American Heroes by Edmund S. Morgan

generally regarded in New England as the authoritative statement of Christian doctrine. What made it authoritative? That a group of learned and pious ministers had written it? That the colony of Connecticut approved it? Stiles decided not; even though he may still have believed most of its doctrines, it was “no authoritative Standard of Truth.”
    This brought him up against another and more difficult question. If you rejected the Westminster Confession as an authoritative statement, why accept the Bible? Stiles never doubted the existence of God. Neither did the deists. But if he was rejecting the authority of great names, was there anything about the Bible to stamp it as the product of divine revelation? The mere fact that its authors said it was could hardly be sufficient proof.
    Ezra Stiles knew that if he decided the Bible to be something less than the word of God, he was a deist. And to be a deist was a pretty drastic and daring thing in New England. There were deists, especially among the lawyers, who seem to have been a notoriously ungodly lot, but they were not supposed to be tutors at Yale, corrupting the youth of Connecticut with ideas worse than Anglicanism.
    Ezra Stiles wrestled long and hard with his problem, and he did most of his wrestling in the library. He had read himself to the edge of deism with Shaftesbury, and he now tried to read himself back again with John Taylor, Joseph Butler, John Scott, and Isaac Watts. From these and other authors and from the Bible itself, he was able to conclude that the Bible, whoever wrote it, was a “most rational and sublime Scheme far exceeding natural Religion,” far exceeding, that is, any religion that was unaided by revelation. This was still not quite proof that the Bible was the word of God, but Stiles eventually convinced himself from the consistency of different apostles in relating the same facts, and from the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, that the Bible was indeed divinely inspired. By further reading in the writings of the early Puritans, he later developed into a thoroughgoing Calvinist.
    It might seem, therefore, that Ezra Stiles fully recovered from his bout with the library. But the books he read left a lasting mark upon him and, through him, on others. Having met temptation and survived, he concluded, perhaps too easily, that others who met it, as he had, would also survive. Though firmly committed to revelation, he continued to believe in reason. Let men read and think freely, he maintained, and they would come to truth in the end, just as he had. He had the same confidence as the old Puritans whom he admired, a confidence that reason would lead men to his opinions.
    But Ezra Stiles went a step beyond the Puritans. If reason did not bring other men to his opinions, he was content to let them hold their wrong opinions in peace. When he recovered his confidence in the Bible, he did not resume the proper New England stance with regard to the Westminster Confession. For him that was still no authoritative standard of truth. In fact, he retained a phobia against all creeds and tests in religious matters. Once he had established the authenticity of the Bible, he made it an excuse for not recognizing the authority of any man-made creed.
    While he was a tutor, Stiles’s rampant curiosity led him to write to authors all over the world, begging copies of their works for the college library. He went right on begging after he moved to Newport, Rhode Island, as pastor of the Second Congregational Church there. One of the men whom he solicited successfully was Henry Collins, a Newport Baptist, and among the books that Collins wished to give Yale were some by James Foster, a controversial but respected English theologian, who favored unitarianism and opposed infant baptism. Collins actually had no hopes of making Baptist converts through Foster’s writings. He merely wanted to make the learned world acquainted with the fact that