Dwight

Dwight, DR TIMOTHY, a well-known American theologian, was born at Northampton, in Massachusetts, May 14, 1752, grandson of Jonathan Edwards; he studied at Yale College, and was licensed to preach in 1777. During the War of Independence, he was for some time a chaplain in the Continental army. In 1783 he became minister of Greenfield Hill, in Connecticut, where he also conducted an academy for twelve years with distinguished success. The College of New Jersey conferred on him the degree of S.T.D. in 1787, and Harvard that of LL.D. in 1810; in 1795 he was elected president of Yale College and professor of Divinity. He died January 11, 1817. His principal work is his Theology Explained and Defended in a series of 173 Sermons (5 vols. Middletown, Conn. 1818), which has gone through a great number of editions both in America and in England. Among his other writings may be mentioned The Conquest of Canaan (1785), an ambitious epic poem, and Travels in New England and New York (4 vols. 1821), reckoned by Southey the most important of his works.—A grandson, a second Timothy Dwight, born in 1828, was in 1886 elected president of Yale University, and was a member of the American committee for the revision of the English version of the Bible.