Harvard University, Richard Rummell

To buttress orthodoxy in Boston, a college for training ministers of religion was founded on the Charles River at Newtown in 1636, according to the will of the Rev. John Harvard. He came to the colonies in 1635 and left 780 pounds and 400 books for this purpose. The place was rechristened Cambridge after the university where he was nurtured.

The business of the first settlers of Massachusetts 'was to settle and (as much as in them lay) to secure Religion to Posterity, according to that way which they believed was of God.' (Samuel Willard, Minister to the Third Church of Boston).

Puritan poets were the metaphysician Edward Taylor of Westfield, Massachusetts (c. 1644-1729) and Michael Wigglesworth, whose theological poem, Day of Doom, published in Cambridge in 1662, popularized Puritan dogma in ballad meter.