Joseph Bellamy was an important figure during the Great Awakening (1740-1742) and one of the architects of the New England theology, which sought to preserve the strict Calvinism linked with the heritage of Jonathan Edwards. According to Harriet Beecher Stowe in Oldtown Folks (1869), Bellamy's theology, as expressed in his most important work, True Religion Delineated (1750), was the gospel of New England religious culture for more than one-hundred years. In the view of Chandler Robbins, who edited the 1855 edition of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana ... (1702), Bellamy's "name was almost a household word in our family." (Robbins's father, a member of the "black regiment" of revolutionary preachers--those patriot-ministers who exhorted and inspired the Continental army--studied under Bellamy.) Contemporaneous testaments assert that Bellamy's sermons, delivered "with a prodigious voice, vivid imagination, great flow of language," had no rivals in eighteenth-century America, except those of Jonathan Edwards himself.

Bellamy graduated from Yale...