American Heroes by Edmund S. Morgan Read Free Book Online Page A

reading Locke, but within eight years of their arrival the new books produced a more spectacular result in a different group of readers. One of these was Samuel Johnson, a Guilford boy. Johnson graduated from college the year before the books arrived; but alumni could use the library, and Johnson read avidly in the new books. As an undergraduate he had studied the old system of logic taught from books that the founding fathers of New England had brought with them. His college notebooks survive, filled with the complicated propositions that summed up the whole of human knowledge for the academic mind of the seventeenth century. At the end of one of these notebooks he has written, “And by next Thanksgiving, November 16, 1715, I was wholly changed to the New Learning.” By which he meant that he had been reading John Locke and had decided to forget everything he thought he knew before.
    Johnson stayed on at the college as a tutor from 1716 to 1719, and then, the college having moved to New Haven, he took a position as the minister of the nearby West Haven Church. He could have had better jobs at a greater distance from New Haven, but he wanted to stay near those new books. The head of the college after its removal to New Haven was the Reverend Timothy Cutler, and he, too, spent his spare minutes in the library. Cutler and Johnson and another tutor, Daniel Browne, together with a number of the ministers of New Haven and the neighboring towns, formed a discussion group that met regularly in the library to talk over what they had been reading and to help each other master the new learning.
    As they read and talked and read again, they found themselves warming to ideas that they recognized as dangerous, the very ideas that Yale had been founded in order to overcome. They were becoming Arminians, and they were finding the Anglican writers appallingly attractive. And so, like the good Puritans they were, they kept reading, confident, no doubt, that they would arrive at the correct, orthodox position in the end. Instead, they were carried farther from it. What was worse, they could not confine their new ideas to themselves. In the realm of ideas, it is difficult to lead a double life. Few men who care about ideas at all have the talent for hypocrisy—to say what they do not believe. Consequently, the new ideas began to leak out. By the spring of 1722, the rumor was going round that “Arminian books are cryed up in Yale College for Eloquence and Learning, and Calvinists despised for the contrary; and none have the courage to see it redressed.”
    By September 1722 the rumor had grown to alarming proportions, but it is doubtful that anyone was quite prepared for what happened next. At the commencement ceremonies in that year, Rector Timothy Cutler closed his prayer with the words “And let all the people say Amen.” This must have made the audience gasp, for it was the form followed in the Anglican Church. The next day, as the trustees met in the library, Rector Cutler and six of his friends appeared at the scene of their crime and confessed: they had not only become Arminians but had all decided to join the Church of England and were going to leave for England at once to take orders.
    The consternation would not have been greater if the president of an American college, at the height of the Cold War, had told his trustees that he and his faculty and a number of leading local citizens had been reading Karl Marx together, had decided to become communists, and were departing for Moscow to receive instructions. In just twenty-one years from the date of its founding, the Yale Library had completely subverted the purpose for which the college was established. The Yale trustees, of course, promptly fired Rector Cutler and Tutor Browne, and everyone tried to talk the converts out of their conversion. In the course of the next month, three were persuaded back to Puritanism. But Rector Cutler, Tutor Browne, Samuel