Subject:  American Minute - September 14 - John Harvard
Date:  Tue, 13 Sep 2005 20:44:46 GMT

The son of a butcher, his family died in a plague that swept England, leaving him with a fair estate.
He attended Emmanuel College and became a minister.
He married, sailed for Massachusetts, and served as assistant pastor of the First Church of Charlestown before dying of tuberculosis on this day, September 14, 1638, at the age of 31.
His name was Rev. John Harvard.
The College at Cambridge was renamed in his honor.
Ten of the twelve presidents of Harvard prior to the Revolutionary War were ministers and over fifty percent of the 17th-century graduates became ministers.
Harvard’s founders wrote:
"After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had…rear'd convenient places for God's worship…One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and to perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust.
And as we were thinking and consulting how to effect this great Work, it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard, a godly gentleman and a lover of learning there living amongst us, to give the one half of his estate...towards the erecting of a college and all his Library."
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