Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/306

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voice rang out in denunciation of the English administration, until in his native land he was branded as a rebel and a traitor. The spread of the Reformation was more largely due to the fact that Luther was a professor in the University of Wittenberg than to any other single cause; the adherence to the Revolution of the powerful Scotch and Scotch-Irish element in the Colonies was chiefly if not entirely secured by the teachings of John Witherspoon from his professor's chair in Nassau Hall. To him and John Dickinson, author of the Farmer's Letters, belongs the credit of having convinced the sober middle classes of the great middle Colonies that the breach with England was not merely inevitable, but just and to their interest.

But Witherspoon was more than a teacher, he was a practical statesman. His country-seat was a farm on the southern slope of Rocky Hill, about a mile due north of Nassau Hall. Its solid stone walls still bear the classic name which he gave it, of Tusculum. In his hours of retirement at that beloved home he seems to have brooded more on the rights of man than on human depravity, more on law than on theology, more on Providence in His present dealings with men than on the remoter mean-