with students because of his trust of the establishment. Early in his time at Harvard, he had sided with the administration during a student-led protest against poor food, and his attempts at reconciling the two sides prompted ridicule from his peers. Ripley, seeking a socially useful role, found work as a teacher in Fitchburg during winter vacation of his senior year. He graduated in 1823. During his time at the school, Ripley became disenchanted with his father and his home town, admitting "no particular attachment to Greenfield". He hoped to enroll at Andover but his father convinced him to stay in Cambridge to attend Harvard Divinity School. There, he was influenced by Levi Frisbie, Professor of Natural Religion, who was largely interested in moral philosophy, which he termed "the science of the principles and obligations of duty". Ripley was becoming very interested in more "liberal" religious views, what he wrote to his mother as "so simple, scriptural, and reasonable". He graduated in 1826. A year later, on August 22, 1827, he married Sophia Dana, a fact which he originally kept a secret from his parents. He asked his sister Marianne to inform them shortly after. Early career Ripley officially became a minister at Boston's Purchase Street Church on November 8, 1826, and became influential in the developing the Unitarian religion. These ten years of his tenure there were quiet and uneventful, until March 1836, when Ripley published a long article titled "Schleiermacher as a Theologian" in the Christian Examiner. In it, Ripley praised Schleiermacher's attempt to create a "religion of the heart" based on intuition and personal communion with God. Later that year, he published a review of British theologian James Martineau's The Rationale of Religious Enquiry in the same publication. In the review, Ripley charged Unitarian church elders with religious intolerance because they forced the literal acceptance of miracles as a requirement for membership in their church. Andrews Norton, a leading theologian of the day, responded publicly and insisted that disbelief in miracles ultimately denied the truth of Christianity. Norton, formerly Ripley's teacher at the Divinity School, had been labeled by many as the "hard-headed Unitarian Pope", and began his public battle with Ripley in the Boston Daily Advertiser on November 5, 1836, in an open letter charging Ripley with academic and professional incompetence. Ripley contended that to insist upon the reality of miracles was to demand material proof