Friday, January 14, 2011
Former Yale President Timothy Dwight
The grandson of Princeton president Jonathan Edwards, Timothy Dwight could read at age 4 and entered Yale at 13. He later became Yale’s president in 1795. Originally founded as a Puritan college, Yale had become a hotbed of French Deism. As Dwight met regularly to discuss students’ questions about faith, the Lord moved powerfully on the campus. A third of the student body became Christians, and 30 entered the ministry.
Timothy Dwight wrote:
“Religion and liberty are the meat and drink of the body politic. Withdraw one of them and it dies….Without religion we may possibly retain the freedom of savages, but not the freedom of New England….If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it and nothing would be left worth defending.”
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