Loomis became an advocate for the Chinese with his language skill providing the means to alleviate prejudice. His primary ministry was as the pastor of the First Chinese Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, which had been organized during the ministry of William Speer. The church had been without a minister for about two years when Loomis began shepherding the Chinese flock and some rebuilding of the congregation was required. Loomis’s life in California had been a busy ministry with only two or three visits back East and one extended trip in Europe for rest and renewal. He was honored by his alma mater, Hamilton College, in 1873, with the Doctor of Divinity.

Augustus W. Loomis included in his minstry writing books about and for the Chinese immigrants and American Indians. He also emphasized catechesis in his ministry as exemplified by The Profits of Godliness, 1859, which is a brief popular study of questions 36-38 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Loomis explains each of the three answers through exposition of their component concepts. Concerning the doctrine of justification by faith he said,
Joy flows from justification; for he that is pardoned will rejoice. There is ground for his rejoicing. He looks to Jesus as his Saviour, his Surety, who, by his blood, his obedience, his intercession, reconciled him to God. He believes on him, trusts in him, and believing, he rejoices with joy unspeakable, and full of glory (p. 35).
Loomis opens the concepts of increase of grace; perseverance to the end; immediately passing into glory; perfection in holiness; awaiting the resurrection; resurrection in glory; open acknowledgement on the day of judgment; enjoying perfect blessedness; and then concludes the little book with the observation “Surely godliness is profitable; it is a pearl of great price” (p. 120). When the book was published Loomis had just returned home from China for health reasons after a six-year ministry. He would spend the rest of his life working with Chinese immigrants living in California.
Augustus Ward Loomis was born September 4, 1816, in Andover, Connecticut, to Seba Loomis and his wife Jerusha (Brewster) Loomis. His mother was a descendant of Mayflower passengers William and Mary Brewster of Plymouth Colony. Seba had been commissioned an ensign in the Connecticut militia in 1808. When the boy was about eighteen months old the family moved to Cazenovia, New York where his father purchased a farm about a half mile south of the village. At the age of eleven Augustus began preparation for college in the Oneida Conference Seminary in Cazenovia which was associated with the Wesleyan Methodists. As a young man he was not interested in becoming a minister, so he begged his parents to leave school and go into business more than a hundred miles to the east in Albany. Despite Augustus’s interest in the business world, his parents prayed for his spiritual well being. The prayers were answered when he professed faith in Christ at the age of sixteen and united with the Second Presbyterian Church in Albany. The pastor at the time was William B. Sprague. Thus, having his plans changed, Augustus returned to Cazenovia to complete preparatory studies for entry into the sophomore class of Hamilton College graduating in 1841, and he moved to New Jersey to begin theological studies in Princeton Seminary that fall.
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Though it professes to be the authoritative revelation of the one true God, the Qur’an includes a number of historically and theologically inaccurate accounts of biblical figures. For instance, the Qur’an teaches that Abraham offered up Ishmael rather than Isaac. The Qur’an also teaches that Isa ibn Maryam (Jesus, the son of Mary) was merely a miracle-working prophet of Allah. Additionally, the Qur’an denies the deity and atoning death of Jesus.

What is Islam?
Islam is the second-largest religion in the world. Today, an estimated 1.3 billion people profess to be Muslims—that is, followers of the religion of Islam. Of these, nearly 1 billion reside in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Islam is a monotheistic religion, requiring submission to the one God, Allah, and to everything Allah revealed through the prophet Muhammad. The two major authoritative texts in Islam are the Qur’an and the hadith. The Qur’an is claimed to be the revelation of Allah to Muhammad. The hadith are the oral traditions of Muhammad’s teaching and practice as passed down in the Muslim community and set to writing a few centuries later. The Five Pillars of Islam structure the essence of Islamic belief and practice. There are two major branches of Islam: the Sunnis and the Shiites, and there is also a large mystical tradition, the Sufis. The Nation of Islam, an African American political and religious movement, has brought an awareness of Islam to many Americans. However, this movement is a modern Western ethnocentric religion that is not recognized by orthodox Muslims as an authentic Islamic tradition.
When did it begin?
Muhammad is the founder of Islam. He was born in AD 570 in Mecca (a city in the western Arabian Peninsula).1 His father died before his birth. His mother died when he was six. Muhammad went to live with his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib. When he was eight, Muhammad’s grandfather died. Muhammad then went to live with his uncle Abu Talib, a caravan tradesman. Abu Talib took Muhammad on many of his travels.
At age twenty-five, Muhammad married Khadija, a wealthy traveling merchant. Khadija had been raised by Ebionite Christians. The Ebionites were a mystical Jewish sect of Christianity that denied the deity of Christ. Scholars believe that Muhammad learned his inaccurate versions of biblical accounts on his travels with Abu Talib and Khadija.
Muhammad said the angel Gabriel visited him in Mecca in 610, which began a twenty-three-year period during which Muhammad claimed to receive the revelation of the Qur’an. Traditionally, eighty-six suras (chapters) of the Qur’an are said to have been revealed while Muhammad lived in Mecca, while the remaining twenty-eight were revealed in the city of Medina.
The first two people to accept Muhammad’s message were his wife, Khadija, and his cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib. The first convert outside of Muhammad’s family was Abu Bakr, a traveling merchant. During his stay in Mecca, Muhammad began calling the polytheistic citizens to repent and submit to Allah, the one true God. After years of rejection, persecution, and warfare, Muhammad journeyed to Medina (then known as Yathrib) in 622. This event, called the Hijrah, marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. The message of Islam found greater acceptance in Medina; the Muslim community there grew, and Muhammad became the leader of the city. Eventually, Muhammad was able to amass an army large enough to capture Mecca, which he purged of polytheism. Mecca is today one of the holiest cities in Islam. Upon Muhammad’s death in 632, Abu Bakr became the first caliph (the religious and political leader of the Islamic state), although many Muslims believed the caliph should have been a relative of Muhammad, specifically his cousin Ali. Abu Bakr carried on the Islamic religion until his death. Caliphs Umar Ibn al-Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan, and Muhammad’s cousin Ali succeeded Abu Bakr, in that order. After Ali’s death, disagreements within the Muslim community over who could be caliph continued to grow, with the Shiites eventually breaking with the majority of Muslims—the Sunnis—over the Shiite belief that the caliph had to be from Muhammad’s family.
Who are the key figures?
Over its long history, Islam has produced a multitude of influential rulers, scholars, philosophers, authors, athletes, businessmen, scientists, and teachers. Muslim mathematicians and philosophers have played important roles in the development of disciplines such as algebra and in the recovery of Aristotle’s thought in the West during the late medieval period. Islamic empires conquered much of the Christian East.
Today, the most well-known Islamic political figures are King Abdullah of Jordan; King Salman of Saudi Arabia; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran; and Mohammed VI, king of Morocco.
Before becoming a Sunni Muslim, Malcom X helped raise awareness of the Nation of Islam in American culture. Louis Farrakhan is currently the leader of the Nation of Islam, a ethnocentric sect viewed as heretical by orthodox Muslims.
Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are among the famous Muslim athletes of recent decades.
What are the main beliefs?

Revelation and interpretation. Although all Muslims profess belief in the Qur’an, considerable diversity of belief and practice exists among the various branches of Islam. Sunni Muslims, who make up the vast majority of the worldwide Muslim community, rely heavily on legal scholars to settle disputes over the teaching of the Qur’an. These lawyers, in the development of Islamic law or sharia, seek to reconcile the differences between the teaching of the Qur’an and the hadith by means of consensus and analogy. Shiite Muslims, who make up the second-largest group of Muslims worldwide, believe that the true successor to Muhammad as leader of all Muslims comes from the family of Ali. (Sunnis believe that Muhammad’s successor can come from the broader Islamic community.) The Shiites also have their own collections of hadith, consisting only of traditions that they trace back to Ali. Disputes within Shiite Islam are settled by appointed imams whose decisions are considered binding. The Sufis believe in a spiritual, nonliteral interpretation of the Qur’an and engage in mystical practices.

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However great the benefits of reading the scriptures in schools have been, I cannot help remarking, that these benefits might be much greater, did schoolmasters take more pains to explain them to their scholars. Did they demonstrate the divine original of the Bible from the purity, consistency, and benevolence of its doctrines and precepts—did they explain the meaning of the Levitical institutions, and show their application to the numerous and successive gospel dispensations—did they inform their pupils that the gross and abominable vices of the Jews were recorded only as proofs of the depravity of human nature, and of the insufficiency of the law, to produce moral virtue and thereby to establish the necessity and perfection of the gospel system—and above all, did they often enforce the discourses of our Savior, as the best rule of life, and the surest guide to happiness, how great would be the influence of our schools upon the order and prosperity of our country! 

Introduction
Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) is rarely remembered as an American founder; his writings are ill-read. But like most of his contemporaries, he lived a rich life of correspondence. One letter is produced below. Thus far at American Reformer we have only republished seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century sermons as part of our resourcement project. Rush’s letter is the first to diversify our genre but will not be the last.
Rush graduated Princeton and then attended medical school at Edinburgh becoming fluent in several languages galivanting around Europe. Upon his return, he practiced medicine in Philadelphia and taught chemistry at what would be come University of Pennsylvania, and authored textbooks on multiple subjects. An active member of the Sons of Liberty, he was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence and a delegate to Pennsylvania’s Constitutional Convention. He served as a field surgeon with the Philadelphia militia. After the war he stayed busy, founding, among other things, the Pennsylvania Bible Society, and was heavily involved with the American Sunday School Union. Public morality and education were central to his work.
Rush’s position on education and Christianity was like Noah Webster’s (1758-1843) who famously recorded in his Dictionary, “Education is useless without the Bible. The Bible was America’s basic textbook in all fields. God’s Word, contained in the Bible, has furnished all necessary rules to direct our conduct.” (See also Webster’s Value of the Bible and Excellence of the Christian Religion (1834)). Both Rush and Webster can, by all accounts, be rightly called Christian nationalists. Webster was a staunch Calvinist and Rush was a microcosm of all American Protestant denominations it seems. Both men saw education, its quality generally and use of the Bible particularly, as invariably dictating America’s future. They were right, on both counts.
In 1791, Rush wrote to the Congregationalist clergyman, Jeremy Belknap (1744-1798), presenting his case for why the Bible should be central to American curriculum. Education was socially and politically essential in a republic, Rush argued elsewhere. And if it was to be good education, then it must be religious. If it was to be religious then it must be true, that is, Christian. Rush’s arguments below are as potent today as they were then. Has his view not been demonstrated by converse occurrences? (More commentary on the substance of the letter will be provided in the Forum section.)

Letter
Dear Sir,
It is now several months, since I promised to give you my reasons for preferring the Bible as a schoolbook, to all other compositions. I shall not trouble you with an apology for my delaying so long to comply with my promise, but shall proceed immediately to the subject of my letter.
Assumptions
Before I state my arguments in favor of teaching children to read by means of the Bible, I shall assume the five following propositions.
1. That Christianity is the only true and perfect religion, and that in proportion as mankind adopt its principles, and obey its precepts, they will be wise, and happy.
2. That a better knowledge of this religion is to be acquired by reading the Bible, than in any other way.
3. That the Bible contains more knowledge necessary to man in his present state, than any other book in the world.
4. That knowledge is most durable, and religious instruction most useful, when imparted in early life,
5. That the bible, when not read in schools, is seldom read in any subsequent period of life.
First Argument
My arguments in favor of the use of the Bible as a schoolbook are founded, in the constitution of the human mind.
1. The memory is the first faculty which opens in the minds of children. Of how much consequence, then, must it be, to impress it with the great truths of Christianity, before it is pre-occupied with less interesting subjects! As all the liquors, which are poured into a cup, generally taste of that which first filled it, so all the knowledge, which is added to that which is treasured up in the memory from the Bible, generally receives an agreeable and useful tincture from it.
2. There is a peculiar aptitude in the minds of children for religious knowledge. I have constantly found them in the first six or seven years of their lives, more inquisitive upon religious subjects, than upon any others: and an ingenious instructor of youth has informed me, that he has found young children more capable of receiving just ideas upon the most difficult tenets of religion, than upon the most simple branches of human knowledge. It would be strange if it were otherwise; for God creates all his means to suit all his ends. There must of course be a fitness between the human mind, and the truths which are essential to its happiness.
3. The influence of prejudice is derived from the impressions, which are made upon the mind in early life; prejudices are of two kinds, true and false. In a world where false prejudices do so much mischief, it would discover great weakness not to oppose them, by such as are true.
I grant that many men have rejected the prejudices derived from the Bible: but I believe no man ever did so, without having been made wiser or better, by the early operation of these prejudices upon his mind. Every just principle that is to be found in the writings of Voltaire, is borrowed from the Bible: and the morality of the Deists, which has been so much admired and praised, is, I believe, in most cases, the effect of habits, produced by early instruction in the principles of Christianity.
4. We are subject, by a general law in our natures, to what is called habit. Now if the study of the scriptures be necessary to our happiness at any time of our lives, the sooner we begin to read them, the more we shall be attached to them; for it is peculiar to all the acts of habit, to become easy, strong and agreeable by repetition.
5. It is a law in our natures, that we remember longest the knowledge we acquire by the greatest number of our senses. Now a knowledge of the contents of the Bible, is acquired in school by the aid of the eyes and the ears; for children after getting their lessons, always say them to their masters in an audible voice; of course there is a presumption, that this knowledge will be retained much longer than if it had been acquired in any other way.
6. The interesting events and characters, recorded and described in the Old and New Testaments, are accommodated above all others to seize upon all the faculties of the minds of children. The understanding, the memory, the imagination, the passions, and the moral powers, are all occasionally addressed by the various incidents which are contained in those divine books, insomuch that not to be delighted with them, is to be devoid of every principle of pleasure that exists in a sound mind.
7. There is a native love of truth in the human mind. Lord Shaftesbury says, that truth is so congenial to our minds, that we love ever the shadow of it: and Horace, in his rules for composing an epic poem, establishes the same law in our natures, by advising the “fictions in poetry to resemble truth.” Now the Bible contains more truths than any other book in the world: so true is the testimony that it bears of God in his works of creation, providence, and redemption, that it is called truth itself, by way of preeminence above things that are only simply true. How forcibly are we struck with the evidences of truth, in the history of the Jews, above what we discover in the history of other nations? Where do we find a hero, or an historian record his own faults or vices except in the Old Testament? Indeed, my friend, from some accounts which I have read of the American revolution, I begin to grow skeptical to all history except to that which is contained in the Bible. Now if this book be known to contain nothing but what is materially true, the mind will naturally acquire a love for it from this circumstance: and from this affection for the truths of the Bible, it will acquire a discernment of truth in other books, and a preference of it in all the transactions of life.
8. There is a wonderful property in the memory, which enables it in old age, to recover the knowledge it had acquired in early life, after it had been apparently forgotten for forty or fifty years. Of how much consequence, then, must it be, to fill the mind with that species of knowledge, in childhood and youth, which, when recalled in the decline of life, will support the soul under the infirmities of age, and smooth the avenues of approaching death? The Bible is the only book which is capable of affording this support to old age; and it is for this reason that we find it resorted to with so much diligence and pleasure by such old people as have read it in early life. I can recollect many instances of this kind in persons who discovered no attachment to the Bible, in the meridian of their lives, who have notwithstanding, spent the evening of them, in reading no other book. The late Sir John Pringle [1707-1782], Physician to the Queen of Great Britain, after passing a long life in camps and at court, closed it by studying the scriptures. So anxious was he to increase his knowledge in them, that he wrote to Dr. [Johann David] Michaelis [1717-1791], a learned professor of divinity in Germany [i.e., University of Halle], for an explanation of a difficult text of scripture, a short time before his death.
Second Argument
My second argument in favor of the use of the Bible in schools, is founded upon an implied command of God, and upon the practice of several of the wisest nations of the world. —In the 6th chapter of Deuteronomy, we find the following words, which are directly to my purpose,
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart. And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
It appears, moreover, from the history of the Jews, that they flourished as a nation, in proportion as they honored and read the books of Moses, which contained, a written revelation of the will of God, to the children of men. The law was not only neglected, but lost during the general profligacy of manners which accompanied the long and wicked reign of Manasseh. But the discovery of it, in the rubbish of the temple, by Josiah, and its subsequent general use, were followed by a return of national virtue and prosperity. We read further, of the wonderful effects which the reading of the law by Ezra, after his return from his captivity in Babylon, had upon the Jews. They hung upon his lips with tears, and showed the sincerity of their repentance, by their general reformation.
The learning of the Jews, for many years consisted in nothing but a knowledge of the scriptures. These were the textbooks of all the instruction that was given in the schools of their prophets. It was by […] of this general knowledge of their law, that those Jews that wandered from Judea into our countries, carried with them and propagated certain ideas of the true God among all the civilized nations upon the face of the earth. And it was from the attachment they retained to the Old Testament, that they procured a translation of it into the Greek language, after they lost the Hebrew tongue, by their long absence from their native country. The utility of this translation, commonly called the Septuagint, in facilitating the progress of the gospel, is well known to all who are acquainted with the history of the first age of the Christian church.
But the benefits of an early and general acquaintance with the Bible, were not confined only to the Jewish nations. They have appeared in many countries in Europe, since the reformation. The industry, and habits of order, which distinguish many of the German nations, are derived from their early instruction in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible. The moral and enlightened character of the inhabitants of Scotland, and of the New England States, appears to be derived from the same cause. If we descend from nations to sects, we shall find them wise and prosperous in proportion as they become early acquainted with the scriptures. The Bible is still used as a schoolbook among the quakers. The morality of this sect of Christians is universally acknowledged. Nor is this all, —their prudence in the management of their private affairs, is as much a mark of their society, as their sober manners.
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