What Happens to Society Without God

Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man.  Appetite, knowing no restraint, and suffering, having no solace or hope, would trample in scorn on the restraints of human laws.  Virtue, duty, principle, would be mocked as unmeaning sounds.  A sordid self-interest would supplant every feeling; and man would become, in fact, what the theory of atheism declares him to be — a companion for brutes.


McGuffy Fifth Reader (designed for 10-year-olds in early public schools). Cited in “Quotable,” The Berean Call, May 2003