the Founders of this country never intended to 1st Amendment to be used as it is today:
http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/const...nt01/index.html
It was impossible, that there should not arise perpetual strife and perpetual jealousy on the subject of ecclesiastical ascendancy, if the national government were left free to create a religious establishment. The only security was in extirpating the power. But this alone would have been an imperfect security, if it had not been followed up by a declaration of the right of the free exercise of religion, and a prohibition (as we have seen) of all religious tests. Thus, the whole power over the subject of religion is left exclusively to the state governments, to be acted upon according to their own sense of justice, and the state constitutions; and the Catholic and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Jew and the Infidel, may sit down at the common table of the national councils, without any inquisition into their faith, or mode of worship.''7
''Probably,'' Story also wrote, ''at the time of the adoption of the constitution and of the amendment to it, now under consideration, the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.''8 The object, then, of the religion clauses in this view was not to prevent general governmental encouragement of religion, of Christianity, but to prevent religious persecution and to prevent a national establishment.
J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States 1865 (1833).
T. Cooley, General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States 224-25 (3d ed. 1898).
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