Princeton University in the Eighteenth Century
“It will suffice to say that the two principal Objectives the Trustees had in view were Science and Religion. Their first Concern was to cultivate the Minds of the Pupils, in all those Branches of Erudition, which are generally taught in the Universities abroad; and to perfect their Design, their next Care was to rectify the Heart, by inculcating the great Precepts of Christianity, in order to make them good Men.”
-Statement prepared for a fund raising trip to Britain in 1752.
The college was opened in May of 1747 under the provisions of a charter granted in 1746 under Acting Governor Hamilton. Its origins lay in the rising demand for a college of genuine quality to fill the need both for broadly educated men in the learned professions and for scholarly ministers of the gospel in the pastorates of the Middle Colonies and the developing regions to the South and West. Jonathan Dickenson, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, was elected the first president and taught the first eight or ten students temporarily in his own parsonage in the hope that permanent buildings could soon be erected at Princeton.
[A General Account of the Rise and State of the College lately established in the Province of New Jersey in America…(New York: Printed by James Parker at the New Printing Office in Beaver Street, 1752), p. 5]
“It will suffice to say that the two principal Objectives the Trustees had in view were Science and Religion. Their first Concern was to cultivate the Minds of the Pupils, in all those Branches of Erudition, which are generally taught in the Universities abroad; and to perfect their Design, their next Care was to rectify the Heart, by inculcating the great Precepts of Christianity, in order to make them good Men.”
-Statement prepared for a fund raising trip to Britain in 1752.
The college was opened in May of 1747 under the provisions of a charter granted in 1746 under Acting Governor Hamilton. Its origins lay in the rising demand for a college of genuine quality to fill the need both for broadly educated men in the learned professions and for scholarly ministers of the gospel in the pastorates of the Middle Colonies and the developing regions to the South and West. Jonathan Dickenson, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, was elected the first president and taught the first eight or ten students temporarily in his own parsonage in the hope that permanent buildings could soon be erected at Princeton.
[A General Account of the Rise and State of the College lately established in the Province of New Jersey in America…(New York: Printed by James Parker at the New Printing Office in Beaver Street, 1752), p. 5]
