John Jay (June 23, 1817-May 5, 1894) was an American lawyer and diplomat. He was the son of Judge William Jay and the grandson of John Jay, the Founding Father who was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was the manager of the New York Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society in 1834; secretary of the Irish Relief Commission during the potato famine in 1847; U.S. Minister to Austria, 1869-75; and the vice-president of the Civil Service Reform Association of the State of New York. He served as the president of the American Historical Society, 1890; as well as being an active member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design. John Jay authored many papers, including: "America Free or America Slave," 1856; "On the Passage of the Constitutional Amendment," 1864; and "Abolishing Slavery," 1864.
In 1887, as the president of the Westchester County Bible Society, John Jay delivered his message "National Perils and Opportunities":
<"It is high time to wake out of sleep!" This gathering of citizens from distant parts, representing the millions who hold to the Bible, and cherish the institutions founded upon its inspired truths, shows that the nation is awakening to the perils, foreign and domestic, which threatens the purity of its Christian civilization.
Its intellectual and moral strength in our Revolutionary struggle were recognized by the world, and Burke rightly attributed that strength to the character of the emigrants from various lands exhibiting "the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion."
They brought with them the best and most heroic blood of the peoples of Europe-of the Hollanders, the Waloons of Flanders, the Huguenots of France, the English, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish, of the Norwegians and Swedes, the Germans and the Swiss, of the Bohemian followers of John Hus, of the Albigenses and Waldenses of the Italian Alps, of the Salzbury exiles, the Moravian brothers, with refugees from the Pallatinate, Alsace and southern Germany.
They all brought the Bible, for which they and their ancestors had been ready to suffer and to die; and their devotion to that Book descended to the Continental Congress, which, a week before it was driven from Philadelphia, ordered an importation of twenty thousand Bibles.
At the Centennial celebration, at Philadelphia, of the Declaration of Independence, the Acting Vice-President, Ferry, said that the American statesmen who had to choose between the royal authority or popular sovereignty had been inspired by the truth uttered on Mars Hill, and repeated in the opening prayer of the morning, that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men."> 1817JJ001
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American Quotations by William J. Federer, 2024, All Rights Reserved, Permission granted to use with acknowledgement.
Endnotes:
1817JJ001. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). John Jay, 1887, in a message, delivered while president of the Westchester County Bible Society, titled "National Perils and Opportunities," pp. 8-9. Stephen Abbott Northrop, D.D., A Cloud of Witnesses (Portland, Oregon: American Heritage Ministries, 1987; Mantle Ministries, 228 Still Ridge, Bulverde, Texas), p. 250.