Robert Lewis Dabney on the delusion of a religious neutrality in public schools.
"The moral judgments and acts of the soul all involve an exercise or reason, so that it is impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions...Man fulfills the ends of his existence, not by right cognitions, but by right moral actions ...The nature of responsibility is such that there can be no neutrality between duty and sin. He that is not with his God is against Him ... Hence, as there cannot be in any soul a non-Christian state which is not anti-Christian, it follows that any training which attempts to be non-Christian is therefore anti-Christian...How obvious then that a let-alone policy as the moral development must to a greater or lesser degree amount to a positive development of vicious character? Not to row, is itself, to float down the stream."
Dabney lived during the civil war and after. He was a theologian, soldier, biographer, poet, financier, farmer and architect.
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