Politics & Power Quote by Noah Webster

Webster isn’t merely praising Christianity; he’s issuing a founding-era instruction manual for the American mind. The key move is the phrase “early understand.” He’s talking about pedagogy and civic formation, not private devotion. In Webster’s worldview, republicanism doesn’t survive on procedural know-how alone; it depends on a moral operating system installed before citizens start improvising politics for themselves.

Calling the Bible the “genuine source” of “correct republican principles” is also a boundary-drawing exercise. “Correct” implies rival versions of republicanism are already circulating: Enlightenment rationalism without revelation, classical virtue without Christ, revolution without restraint. Webster’s sentence tries to settle an argument by relocating political legitimacy from debate to doctrine. If the New Testament is the source code, then certain civic virtues (self-restraint, humility, duty, conscience) become nonnegotiable, and certain “principles” can be treated as more than opinions.

The careful narrowing to “particularly the New Testament” is telling. Webster isn’t invoking the Bible as a blunt instrument of law; he’s elevating a specifically Christian ethic suited to a republic that fears both tyranny and mob passion. The subtext is anxiety about the fragility of popular government: give people power without an internalized moral check, and the system collapses into license, faction, or demagoguery.

Context matters. Early American leaders routinely tied religion to civic virtue, especially amid worries about social disorder, partisan rancor, and the dilution of communal norms. Webster, famous for shaping American language and schooling, is effectively arguing that the republic’s dictionary needs a catechism behind it: not to replace politics, but to keep politics from eating itself.