When, therefore, we say there is a God, we do not assert merely that there is in our minds the idea of an infinite Spirit; but that, entirely independent of our idea of Him, such a Being really exists.

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, 369.

God, therefore, is in his nature a substance, or essence, which is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable; the common subject of all divine perfections, and the common agent of all divine acts. This is as far as we can go, or need to go.

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, 368.

The second antebellum congressional battle over moral legislation, that over Mormon polygamy, had greater significance but revealed similar sectional divisions. . . . Other southerners feared that legislating morality in the territories, even if it involved something they believed to be so clearly immoral as polygamy, would establish a dangerous precedent that could be turned against the South’s own peculiar institution [i.e., race-based slavery]. They rested their case against the proviso on broader principles, however. Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia argued that Congress had no power “to establish any religion” or “to touch the question of morals, which lie at the foundation of all systems of religion.” “If we discriminate to-day against Mormons,” he added, “to-morrow, perhaps, we shall be asked to discriminate against Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Catholics.” An Alabama Democrat also condemned the proviso as one more step toward “centralization” and government regulation of “morality.” The bill died in the House. . . .

Congress’s failure to pass antipolygamy legislation was not surprising; in the antebellum period, it rarely legislated on the issue of personal morality.

Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920, 15 & 17.

If the outcome of the Sunday mail fight in Congress testified to the existence of a morality polity based in personal liberty, states’ rights, and moral suasion, the Sabbatarians’ crusade, nevertheless, revealed that some Americans doubted that such a moral polity could ensure the moral populace that the nation needed. Two goals of the opponents of the Sunday mail would remain central to the crusade for moral legislation over the next century. First, worried about the religious authority of the state, they wanted it to acknowledge God’s sovereignty and respect God’s laws. Second, they reconceived the federal government’s role in shaping individual behavior; they wanted it to have the power to make people follow God’s law, in so far as possible, that is, to make them behave morally. The goals were intertwined, since a state with religious authority could have the power to regulate morals and a state that encouraged morality had religious authority.

Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920, 12-13.

The founders of the American Republic built into its polity a fundamental tension. The nation state would have no responsibility to promote religion even though, most of the founders believed, the survival of the new nation depended in part upon its citizens’ morality, which most saw as deriving from religion. In the Northwest Ordinance, Congress proclaimed unequivocally that “Religion, Morality and knowledge” were “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” Yet in it Congress provided financial support for schools but not churches.

The Constitution, written the same year, contained no appeal to God for sanction or guidance, not even to the vague “Nature’s God” or “Creator” of the Declaration of Independence. It did include “in the Year of our Lord” in the date and prohibited counting Sunday in the ten days allowed the president to veto a bill, but neither provision undermined the inescapable conclusion that the writers of the Constitution purposefully left God out, that they intended to create a secular national government, one with no responsibility for religion or morality. The Constitution left both religion and morality to the states. The First Amendment, with its troubling tension between a ban on establishing religion and “prohibiting” its “free exercise” (a confusion that has kept courts occupied into a third century) did nothing to undermine the secular nature of the new federal government. Rather, the Bill of Rights, of which it was a part, affirmed and codified the Revolution’s emphasis on individual liberty. The First Amendment did not apply to the states, of course. Most provided some acknowledgment of God’s guidance in their constitutions, and in all, regulating public morality remained, as one historian concluded, a “crucial obligation.” Even the states, though, disestablished religion. Starting in Virginia in 1785 and ending in Massachusetts in 1833, all the states that had once had established churches separated church and state.

The founders, in sum, created a thoroughly secular national government, which left the regulation of morals to the states and the promotion of morality among its citizens primarily to the churches. What came to be called a voluntary system of religion emerged; even though churches received no aid from the government, they tacitly assumed responsibility for ensuring the moral population most Americans still though necessary to a republic’s survival. After the Civil War, Christian lobbyists would challenge the system created by the founders, and even before the war, not all Americans favored the new voluntary system. Some — especially New England Federalists — sought an acknowledgment by the state of God’s authority as well as a role for the national government in enforcing morality. The first major controversy over the emerging moral polity erupted over the government’s transportation and delivery of the mail on Sunday.

Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920, 9-10.

The founders of the United States deemed moral citizens essential to the perpetuation of the republic, yet they created a secular national government that lacked any power to regulate morality. Ensuring a virtuous population became primarily the responsibility of the churches and reform groups that relied not on coercion but on moral suasion. Some states did regulate various forms of personal morality, but only on very rare occasions before the Civil War did Congress pass moral legislation.

That changed after the war because the Christian lobby convinced the federal government to accept a far greater role in regulating moral behavior. . . . Giving appropriate attention to the role played by conservative Christians adds complexity to the historical narrative of the creation of the twentieth-century state.

Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920, 6.

The laws of our nature are sure sooner or later to assert themselves, and constrain an opposite belief. A pendulum when at rest hangs perpendicularly to the horizon. It may by extraneous force be made to hang at any degree of inclination. But as soon as such force is removed, it is sure to swing back to its normal position. Under the control of a metaphysical theory, a man may deny the existence of the external world, or the obligation of the moral law; and his disbelief may be sincere, and for a time persistent; but the moment the speculative reasons for his disbelief are absent from his mind, it of necessity reverts to its original and natural convictions. It is also possible that a man’s hand may be so hardened or cauterized as to lose the sense of touch. But that would not prove that the hand in man is not normally the great organ of touch. So it is possible that the moral nature of a man may be so disorganized by vice or by a false philosophy as to have its testimony for the existence of God effectually silenced. This, however, would prove nothing as to what that testimony really is. Besides this, insensibility and the consequent unbelief cannot last. Whatever rouses the moral nature, whether it be danger, or suffering, or the approach of death, banishes unbelief in a moment. Men pass from skepticism to faith, in many cases, instantaneously; not of course by a process of argument, but by the existence of a state of consciousness with which skepticism is irreconcilable, and in the presence of which it cannot exist. This fact is illustrated continually, not only in the case of the uneducated and superstitious, but even in the case of men of the highest culture. The simple fact of Scripture and experience is, that the moral law as written upon the heart is indelible; and the moral law in its nature implies a lawgiver, one from whom that law emanates, and by whom it will be enforced. And, therefore, so long as men are moral creatures, they will and must believe the existence of a Being on whom they are dependent, and to whom they are responsible for their character and their conduct. To this extent, and in this sense, therefore, it is to be admitted that the knowledge of God is innate and intuitive; that men no more need to be taught that there is a God, than they need to be taught there is such a thing as sin. But as men are ignorant of the nature and extent of sin, while aware of its existence, until instructed by the Word of God, and enlightened by his Spirit; so they greatly need the same sources of instruction to give them any adequate knowledge of the nature of God, and of their relations to him.

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, 199.

There is no satisfactory way of accounting for the universal belief in the existence of God, except that such belief is founded on the very constitution of our nature.

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, 198.

It is evident from the entire passage in Matthew 23 that the note of denunciation mingles with that of lamentation, and the note of wrath and judgement mingles with that of tenderness, sorrow, and weeping. This fact should serve as a salutary reminder to the preacher that this prophetic note of denunciation, if it is employed at all, must be employed with great caution, and then only if those intense spiritual emotions, which are clearly present in the soul of Christ, are also, in a measure, present in the soul of the preacher as he pleads with men ‘in Christ’s stead’.

John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching, 39.

In each historical covenantal administration, the shared faith of God’s people has attached to the particularities of each successive covenant.

STEPHEN G. MYERS, GOD TO US – COVENANT THEOLOGY IN SCRIPTURE, 166.