Local Origins.

Although he became one of early America's most widely known religious figures, Joseph Bellamy spent most of his life working in rural Connecticut. He was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, on 20 February 1719. Bellamy was raised on a farm, yet attended Yale College, graduating at the age of sixteen in 1735. From Yale he became an informal student of Jonathan Edwards, who was the minister of Northampton, Massachusetts, and the most sophisticated theologian of eighteenth-century America. Edwards was a leader of the revivals of the Great Awakening, and Bellamy followed him in promoting that work. In November 1758 Bellamy became the minister of a newly formed church in Bethlehem, in rural Litchfield County on the Connecticut frontier. He remained in that pulpit for the rest of his life, although he preached widely in Connecticut, bringing his fervent preaching about the "new birth" that...