Recall the early days of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, during the fall of 1774. With Boston occupied by British troops, there were rumors of imminent hostilities and fears of an impending war. In this time of peril, someone suggested that they pray. But there were objections. ‘They were too divided in religious sentiments,’ what with Episcopalians and Quakers, Anabaptists and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Catholics.

Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot.

And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation.

— Mitt Romney

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The account with which Governor Romney concluded his address yesterday on “Faith in America” is so often told that it has become something of an old chestnut in the circle of historians who write about the founding of America. The clergyman who ended up leading the prayer in 1774 was Jacob Duché, of the Church of England, who preached on the 35th Psalm, in which David asks the Lord to take up his shield, spear, and battle-axe and “fight against them that fight against me.” The prayer was well-received; as James Grant recounts it in his biography of John Adams, “Party of One,” John Adams “thought his performance equal to vintage Sam Cooper,” a reference to the patriotic Congregationalist minister who headed Boston’s Brattle Street Church.

What is less well-known about Duché, however, is that when the going in the Revolutionary War really got rough, he gave up. The Philadelphia minister ended up, on October 8, 1777, writing George Washington a letter, urging Washington also to give up. “Under so many discouraging circumstances, can Virtue, can Honour, can the Love of your Country, prompt you to proceed? Humanity itself, and sure humanity is no stranger to your breast, calls upon you to desist,” Duché wrote Washington. He urged Washington to “represent to Congress the indispensible necessity of rescinding the hasty and ill-advised declaration of Independency — Recommend, and you have an undoubted right to recommend, an immediate cessation of hostilities.”

When Washington refused and leaked the letter to the press to expose Duché, the minister fled to London, where he and other loyalists spent the duration of the Revolutionary War while the Adamses and Washington bet their lives for a surge in the Revolution — not unlike, incidentally, the test our country is going through today — and risked all for an independence that lit up the world like few events since Sinai.

None of this is gainsaid by Governor Romney ‘s vision of “our nation’s symphony of faith.” Washington himself was an Anglican, as were many of those who fought for American independence. But they were judged in history, as Duché has been, not on the basis of their religiosity but on the basis of their steadfastness in the struggle for freedom. We note this not to diminish the religious motivation many, though not all, of the revolutionaries felt, or to diminish the role of faith in motivating many of today’s politicians and voters but to underscore the essential point.

Samuel Adams may have been right about Duché’s piety, but he was wrong about his patriotism. In wartime, in which America finds itself now as it did during the revolution, it’s especially important to avoid repeating Samuel Adams’s error. It is a reminder that, as Mr. Romney put it so well yesterday, the test for officeholders has never in our history been a religious one. It is no doubt why the constitutional founders established so emphatically, in the bedrock of Article VI, that no religious test shall ever be required for any office of trust under the United States. Rather the test is of “a steadfast commitment to liberty,” a commitment that, as Mr. Romney put it, is “not unique to any one denomination” but is part of “the firm ground on which Americans of different faiths meet and stand as a nation, united.”