When William Ames (1576–1633) chose not to wear a surplice while preaching at a Cambridge University chapel, he embodied the Reformation spirit of defiance toward the symbols of ecclesiastical and educational authority. This action and subsequent signs of dissent within the Church of England earned Ames a life of exile in the Netherlands. Yet in serving as a professor at the Universities of Leiden and Franeker, the Puritan scholar perfected methods of instruction that would establish him as an authority among those similarly committed to learning the revealed will of God and investigating the structure and operation of the human mind.