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Liberal Education Imperiled3 2 5today. 34 The spirit of the Revolution led to the founding of many colleges anduniversities that were influenced by the principles of the American Founding.The goal of many of the colleges in the Revolutionary era was to producemorally upright citizens, and moral philosophy became the common groundon the basis of which to build republics of virtue. Aristotle was found usefulbecause he taught that anyone could be virtuous by forming good habits. 35Theology increasingly was relegated to chapel services and one’s local church,but it was not discarded from intelligent life.While there were sectarian conflicts through the eighteenth century,new schools, such as the College of New Jersey, made efforts in the directionof toleration and rights of dissent. Much of this toleration developed out ofpersecutions at places like Harvard and Yale. John Witherspoon, the onlyclergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, symbolizes the Revolutionaryspirit that moderated the sectarian conflict. According to George M.Marsden, Revolutionary statesmen believed that “service to the Republic hademerged as the preeminent good. For this there was hardly any distinctionbetween the benefits of religion and the benefits of the science of morality.” 36This was not a rejection of religion, for the belief still prevailed that religionassisted in the development of public morals. However, the sectarian edge ofthe destructive conflicts throughout history subsided in the Revolutionaryperiod. In post-Revolutionary America, there was general agreement thatrevelation could be seen in nature, and that it confirmed his divine work.While there was some disagreement over the proper relationship betweenreason and revelation, even the most ardent supporters of scripture—fromAlexander Campbell’s restorationists to the evangelical Presbyterians—were“all…convinced that in fair controversy universal truth would eventually34Kronman, Education’s End, 54, 58. At the College of New Jersey in 1751, students read Xenophonin Greek and Cicero’s De oratore in Latin and took courses in Hebrew grammar. Under John Witherspoon’stenure (in 1772) students took Greek and Latin and studied Roman antiquities and rhetoric.They also had to study mathematics, history, philosophy, natural and moral philosophy, and geography.Harvard and Yale required conversation to be conducted in Latin in the early 1700s. See Kraus,“Development of a Curriculum,” 67, 71. Many colleges required Greek or Latin the first two years;see McAnear, “College Founding in the American Colonies,” 34, and Ringenberg, Christian College,37. Making admission still more demanding, colleges required applicants to translate an elementaryLatin or Greek text. For example, at Rutgers in the late colonial period, prospective students had totranslate into English Caesar’s Commentaries, the Eclogues of Virgil, and one of the four Gospels. SeeRingenberg, Christian College, 50.35Marsden, Soul of the American University, 51–52. By the mid-1800s even those denominationsthat were founding their own colleges could not attract students on a narrow or sectarian basis. Theyappealed to religion, but in a more socially acceptable way that emphasized the general moral aspectsof religion and its moral benefits, rather than on theological peculiarities. See ibid., 80.36Ibid., 63.