Welcome to Call to Decision 

 American Minute with Bill Federer

 May 28

 He left Yale for four years to fight in the Revolutionary War.

 After graduation, he became a lawyer and taught school in New York.

 Dissatisfied with the children's spelling books, he wrote the famous
 Blue-Backed Speller, which sold over one hundred million copies.

 After twenty-six years of work, he published the first American
 Dictionary of the English Language.

 His name was Noah Webster, and he died MAY 28, 1843.

 In his 1788 essay, "On the Education of Youth in America," printed in
 Webster's American Magazine, Noah Webster wrote:

 "Select passages of Scripture...may be read in schools, to great
 advantage.

 In some countries the common people are not permitted to read the
 Bible at all.

 In ours, it is as common as a newspaper and in schools is read with
 nearly the same degree of respect."

 Noah Webster continued:

 "My wish is not to see the Bible excluded from schools but to see it
 used as a system of religion and morality."

 In his book, The History of the United States, published in 1832,
 Noah Webster wrote:

 "All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime,
 ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their
 despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible."