ce upon his
spiritual character. His father was a strict Calvinist, and Dr Samuel
Hopkins, one of the leaders of the old school Calvinists, was a frequent
guest in his father's house. He was, even as a child, he himself says,
"quite a theologian, and would chop logic with his elders according to
the fashion of that controversial time." He prepared for college in New
London under the care of his uncle, the Rev. Henry Channing, and in
1794, about a year after the death of his father, entered Harvard
College. Before leaving New London he came under religious influences to
which he traced the beginning of his spiritual life. In his college
vacations he taught at Lancaster, Massachusetts, and in term time he
stinted himself in food that he might need less exercise and so save
time for study,--an experiment which undermined his health, producing
acute dyspepsia. From his college course he thought that he got little
good, and said "when I was in college, only three books that I read were
of any moment to me: ... Ferguson on _Civil Society_, ... Hutcheson's
_Moral Philosophy_, and Price's _Dissertations_. Price saved me from
Locke's philosophy."

After graduating in 1798, he lived at Richmond, Virginia, as tutor in
the family of David Meade Randolph, United States marshal for Virginia.
Here he renewed his ascetic habits and spent much time in theological
study, his mind being greatly disturbed in regard to Trinitarian
teachings in general and especially prayer to Jesus. He returned to
Newport in 1800 "a thin and pallid invalid," spent a year and a half
there, and in 1802 went to Cambridge as regent (or general proctor) in
Harvard; in the autumn of 1802 he began to preach, having been approved
by the Cambridge Association. On the 1st of June 1803, having refused
the more advantageous pastorate of Brattle Street church, he was
ordained pastor of the Federal Street Congregational church in Boston.
At this time it seems certain that his theological views were not fixed,
and in 1808, when he preached a sermon at the ordination of the Rev.
John Codman (1782-1847), he still applied the title "Divine Master" to
Jesus Christ, and used such expressions as "shed for souls" of the blood
of Jesus, and "the Son of God himself left the abodes of glory and
expired a victim of the cross." But his sermon preached in 1819 at
Baltimore at the ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks was in effect a
powerful attack on Trinitarianism, and was followed in