Daniel Ford, Liberty and Property, pg. 141

Nothing expressed the sentiments — nothing shaped the sentiments — of eighteenth-century colonial Americans more than their preachers.... Americans certainly read newspapers for news, and kept track of the latest innovations in science, industry, and the arts through books and periodicals of all kinds, but we may safely conclude that nearly all English colonials received their basic ideas of life and living from a steady diet of God’s Word from regular Sunday pulpit preaching."