Everyone is familiar with the story of Washington's praying at Valley Forge. This is a pure fiction. Intelligent Christians reject it. The Rev. E. D. Neill, of the Episcopal church, whose father's uncle owned the building occupied by Washington at Valley Forge, says: "With the capacious and comfortable house at his disposal, it is hardly possible that the shy, silent, cautious Washington should leave such retirement and enter the leafless woods, in the vicinity of the winter encampment of an army and engage in audible prayer."—Episcopal Recorder.
Alluding to this subject, the Rev. Dr. Minot J. Savage, in a sermon, said: "The pictures that represent him on his knees in the winter forest at Valley Forge are silly caricatures."
Dr. Conway, who was employed to edit Washington's letters, and who is considered one of the best authorities on his domestic life, says: "Many clergymen visited him, but they were never invited to hold family prayers, and no grace was ever said at table."
Washington's library contained the Deistical works of Paine, Voltaire and other Freethinkers. When the French Freethinker Volney visited this country he was the guest of Washington.
"His services as a vestryman had no special significance from a religious standpoint. The political affairs of a Virginia county were then directed by the vestry, which, having the power to elect its own members, was an important instrument of the oligarchy of Virginia."—General A. W. Greeley in Ladies' Home Journal.
George Wilson, whose ancestors occupied the pew next to Washington's in Virginia, says.: "At that time the vestry was the county court, and in order to have a hand in managing the affairs of the county, in which his large property lay, regulating the levy of taxes, etc., Washington had to be a vestryman."
Jefferson was a more radical Freethinker than Paine, as the following passages from his writings will show. My quotations are from Randolph's edition of Jefferson's works, published in 1829.
In a letter to his nephew and ward, Peter Carr, while at school, Jefferson writes: "Read the Bible as you would Livy or Tacitus... Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God."—Jefferson's Works, Vol. ii, P. 217.
The God of the Old Testament, the God that Christians worship, Jefferson pronounces "a being of terrific character—cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust."—Works, vol. iv, p. 325.
In the Four Gospels, which Christians consider the most authentic and the most important books of the Bible, Jefferson discovers what he terms "a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms, and fabrications."—Ibid.