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Sweeney argues that three key relationships grounded Taylor even deeper in the Edwardsian culture – his close friendships with Lyman Beecher and Timothy Dwight and his marriage to Rebecca Marie Hine. Just prior to his wedding to Rebecca, Taylor received his license to preach, and upon the recommendation of Timothy Dwight, then president of Yale, he began preaching at New Haven's prominent First Church, to which he was called as pastor in 1812. When Yale added a divinity school, Dwight's son endowed a chair in his father's honor to which Nathaniel Taylor was invited. His placement secured Taylor's reputation as a cultural leader. At Yale, Taylor used his platform to further his Edwardsian agenda, steeping his students in Edwards's theology and modeling and Edwardsian approach to ministry.

Between 1790 and 1840, Reformed theology reached the summit of its broad influence in American culture. With New England's Congregationalists in the lead, and then joined by mid‐state and southern Presbyterians, the Reformed theologians engaged in the most serious religious and public debates of the years. These debates led to the production of a great surge of theological literature, most of which was significantly influenced by the new conditions of American public life. The rise of Unitarianism during this period presented a special challenge to more traditional Calvinist theologians.

Led by James McGready, Timothy Dwight, Asahel Nettleton, and Charles Finney, the Second Great Awakening (1800–40) had a significant impact on American society. Both prominent revivalists and ordinary pastors painted vivid pictures of heavenly life, especially stressing the saints’ relationship with God, celestial worship, and progress in knowledge, love, and power. Much more than did subsequent generations, they warned their readers and listeners of the suffering that awaited them in hell if they refused to repent of their sins and accept Jesus as their savior and Lord. During the revolutionary, early national, and antebellum periods, numerous deists, free thinkers, and Unitarians attacked conventional Christian understandings of God, the Bible, the means of salvation, and the nature of heaven. Meanwhile, Universalists repudiated the orthodox view that individuals had to receive Jesus as their redeemer to gain entry to heaven.

This chapter examines the Augustan tradition in American literature, arguing that it should not be seen as confined to the world of belles lettres. It suggests that Augustan American literature involves the creative entanglement of potentially contradictory narratives, and the peculiar power of its art derives from its sense of being deliberately out of place, of transgressing the boundaries of civil convention in the interests of exploration and extravagance. The chapter explores the relationship between plantations and the aesthetics of extravagance by offering a critique of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, which describes an increasing sense toward the end of the seventeenth century of the importance of geography, of the position of New England in relation to the rest of the world. It also analyzes the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, Timothy Dwight, and Richard Alsop.

Chapter 1 begins with a short history of Horace’s childhood home in Salisbury, Connecticut, and then transitions to an overview of his educational experiences as an independent scholar and a student first at local grammar schools and then at Williams College and Yale. Horace’s reflections on Williams are mixed with those of his brothers John Milton and Myron to create a comprehensive understanding of collegiate life in the early republic. However, Horace’s education at Yale and his training under the Reverend Timothy Dwight in particular were fundamental to his later career, both as a minister and as an academic. This chapter also places Horace’s experiences in the context of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of American federalism.

This chapter describes Reverend Timothy Dwight's valedictory address to the Yale graduating class of 1776. Dwight espoused his vision of revolution, the future of the newly born nation, and the perfectibility all mankind. Refuting the hard realities weighing so heavily upon the new nation, he urged Yale's graduates to soar with him on the wings of patriotic rhetoric, to willingly suspend their disbelief, and imagine their politically divided and war-torn composite of states as “the greatest empire the hand of time ever raised up to view.”

Chapter Fifteen offers an overview of the influence of the ideology of democracy on American Protestantism. American theology began to change in the early nineteenth century as Americans increasingly believed in an egalitarian ethic. Princeton Seminary remained firmly committed to a high sense of God’s sovereignty and the implications that had for a hierarchical church governance structure.

This chapter presents Timothy Dwight's Greenfield Hill: A Poem, in Seven Parts (1794). Dwight was a pivotal leader during the Second Great Awakening. Aside from being a preacher and president of Yale, he was a prolific author whose literary corpus includes sermons and theological treatises as well as poems. Greenfield Hill, dedicated to John Adams, describes New England in general, and the town of Greenfield in Massachusetts in particular, as the ideal godly environment for fostering piety. In part five of the poem, Dwight advises the townsfolk on how to avoid the pitfalls of sin while encouraging them in godly living.

This chapter explores the rise of American animal protectionism during the Second Great Awakening. Evangelical Protestant revivalism promoted a new proactive theology of free moral agency, which helped propel antebellum social reform movements stressing kindness toward “the least among us.” Timothy Dwight, Charles Grandison Finney, and other revivalists stressed biblical animal kindness as a moral imperative for building a civilized society, especially in regard to proper childrearing. Contemporary religious literature, children’s school readers, and popular novels collectively promoted animal mercy. Abolitionists and temperance leaders cultivated a shared movement language of cruelty, suffering bodies, and kindness to “our fellow creatures,” which helped define a nascent gospel of animal kindness. This theological and reformist milieu gave rise to dozens of new antebellum animal welfare laws. Moreover, this formative reformist environment directly influenced the rise of organized societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals (SPCAs) after the Civil War.

Horace grew to become one of Timothy Dwight’s greatest acolytes, and out of this devotion he developed a strict Calvinistic religious orientation. In reward for his dedication, Horace was named head minister at Greenfield Hill Congregational Church and headmaster of Greenfield Hill Academy, positions formerly held by Dwight. But Horace tired of life as a country minister, and so he looked for and found a more compelling situation as head pastor of Hollis Street Church in South Boston. Here, he cultivated a more refined understanding of the social benefits of cultured society. His position at Hollis Street allowed him to participate in many of Boston’s elite organizations, and his proximity to the city’s elite expanded the scope of his ambitions.