From the landing of the Pilgrims through the American Revolution, American religious thought was strongly influenced by the Puritan theologian William Ames. Quoted more often in the New World than either Luther or Calvin, Ames was read in Latin by undergraduates at Harvard and Yale as part of their basic instruction in divinity. Both Thomas Hooker and Increase Mather recommended the Marrow of Theology as the only book beyond the Bible needed to make a student into a sound theologian. Brief, lucid and comprehensive, the Marrow presents the substance of the Puritan understanding of God, the church and the world. Ames shows Puritanism to be an eminently practical religion which stresses individual experience and feeling. Connections run from Ames in the eighteenth and Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth.
