Excerpt from the book, The World’s Greatest Truths, by James Bramlett:

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The influence of Christ pervaded the nation's early institutions.  For example, history has largely ignored the fact that fully 104 of the first 119 colleges founded in the United States were Christian and dedicated to the idea that God is the basis of all knowledge.  Harvard had in its laws that each student should consider: "The main end of his life and studies to know God and Jesus Christ… and therefore to lay Christ… as the only foundation for all sound learning and knowledge."  Yale, Columbia, and Princeton had similar roots. 

 

In spite of the shortcomings of our nation and our people (and there are many), people all over the world recognize that the concept and the dynamic of the free human spirit and the historic values represented in America, which sprang from its Christian roots, are the only things preventing the entire world from being swallowed into the dark spiritual abyss of atheistic, materialistic, and totalitarian communism.  Sadly and alarmingly, there are those even in our own nation who are bent on destroying these roots and who would lead us toward cultural suicide.  It makes the words of Dr. Jedediah Morse in 1799, close to 200 years ago, both relevant and prophetic:

 

"To the kindly influence of Christianity we owe that degree of civil freedom, and political and social happiness which mankind now enjoys.  In proportion as the genuine effects of Christianity are diminished in any nation, either through unbelief, or the corruption of its doctrines, or the neglect of its institutions; in the same proportion will the people of that nation recede from the blessings of genuine freedom…. Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be over thrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them."²⁴