President Witherspoon in the American Revolution

Abstract

ALTHOUGH John Witherspoon did not come to America until the year I768, long after he had himself passed the middle line of human life, -yet so quickly did he then enter into the spirit of American society, so perfectly did he identify himself with its nobler moods of discontent and aspiration, so powerfully did he contribute by speech and act to the right development of this new nation out of the old cluster of dispersed and dependent communities, that it would be altogether futile to attempt to frame a just account of the great intellectual movements of our Revolution without taking some note of the part played in it by this eloquent, wise, and efficient Scotsman -at once teacher, preacher, politician, law-maker, and philosopher, upon the whole not undeserving of the praise which has been bestowed upon him as one of the great men of the age and of the world. 1 Born in 1722, in the parish of Yester, fourteen miles cast of Edinburgh, a parish of which his father was minister, he was able upon his mother's side to trace his lineage, through an unbroken line of Presbyterian ministers, back to John Knox. That such a man should ever, in any country, come to lend his support to a system of rather bold conduct respectino royal personages in general, was hardly a thing to shock or surprise any sinrle drop of blood in his body. At the age of twenty, he was graduated from the University of Edinburgh, where he had for associates Huogh Blair, James Robertson, and John Erskine. At the age of twenty-two, he became minister of the parish of Beith in the west of Scotland. At the age of thirty-four, he became pastor of the Low Church in Paisley. At the age of forty-six, after having declined calls to Presbyterian congregations in Dundee, Dublin, and Rotterdam, he accepted an invitation to the presidency of the College of New Jersey an invitation which he had already declined two years before. At the time of his removal to America, therefore, he had achieved distinction as a preacher and an ecclesiastical leader. Even as an author, also,