American Minute with Bill Federer

 January 11

 Grandson of Princeton president Jonathan Edwards, he could read at
 age 4 and entered Yale at 13.

 He was a chaplain in the Continental Army until his father died,
 when, as the eldest of 13, he worked the family farm to pay off debts.


 He was in Massachusetts' first State Legislature.

 This was Timothy Dwight, who became Yale's president in 1795.

 In 22 years he created departments of chemistry, geology, law,
 medicine, and founded Andover Theological Seminary.

 He pioneered women's education, and was critical of slavery and
 encroachment on Indian lands.

 Originally a Puritan college, Yale students became enticed by
 France's deistic "cult of reason," which birthed the bloody French
 Revolution.

 Dwight answered their questions on faith and by his death, JANUARY
 11, 1817, Yale had grown from 110 to 313 students, a third professing
 Christians and 30 entering ministry.

 Timothy Dwight wrote in 1798:

 "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."