262 History of Universities
gospelling rather than learning from their pulpits. The first
of the numerous Methodist colleges in the United States
was Wesleyan University in Connecticut, which was not
founded until 1830.
Princeton, the College of New Jersey, was a child of the
“Great Awakening,” that religious revival that tore through
the Northern Colonies in the wake of George Whitefield,
shaking down converts like apples. The Scotch and Irish
Presbyterians, who began emigrating to the Middle Colonies
in large numbers early in the eighteenth century, were just
as insistent on a learned clergy as the New England Puritans ;
but after the first generation of Scotch-educated parsons died
out, the American Presbyterians were at a loss for good min-
isterial material. William Tennent, a graduate of Edin-
burgh, established in 1726 at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, a
private school popularly called the “Log College,” for the
training of Presbyterian divines. Without a charter, he
could not grant degrees ; and the “Log” alumni were accused
of having more enthusiasm than learning. Accordingly, the
Philadelphia Synod of the Presbyterian Church, in 1738,
ruled that no candidate for orders who did not hold a degree
from Harvard, Yale, or a European University, should be
licensed by a presbytery, until his educational fitness had
been passed on by a committee of the Synod. Mr. Tennent’s
former pupils resented this edict, split off from the Phila-
delphia Synod, and when George Whitefield began his re-
vivalistic tour of the Colonies in 1739, took him to their
bosom ; but they were candid enough to see the wisdom of
strict educational requirements. Forming a new synod in
New York, they united with two Presbyterian pastors al-
ready in that city—Jonathan Dickinson, a graduate of Yale,
and Ebenezer Pemberton of Harvard—applied to the Royal
Governor of New Jersey, and in 1746 obtained a charter as