In the nineteenth century, British Protestants moved to Palestine for the purposes of missionary work among Arabs and Jews. One of most important early Protestant missionaries to Palestinian Arabs however hailed from Switzerland. Samuel Gobat, like most Swiss from...
Miles Smith
Southern Presbyterians and the Roots of American Philosemitism
In the inaugural volume of The Southern Presbyterian Review published in December, 1847, Benjamin Morgan Palmer the younger reviewed Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews from the Church of Scotland in 1839. The...
“A Species of Patriotism, So Called, Which the Gospel Does Not Approve”
George B. Cheever and “God’s Hand in America”, 1841
“Education A Divine Thing”: George Washington Doane and the Divine Foundations of Education, 1854
In 1854, George Washington Doane, Episcopal bishop of New Jersey, addressed the students, faculty, and friends of Burlington College, adjacent to the Episcopal parish church in Burlington, New Jersey. He took as his subject the divine roots of education. “Education”...
A Review of *Reformed Theology*, by Jonathan Master
Humans, argues Rev. Dr. Jonathan Master, “need clear answers to the biggest questions in life and the most consequential matters of eternity.” This is because “knowing what we believe about God, humanity, worship, and salvation is important.” These two simple...
William Mercer Green, *The Influence of Christianity Upon the Welfare of Nations*
In 1831 William Mercer Green, an Episcopal clergymen and later bishop of Mississippi, used a lecture at the University of North Carolina to extol what he argued was the near total affects of public Christianity on the development of Western social progress. For Green,...
John Henry Hobart on Exoticism and Patriotism, 1825
It was, declared the bishop, the United States’ “civil and religious institutions that we may, without the imputation of vainglory, boast the preeminence.”
Patriotic Jesus: Bishop Theodore Dehon on the Duty of Patriotism in the Early Republic
Christopher Edwards Gadsden, rector of St Philip’s Church in Charleston, South Carolina and later bishop of South Carolina, published a comprehensive biography of Theodore Dehon in 1833. Dehon served as the second Episcopal bishop of South Carolina. When he died in...
Napoleon’s Defeat and Thomas Chalmers’ Post-millennial Nationalism
“Were such a government as this to be swept from its base, either by the violence of foreign hostility, or by the hands of her own misled and infatuated children-I should never cease to deplore it as the deadliest interruption which ever had been given to the interests of human virtue, and arm, to the march of human improvement.”
“Impious and Fearful”: Early Republic Episcopalians Against the Social Contract
In an 1848 election sermon to the Massachusetts legislature, Alexander H. Vinton, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Boston, told the state legislators the state had a divinely ordained function in moral government. Interestingly, Vinton rejected Locke and the...