It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.

Washington is known to have made some official statements of public piety, but this is not one of them. The assertion is very widely reported to have been said in Washington's Farewell Address (17 September 1796), but this is not actually the case, as any search of the documents would reveal. It has also been presented as having been part of his Proclamation on January 1, 1795 of February 19th, 1795 as a day of national Thanksgiving. The oldest form of this saying appears as part of an argument for the existence of God attributed to Washington in an undocumented biography written for children. In A Life of Washington (1836) by James K. Paulding, Washington is quoted as having stated

It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being. | (For the context see Paulding's anecdote given below in the section of quotations about Washington.) This is unattributed, and no source other than Paulding is known. In 1864 the words "the aid of a Supreme Being" were replaced by the word "God" in Benjamin Franklin Morris, Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States (1864), p. 510 | It is impossible ... to govern the universe without God... | Three years later, in 1867, Henry Wilson (Testimonies of American Statesmen and Jurists to the Truths of Christianity, American Tract Society) replaced "universe" with "world" | It is impossible to govern the world without God. | In 1893 Howard H. Russell (A Lawyer's Examination of the Bible, 1893) added the word "rightly" and the phrase "and the Bible" to create the most commonly cited form | It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. | This form, which is also found in Upper Room Bulletin, Vol. 7, No. 3 (23 October 1920), rests on no other authority than Russell, who was born long after Washington had died. It is clearly spurious. The saying is often found attached to genuine material such as Washington's 1795 Thanksgiving proclamation | It is in an especial manner our duty as a people, with devout reverence and affectionate gratitude, to acknowledge our many and great obligations to Almighty God, and to implore Him to continue and confirm the blessings we experienced. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe, without the agency of a Supreme Being. It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being. It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is as necessary to reason, as reason is to religion. The one cannot exist without the other. A reasoning being would lose his reason, in attempting to accou