Answer: John Witherspoon
Explanation: John Witherspoon was born into a ministerial family near Edinburgh on Feb. 5, 1723. He matriculated at the University of Edinburgh at 13 and took his master of arts degree in 1739 and his divinity degree 4 years later. In 1745 he accepted the call to the pulpit of Beith in Ayrshire. There he married Elizabeth Montgomery, who bore him ten children, only five of whom survived.
In 1757 the town of Paisley offered him its church and he served there for the next eleven years. An eloquent spokesman for the Popular (conservative) church party, he deplored the spiritual vacuity of the "paganized Christian divines" of his day and attracted the attention of intellectuals at home and abroad for his courage and leadership. As moderator of the synod of Glasgow and Ayr, he delivered a powerful sermon, "The Trail of Religious Truth by Its Moral Influence" (1759), in which he decried the flabby "theory of virtue" that was replacing "the great and operative views of the Gospel."
Witherspoon was just the man for the presidency of the College of New Jersey, which was torn between new-and old-side factionalism, and the job was offered him in 1766. But his wife thought that to leave home "would be as a sentence of death to her." The persuasiveness of Benjamin Rush, an alumnus of the college, and now a medical student at Edinburgh, finally allayed her fears. Witherspoon and his family arrived in America in August 1768, loaded with valuable books for the college library.
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-A Girl Who Loves History-
