Detached from The Christian Advocate, May 28, 1914.

Rev. Dr. William Warren Sweet (1881-1959) was a Methodist scholar. His doctoral dissertation, published as The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Civil War (1912), initiated that prolific publication that was to make him "the dean of the historians of Christianity in America." He taught at Ohio Wesleyan (1911-13), DePauw University (1913-27), and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago (1927-46). His fundamental concern was to give such a reputation to church history that secular historians could no longer ignore its role. He influenced both the writing of general American history by calling attention to those often neglected "civilizing and cultural forces" of religion, and that of denominational histories by broadening individual examples to see their place within the total development of America and its peculiar form of Christianity.