(5) The Hon. David Ramsay
The Hon. David Ramsay, M.D., of South Carolina, the historian, in his oration on the death of Washington, delivered at Charleston, South Carolina, on January 15, 1800, at the request of the inhabitants, says; “He was the friend of morality and religion; steadily attended on public worship; encouraged and strengthened the hands of the clergy. In all his public acts he made the most respectful mention of Providence, and, in a word, carried the spirit of piety with him, both in his private life and public administration. He was far from being one of those minute philosophers who believe that ‘death is an eternal sleep’; or, of those, who, trusting to the sufficiency of human reason, discard the light of divine revelation.”6
(6) The Reverend John M. Mason, D.D.
The Reverend John M. Mason, pastor of the Associate Reformed Church in the city of New York, in the funeral eulogy delivered by appointment of a number of the clergy of New York City, February 22, 1800, uses this language: “That invisible hand which guarded him at first continued to guard and to guide him through the successive stages of the Revolution. Nor did he account it a weakness to bend the knee in homage to its supremacy, and prayer for its direction. This was the armor of Washington, this the salvation of his country.”7
(7) Jeremiah Smith
In an oration delivered by Jeremiah Smith at Exeter, New Hampshire, February 22, 1800, he says: “He had all the genuine mildness of Christianity with all its force. He was neither ostentatious, nor ashamed of his Christian profession. He pursued in this, as in everything else the happy mean between the extremes of levity and gloominess, indifference and austerity. His religion became him. He brought it with him into office, and he did not lose it there. His first and his last office acts (as he did all the intermediate ones) contained an explicit acknowledgement of the overruling providence of the Supreme Being; and the most fervent supplication for His benediction on our government and nation.”
“Without being charged with exaggeration, I may be permitted to say, that an accurate knowledge of his life, while it would confer on him the highest title to praise, would be productive of the most solid advantage to the cause of Christianity.”8
(8) President Timothy Dwight
Timothy Dwight, D.D., president of Yale College, in a discourse on “The Character of Washington,” February 22, 1800, says: “For my own part, I have considered his numerous and uniform public and most solemn declarations of his high veneration for religion, his exemplary and edifying attention to public worship, and his constancy in secret devotion, as proofs, sufficient to satisfy every person, willing to be satisfied. I shall only add that if he was not a Christian, he was more like one than any man of the same description whose life has been hitherto recorded.”9
(9) Reverend Devereux Jarratt
In an address delivered by the Reverend Devereux Jarratt, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, he says: “Washington was a professor of Christianity and a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He always acknowledged the superintendence of Divine Providence; and from his inimitable writings we find him a warm advocate for a sound morality founded on the principles of religion, the only basis on which it can stand. Nor did I ever meet with the most distant insinuation that his private life was not a comment on his own admired page.”10
(10) Reverend Jonathan Boucher
The testimony of the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, who, to say the least, was not prejudiced in favor of Washington, is very interesting. He was a minister in the Episcopal Church at Annapolis, Maryland. During the first six months of 1775 he always preached with a pair of loaded pistols lying on the cushion in front of him; and indeed, with no aid from firearms, he was well known to be more than a match for any single member of his congregation. He opposed the independence of the colonies, and returned to England in 1775. He was for a time private tutor to John Parke Custis, the son of Mrs. Washington. His acquaintance with Washington was prior to the Revolution, and, in his own words, he “did know Washington well.” In 1776 he writes concerning him; “In his moral character he is regular, temperate, strictly just and honest (except that as a Virginian he has lately found out that there is no moral turpitude in not paying what he confesses he owes to a British creditor), and, I always thought, religious; having heretofore been pretty constant and even exemplary in his attendance on public worship in the Church of England.”11
(11) President Madison
President Madison says, “Washington was constant in the observance of worship, according to the received forms of the Episcopal Church.”12
(12) Bushrod Washington
Washington bequeathed Mount Vernon, four thousand acres, including the Mansion House to his nephew, Bushrod Washington, who afterwards became a judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1862 the latter was elected a vice-president of the American Sunday School Union. In replying to an address he said, “Upon the well-intended efforts I have made to secure the due observance of the Sabbath day, upon a spot, where, I am persuaded, it was never violated during the life and with the permission of its venerable owner.”13
(13) Tradition of the New York Indians
The New York Indians hold this tradition of Washington: “Alone, of all white men, he has been admitted to the Indian Heaven, because of his justice to the Red Men. He lives in a great palace, built like a fort. All the Indians, as they go to Heaven, pass by, and he himself is in his uniform, a sword at his side, walking to and fro. They bow reverently with great humility. He returns the salute, but says nothing.” Such is the reward of his justice to the Red Men.”14
(14) Reverend Israel Evans
The Reverend Israel Evans was a chaplain in the United States army through nearly the entire Revolutionary service. He was a native of New Jersey, a man of education, and capable of appreciating such a character as that of Washington. The opportunities he enjoyed for social intercourse with him, as well as with other patriots of the Revolution, were very frequent and favorable, and his reverence for Washington was very great. “It is related of Mr. Evans that during his last sickness, thirty years or more after the Revolution, his successor in the ministry, in the New England village where he had been settled, was called in by the family to pray with him, in the evident near approach of the dying hour. Mr. Evans had lain some considerable time in a stupor, apparently unconscious of anything around him, and his brother clergyman was proceeding in fervent prayer to God, that, as his servant was evidently about departing this mortal life, his spirit might be conveyed by angels to Abraham’s bosom. Just at his point, the dying man for the first time and for the moment revived, so far as to utter, in an interval of his delirium, ‘and Washington’s, too’—and then sunk again into apparent unconsciousness. As if it was not enough to ‘have Abraham to his father,’ and on whose bosom to repose, but he must have Washington, too, on whom to lean. A signal manifestation of ‘the ruling passion strong in death’—and of the lasting hold which that great man had on this mind and heart of one of his early and devoted friends.”15
B. The Judgment of Washington’s Earliest Historians Concerning His Christian Faith
(1) Mason L. Weems
“The noblest, the most efficient element of his character was that he was an humble, earnest Christian.”16
(2) Aaron Bancroft
“In principle and practice he was a Christian.”17
(3) Cyrus R. Edmunds
“The elements of his greatness are chiefly to be discovered in the moral features of his character.”18
(4) John Marshall
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who had been the personal friend and frequent associate of Washington, says in his biography, “Without making ostentatious professions of religion, he was a sincere believer in the Christian faith, and a truly devout man.”19
(5) George Bancroft
“Belief in God and trust in His overruling power, formed the essence of his character…His whole being was one continued act of faith in the eternal, intelligent and moral order of the universe.”20
(6) Jared Sparks
“A Christian in faith and practice, he was habitually devout. His reverence for religion is seen in his example, his public communications, and his private writings. He uniformly ascribed his successes to the beneficent agency of the Supreme Being. Charitable and humane, he was liberal to the poor and kind to those in distress. As a husband, son, and brother, he was tender and affectionate.
“If a man spoke, wrote, and acted as a Christian through a long life, who gave numerous proofs of his believing himself to be such, and who was never known to say, write or do a thing contrary to his professions, if such a man is not a to be ranked among the believers of Christianity, it would be impossible to establish the point by any train of reasoning…
“After a long and minute examination of the writings of Washington, public and private, in print and in manuscript, I can affirm that I have never seen a single hint or expression from which it could be inferred that he had any doubt of the Christian revelation, or that he thought with indifference or unconcern of that subject. On the contrary, whenever he approaches it, and, indeed, whenever he alludes in any manner to religion, it is done with seriousness and reverence.”21
(7) David Ramsay
Doctor David Ramsay was a celebrated physician of Charleston, South Carolina. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1782-86. In his biography of Washington, he says: “There are few men of any kind, and still fewer of those the world calls great, who have not some of their virtues eclipsed by corresponding vices. But this was not the case with General Washington. He had religion without austerity, dignity without pride, modesty without diffidence, courage without rashness, politeness without affectation, affability without familiarity. His private character, as well as his public one, will bear the strictest scrutiny. He was punctual in all his engagements; upright and honest in his dealings; temperate in his enjoyments; liberal and hospitable to an eminent degree; a lover of order; systematical and methodical in his arrangements. He was a friend of morality and religion; steadily attended on public worship; encouraged and strengthened the hands of the clergy. In all his public acts he made the most respectful mention of Providence; and in a word, carried the spirit of piety with him both in his private life and public administration.”22
(8) James K. Paulding
“It is impossible to read the speeches and letters of Washington and follow his whole course of life, without receiving the conviction of his steady, rational, and exalted piety. Everywhere he places his chief reliance, in the difficult, almost hopeless circumstances in which he was so often involved, on the justice of that great Being who holds the fate of men and of nations in the hollow of His hand. His hopes for his country are always founded on the righteousness of its cause, and the blessing of Heaven. His was the belief of reason and revelation; and that belief was illustrated and exemplified in all his actions. No parade accompanied its exercises, no declamation its exhibition; for it was his opinion that a man who is always boasting of his religion, is like one who continually proclaims his honesty—he would trust neither one nor the other. He was not accustomed to argue points of faith, but on one occasion, in reply to a gentleman who expressed doubts on the subject, thus gave his sentiments:
It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being.
It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme being.
It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is as necessary to reason as reason is to religion. The one cannot exist without the other. A reasoning being would lose his reason in attempting to account for the great phenomena of nature, had he not a Supreme Being to refer to; and well has it been said, that if there had been no God, mankind would have been obliged to imagine one.
“On this basis of piety was erected the superstructure of his virtues. He perceived the harmonious affinity subsisting between the duties we owe to Heaven and those we are called upon to sustain on earth, and made his faith the foundation of his moral obligations. He cherished the homely but invaluable maxim that ‘honesty is the best policy,’ and held that the temporal as well as the eternal happiness of mankind could never be separated from the performance of their duties to Heaven and their fellow creatures. He believed it to be an inflexible law that, sooner or later, a departure from the strict obligations of truth and justice would bring with it the loss of confidence of mankind, and this deprives us of our best support for prosperity in this world, as well as our best hope of happiness in that to come. In short, he believed and practiced on the high principle, that the invariable consequence of the performance of a duty was an increase of happiness. What others call good fortune, he ascribed to a great and universal law, establishing an indissoluble connection between actions and their consequences, and making every man responsible to himself for his good or ill success in this world. Under that superintending Providence which shapes the ends of men, his sentiments and actions show that he believed, that, as a general rule, every rational being was the architect of his own happiness.”23
(9) Sir George Otto Trevelyan
“A better churchman—of, at all events, a better man who ranked himself as a churchman—than George Washington it would have been hard indeed to discover. When at home on the bank of the Potomac, he had always gone of a Sunday morning to what would have been called a distant church by any one except a Virginia equestrian; and he spent Sunday afternoons, alone and inapproachable, in his library. In war he found time for daily prayer and meditation (as, by no wish of his, the absence of privacy, which is a feature in camp life, revealed to those who were immediately about him); he attended public worship himself; and by every available means he encouraged the practice of religion in his soldiers, to whom he habitually stood in a kind of fatherly relation. There are many pages in his Orderly Books which indicate a determination that the multitude of young fellows who were intrusted to his charge should have all possible facilities for being as well-behaved as in their native villages.
“The troops were excused fatigue duty in order that they might not miss church. If public worship was interrupted on a Sunday by the call to arms, a service was held on a convenient day in the ensuing week. The chaplains were exhorted to urge the soldiers that they ought to live and act like Christian men in times of distress and danger; and after every great victory, and more particularly at the final proclamation of Peace, the Commander-in-chief earnestly recommended that the army should universally attend the rendering of thanks to Almighty God ‘with seriousness of deportment and gratitude of heart.’
