Joseph Story

Joseph Story
Supreme Court Justice (1779-1845) Considered today "the foremost of American legal writers" was born in Marblehead, Mass. Largely self-schooled, he entered Harvard in 1795, and graduated in 1798, second in his class. http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/discovery/people/bio.story.joseph.html

"Indeed, the right of a society or government to [participate] in matters of religion will hardly be contested by any persons who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of the state and indispensable to the administrations of civil justice. The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion—the being, and attributes, and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to Him for all our actions, founded upon moral accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues—these never can be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how any civilized society can well exist without them."
(Source: Joseph Story, A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), p. 260, §442.)