ABSTRACT
With that optimistic profession of faith in the eventual establishment of a peaceful kingdom of God on this earth, Vernon Louis Parrington stepped away from the podium. In his oration Parrington conjoined his faith in God with a belief in progress as beneficent when he attempted to define the purpose of history. Early in 1890 he delivered his first oration, vaguely titled “The American Nobility,” and early in 1891 he delivered another, “Gustavus Adolphus and the Advance of Protestant Toleration". Parrington was drawn, not by emotionalism or piety, but by intellectual vigor, freshness of ideas, the force of the preacher’s personality, and—perhaps above all—by his mode of expression. While Parrington’s initial 1890 diary entry may be taken as a typical example of his daily concerns, the ideas he tried to formulate in his 1891 oration “God in History” were what he packed in his intellectual luggage when he boarded the train for Cambridge.
