The liberal religious views of the American clergyman Charles Chauncy (1705-1787) influenced 19th-century theology in New England.

Charles Chauncy was the great grandson of Charles Chauncy, second president of Harvard College. Young Charles was born and educated in Boston. He graduated from Harvard in 1721 and received his master's degree there in 1724. Ordained as minister to the First Church in Boston in 1727, he served in this prestigious position for 60 years. In 1727 he married the first of three wives, Elizabeth First; in 1738 he married Elizabeth Townsend; and in 1760 Mary Stoddard. He was a serious, diligent person and an energetic scholar of religion and the Bible.

Chauncy became the Great Awakening's most formidable critic. In 1741 he gave a lecture remarkably close in spirit to the thinking of New England clergyman Jonathan Edwards, but a year later Chauncy preached against the revivals. His Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion (1743) is a...