"Beginning in the 1760's the idea of the 'man of letters' as a proper definition of the college graduate intruded into the curriculum the study of belles lettres -- orations, history, poetry, literature. An emphasis on reason and observation, on rational moral behavior, replaced a reliance on divine law in the study of ethics. The God who inhabited Dunster's Harvard was a righteous and wrathful God; the God who inhabited Princeton in 1764 was the creator and source of all nature's wonders. The curriculum had shifted from explaining the ways of God to exploring the ways of man."
-- Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Frederick Rudolf, 1977, p. 53.
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