Politics & Power Quote by Noah Webster

Webster isn’t praising Scripture as private consolation; he’s staking out a political infrastructure. In a new republic allergic to kings and wary of centralized power, “the great source of all the truth” offers something like an operating system: a shared moral code sturdy enough to outlast parties, personalities, and the volatility of popular passions. The line is doing cultural triage. If citizens are sovereign, the question becomes what restrains them when no monarch does. Webster’s answer is: a canon.

The phrasing is absolutist on purpose. “Must be considered” reads like a civic directive, not a devotional aside. “All the truth” is less a theological claim than a bid for epistemic authority: in a landscape of competing pamphlets, sects, and Enlightenment arguments, he’s declaring which book gets to set the terms of reality. That “government” and “social transactions” are paired is telling. Webster wants the Bible to referee not only laws but the everyday economy of trust - contracts, conduct, family life, reputation. The subtext: a republic can’t run on procedure alone; it needs a moral culture that makes self-rule possible.

Context matters. Webster is remembered for standardizing American language; this line belongs to the same nation-building impulse. He’s trying to standardize American conscience. It also reveals an anxiety that pluralism, left unchecked, turns into fragmentation. By rooting civic truth in the Bible, Webster is arguing for cohesion - but also narrowing who counts as fully legible, fully “guided,” in public life. The quote works because it compresses a whole theory of the United States: freedom, yes, but tethered to a shared sacred text so the experiment doesn’t fly apart.