Barton W. Stone, born in 1772 at Port Tobacco, Maryland, was a member of one of the oldest American families. His great-great-great-grandfather was the first Protestant governor of Maryland, 1648-53. Barton Stone’s father, a man of some property, died just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and his mother moved with her large family to Pittsylvania County, Virginia, very close to the North Carolina line. With his share of the money from his father’s estate, Barton spent three years in David Caldwell’s academy at Greensboro, North Carolina, thirty miles southwest of his home. Here he “completed the classical course” in 1793. This school was hospitable to revivalism. Caldwell himself was a Princeton graduate and a Presbyterian minister of the “New Light” type—that is, of evangelistic temper and with an easy tolerance in theology. McGready, the Presbyterian evangelist who was later to set southern Kentucky afire, came to Greensboro and converted most of the students. Stone was stirred by the appeal but repelled by the theology. Meanwhile his mother, who had been an Anglican, had become a Methodist. William Hodge, a young “New Light” Presbyterian, who had been one of Caldwell’s boys, came preaching the love rather than the wrath of God. Stone abandoned his purpose to study law and decided to be that kind of Presbyterian preacher. The presbytery to which he applied for license directed him to prepare a trial sermon on the Trinity. He struggled with the theme, and his sermon was accepted, but he always had trouble with the doctrine of the Trinity. While waiting for his license to preach, he went to Georgia to visit his brother and while there he served for about a year, beginning in January, 1795, as “professor of languages” in Succoth Academy, a Methodist school at Washington, Georgia. The principal of this academy was Hope Hull, a Methodist preacher who had been closely associated with O’Kelly in his protest at the Methodist conference two years earlier but who had remained with the Methodist Church when O’Kelly and the other insurgents withdrew to form the Christian Church. Stone and Hull became very intimate friends, and Stone accompanied Hull on a journey to Charleston, South Carolina, to attend a Methodist conference. John Springer, an ardently evangelistic Presbyterian preacher of the “New Light” type, whose field was only a few miles from the academy and who had the most cordial relations with the Baptists and Methodists in his neighborhood, became another counselor and friend and exercised, says Ware, a “decisive influence” on Stone. Returning to North Carolina, Stone received his license to preach from the hands of the venerable and liberal Henry Pattillo, who, in a published sermon on “Divisions among Christians,” had recommended the name “Christians” as the one “first given to the disciples by divine appointment at Antioch,” and who declared that men ought to be permitted to differ peaceably about the doctrines of religion.