Quote:
Originally Posted by beppe
Good morning Tom.
Who was he addressing, the fourth President of the United States?
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Great question! It was written in response to a Bill before the Virginia legislature that would have allowed state funds to pay for religious instructors. Madison had little love for those who would entwine Church and State. In that same document, he wrote, "During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution." This is often taken to mean that he was anti-religion, which he was not. He was opposed to the legal establishment of any one religion such as Christianity by the State such as was common throughout the rest of the Western world at the time. He saw, as did many other of the founders of the United States, that mixing the two, and had been commonplace in Europe for centuries, invariably led to a corruption of religion.
Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" is short and can be read in minutes. In you'd care to see those remarks in their greater context; I'm enclosing a copy of it as a text file attachment.