The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America by Frank Lambert

Author:Frank Lambert [Lambert, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781400825530
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-07-28T06:00:00+00:00

THE NEW LEARNING

Ezra Stiles attended Yale just one generation after his father Isaac, but the two men found very different intellectual worlds in New Haven. Ezra discovered in the Yale Library a whole new universe of ideas that undermined his confidence in his father’s way of thinking. The New Learning was Newtonian science, a radically different way of viewing the universe, its creator, and human understanding. Reflecting on his father’s education, Ezr a wrote that “Newtonian Science had not passed the Atlantic then; and after its Arrival he [Isaac] had no Taste or Genius for more than a superficial Knowledge of it.” Rather, he asserted, his father had read “the old Logic, Philosophy, and Metaphysics,” though, insofar as he himself judged it to be “unintelligible,” Ezra questioned how much of it his father could have understood. The fact is that Newton’s works, along with those of other Enlightenment writers, had been on the Yale Library bookshelves when Isaac Stiles was a student. Through a donation by colonial agent and Yale benefactor Jeremiah Dummer (1681–1739), a collection of such books arrived in 1714, but “Yale was slow to absorb the new learning.”5 By contrast, Ezr a Stiles and his generation of college students, which included many of the Founding Fathers, were quick to imbibe it. The result was a thorough critique of religious and moral thought in general and of Christianity in particular.6

For Ezra Stiles, the Yale Library was an intellectual window opening onto a new, exciting, wide world that both elucidated and challenged old beliefs. At the age of fifteen, this minister’s son from North Haven, Connecticut, arrived at the New Haven college in 1742 secure in his Puritan beliefs. After all, they were anchored in truths revealed in Holy Scripture and manifested in nature. Four years before entering Yale, the boy had “calculated that God had made the world 5, 700 years before. Looking at the great cliff of East Rock as he rode into New Haven, he could be sure the Deluge had washed over it exactly 4, 032 years ago in the time of Noah.” While his religious heritage gave him the confidence to decipher such mysteries as the age of the earth, it also engendered a degree of arrogance, perhaps no more or less than that of many other teenagers who see with clarity their parents’ limitations. Writing sixteen years after his graduation from college, Ezr a dismissed his father’s scholarship: “He read much, but digested almost nothing.” Stiles wrote, “His mind was stored with rich and valuable Ideas, but classed in no Order, like good Books thrown in Confusion in a Library Room.”7

Ezra Stiles’s characterization of his father’s mind as disorderly was misleading and probably inaccurate. It was not true that Isaac Stiles failed to order ideas within a logical framework; rather, it is clear that he subscribed to a classification method that was very different from that preferred by his son. When the elder Stiles attended Yale in the early 1720s, Puritan orthodoxy was

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