Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THEODORE DWIGHT WOOLSEY?A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH By Theodore S. Woolsey In this sketch of my father's early years, the years preparatory to his life work, I have tried to place together, as far as may be in his own words, the influences, the education, the social and family environment, and particularly the foreign training which bore upon this preparation. npHERE was graduated at Yale College in 1820 at the A head of his class, Theodore Dwight Woolsey. Destined to spend almost the whole of a long life in the service of his college, he had small thought then of an academic career. His father was an influential merchant in New York; his two brothers, both graduates of the class of 1813, were engaged in active business. College training was the custom of the family, for both his grandfather and great-grandfather had been nurtured within the same walls; so that with young Woolsey, a college education did not necessarily imply a clerical profession or the idea of an academic life. He had a plentiful clerical ancestry, however, which may well have influenced his mind. President Dwight was his uncle by marriage; Jonathan Edwards was his greatgrandfather; James Pierpont was also an ancestor, a step further removed; his own paternal great-grandfather was a clergyman on Long Island, continuing to preach after he had retired from a charge to his own estate. The influences, therefore, as to choice of profession to which my father was subject must have been various. Perhaps it was the example of his closest friends rather than home advice which for a time urged him to the ministry. This was not his first determination however. He did not profess a religious faith and connect himself with the church until his Senior year, and the first year after graduation was given to the law. Valuabl...