American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

AMES, WILLIAM

Picture
(1576, Ipswich, England-November 1633, Rotterdam, Holland) Education: A.B., Christ's College, Cambridge, 1597. Career: teacher at Christ's College, c. 1597-1610; controversialist in Holland, 1610s; Professor of Theology, Franeker, Holland, 1622-33. 

William Ames lived the tumultuous sort of life that sent many Puritans to New England, and if he had lived longer he might have gone himself. Although Ames did not migrate, he bequeathed the Congregationalists his textbook, his library-and, in a sense, his family. Ames studied at Cambridge under William Perkins, the great exemplar of moderate Puritanism. Ames might have become master of Christ College, except that he became more open in his support of Puritanism after the death of his mentor. He refused to wear a surplice in -college chapel and attacked card playing. These typically Puritan stands won him suspension by the university. 

Ames hoped to settle as minister in Colchester, but was forbidden to preach by the Bishop of London. He then went to Holland, like so many other early Puritans; he was supported by some London merchants, who wanted him to take part in current debates between Calvinists and Arminians. He was a skillful advocate for Calvinism at a time when Arminianism was growing popular in the Anglican Church and on the continent. And he became one of the leading theologians of his time. His book, Medulla Theologiae, was the standard survey of theology used by several generations of New England students. Congregationalists were also influenced by his insistence that speculative divinity was less important in the pulpit than a good sense of the "use" of each doctrine. His De Conscientia applies Christian moral principles to particular circumstances. 
Even in Holland English authorities were able to block Ames's appointment to several attractive positions. Finally he became professor of theology and university president at Franeker, where he served for a decade, attracting students from as far away as Hungary, Poland, and Russia. He had considered going to New England, and after his death in 1633 his widow and two children immigrated, taking with them his library-a valuable asset to the Puritans in the wilderness and a tangible link to a man who would influence Congregational thought for years to come. 

Bibliography 
A: The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1643); An Analytical Exposition of Both the Epistles of the Apostle Peter (London, 1641); The Substance of Christian Religion (London, 1659); The Workes of the Reverend and Faithfull Minister of Christ William Ames (London, 1643). 
B: DNB, 355-57; Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Dr. William Ames (Urbana, Illinois, 1972).