Some more thoughts from the Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville.

     1. This first statement is brilliant and perceptive beyond description. America, 2026: “When the taste for physical gratifications among [men] has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint.”

God said to Moses that when the Israelites “have eaten and filled themselves and grown fat, then they will turn to other gods and serve them.” When the desire for physical gratification outruns our wisdom and moral education, then people will be “carried away and lose all self-restraint.” Historian Sir Alexander Tytler said that democracies go “from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back into bondage.” There is no doubt in my mind that the desire for physical pleasure in America today has far outpaced our wisdom and moral education, and the results are plainly manifest in the massive amounts of promiscuity, corruption, fraud, decadence, selfishness, and licentiousness that plague our nation.

Noah Webster once said, “Education is useless without the Bible.” What he enunciates here is the greatest truth of all about a proper education—knowledge without wisdom, “intelligence” without virtue, is not only vain — it is positively dangerous. The most important facet of education is moral education, building excellence, character, and virtue in our children. What good would it do to have a country full of PhDs and rocket scientists if they are all rotten, immoral, godless, materialistic Democrats? What value is a 180........

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