The colleges founded before the American Revolution taught ethics, law, and government to form pious and energetic men for leadership in the colonies. Schools of the Protestant reformation, they inculcated a collegiate way of life to form ministers of religion and civil leaders for the colonies. They did so within a natural-law framework where rationality and morality go together and human laws accordingly derive their authority from their correspondence with the moral order. In the colonial curriculum, natural law accorded with Scripture and the best of antiquity, focused on civil affairs, and offered an account of the authority of the civil law and the veracity of Christian revelation. The Puritans’ teaching on law was not restricted to teaching skills for its practice. College instruction, indeed, seemingly inextricably encompassed ethics, law, and government. The Puritans’ understanding of natural law differs significantly from today’s leading theological and legal accounts. It is neither the natural law of Roman Catholic scholasticism nor that of the “new natural lawyers.” What the Puritans offer, instead, is a particularly “protestant” form of natural law, focused on Scripture and committed to an understanding of human moral incapacity apart from God’s grace.