Say your daddy is rich. Say you’re smart. How should you spend his money and your life? Bill Buckley, who died yesterday at age 82, answered that question well.

Born in 1925, he was the sixth of ten children fathered by a Catholic oil millionaire. In college he headed the Yale Daily News, then gained national attention by writing God and Man at Yale, which accused his alma mater of proselytizing for atheism and collectivism.

After a year in the CIA and other short stops, Buckley in 1955 used $100,000 from his father to start National Review, which was important in many ways. Its wit showed that conservatives weren’t hicks. It laid out reasonable alternatives to regnant liberalism. It gave a start to young conservative writers. It routed right-wing ranters like John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who had called President Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent.

Buckley gained personal visibility largely through his television program Firing Line, on which he consulted his clipboard, used big words, arched his eyebrows, licked his lips, and flashed a wolfish grin just before cleverly eviscerating liberal opponents. He became so well-known that the Disney movie Aladdin has the genie transforming himself into the polysyllabic speaker, who leans back in a chair and explains the permutations of the “three wishes” rule.

Buckley also sailed across the Atlantic, took up playing the harpsichord, and wrote at least 55 books, including 11 action-adventure spy novels. He and his wife Patricia married in 1950 and stayed married until she died last April. They called each other “Ducky” and had one son, Christopher, a witty writer as well.

Last Wednesday Buckley, who had recently suffered from diabetes and emphysema, was found dead at his desk in his home. “He might have been working on a column,” his son said.

I remember William F. Buckley many years ago telling a guest on “Firing Line” that you can get away with mentioning the word “God” once, and maybe twice, at a party. But three times and you’ll never get invited back.

The man who no sooner graduated from Yale in 1950 than he excoriated his alma mater’s defection from Christ in God and Man at Yale might be amused by the following excerpt from the “Testimony of Harvard College against George Whitefield” (1744), signed by that institution’s President, Professors, Tutors, and Hebrew Instructor:

In regard to the danger which we apprehend the people and churches of this land are in, on the account of Rev. Mr. George Whitefield we have tho’t ourselves oblig’d to bear our testimony, in this public manner, against him and his way of preaching, as tending very much to the detriment of religion and the entire destruction of the order of these churches of Christ, which our fathers have taken such care and pains to settle, as by the platform, according to which the discipline of the churches of New England is regulated: and we do therefore hereby declare, that we look upon his going about, in an itinerant way, especially as he hath much of an enthusiastic turn, utterly inconsistent with the peace and order…of these churches of Christ….

You can always tell when the church of Christ is going bad, by these two marks:

1) It still uses lots of God words.

2) Its zeal is not for Christ but for “church order.”