[1] He is best known for introducing many Americans to avant-garde German historical scholarship, especially in his History of the Church of Christ, in Chronological Tables: A Synchronistic View of the Events, Characteristics, and Culture of Each Period, including the History of Polity, Worship, Literature, and Doctrines: Together with Two Supplementary Tables upon the Church in America; And an Appendix Containing the Series of Councils, Popes, Patriarchs, and Other Bishops, and a Full Index (1860).

He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1834; studied theology at Andover, where his health failed, at Bangor, and, after a year (1836-1837) as librarian and tutor in Greek at Bowdoin, in Germany at Halle, where he became personally intimate with August Tholuck and Hermann Ulrici, and in Berlin, under August Neander and Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg.

[2] He returned to America in 1840, was a tutor for a few months (1840-1841) at Bowdoin, and in 1842, shut out from any better place by distrust of his German training and by his frank opposition to Unitarianism, he became pastor of the Congregational Church of West Amesbury (now Merrimac), Massachusetts.

His theology is most strikingly contained in the Andover address, "Relations of Faith and Philosophy," which was delivered before the Porter Rhetorical Society in 1849.

He always made it clear that the ideal philosophy was Christocentric: he said that Reformed theology must "'Christologize' predestination and decrees, regeneration and sanctification, the doctrine of the Church, and the whole of the Eschatology.