ABSTRACT
In June, 1654, eighteen years after the enactment that created Harvard, its president, Henry Dunster, was obliged to present his resignation to the Overseers. The concept upon which his tenure at Harvard was based was presumably the same as that upon which the New England clergy held their offices. The Dunster case showed that in his day the only appeal was to the correctness of the individual's deviant opinion, not to his right to have one. Much of John Leverett's sixteen-year reign at Harvard coincided with the era of peace and prosperity that followed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. For Harvard College itself and for New England intellectual life their victory was truly momentous, for it set the institution on a path which it has never deserted and paved the way for a series of cumulative minor victories that established Harvard's place in the vanguard of intellectual liberalism.
