Excerpt from Historical Sketch of the Synod of Kentucky, 1802-1902: Delivered October 14, 1902 at Lexington, Ky;, Before the Synod of Kentucky, North and South

Evils such as these would soon have run their course and passed away, had not another super vened, peculiarly fitted to poison an atmosphere already charged with elements which steel the human heart against the pleading of conscience and the requirement of religion. I refer to the introduction and spread of that abandoned type of infidelity and materialism engendered and spread far and wide by the French Revolution. It was but natural that the American people should have accorded a most enthusiastic support to that revolu tion in its opening stages, and before its wild excesses developed its true character, and before suffering and disaster accumulated, such as call to mind that old prophecy in Deuteronomy: The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexation and rebuke, in all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do. The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting and mildew, and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.

Does it not seem anomalous that among the colonists on the seaboard, the men of 1776, with all their strong traits of character and intellect, their power to detect and separate the true from the false - that in soil in such as that the most offensive and radical type of infidelity ever known should have taken root and grown and flourished?

But there is nothing anomalous in the fact that it should have been carried unto the wilderness, and there found a dwelling-place among a genera tion of men upon whom the ties of religion hung loose and easy.

And, like a quick and powerful poison, it went springing through the arteries and came back again through the veins, loaded with moral corruption and spiritual death.

There is a proverb as old as the everlasting hills that what a man believes that will he do. In proportion as a man abandons his faith in God his moral nature becomes enfeebled and corrupt; and vice and dissipation will reveal the thoughts and intents of the heart.

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