Jonathan Dickinson was the foremost intellectual leader of American Presbyterianism during its formative decades and the key figure in the founding of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). His prolific output of books, pamphlets, and published sermons earned him a reputation as a formidable controversialist.

Dickinson was born on 22 April 1688 in Hatfield, Massachusetts, to Hezekiah and Abigail Dickinson. He graduated from Yale in 1706 and in 1709 was ordained pastor at Elizabethtown, New Jersey, where he remained for the rest of his life. He also served as the community's physician. In 1717 his congregation entered the Presbyterianism church, which in its early years in America had a loose organization virtually indistinguishable from the ministerial associations being formed by Connecticut Valley Congregationalists.

Dickinson soon emerged as the spokesman for those ministers whose conception of Presbyterian polity derived, like his, from New England backgrounds. The model for their principal opponents was...