In 1789, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church met for the first time after the Revolutionary War. The denomination reported that 215 congregations had pastors, but 204 did not. The shortage of Presbyterian pastors stemmed in large part from a surge in immigration of Presbyterians from Scotland and Ireland. The shortage, however, only grew more acute in the early nineteenth century as the Second Great Awakening fueled the rapid expansion of Presbyterian churches on the Midwest frontier and in the South. In response to the pressing need for more trained pastors, Presbyterians established colleges and, later, seminaries.

In A Copious Fountain: A History of Union Presbyterian Seminary, 1812–2012, William B. Sweetser Jr. chronicles the two-hundred-year history of one of the Presbyterian Church's most important seminaries, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. Sweetser does not propose a thesis and substantiate it through a carefully constructed argument. Instead, he offers a detailed account of Union Seminary's history in light of Glenn T. Miller's study, Piety and Professionalism: American Protestant Theological Education, 1870–1970 (William B. Eerdmans, 2007).

The first chapter examines the origins of colonial American Presbyterianism as well as the particular forces that led Virginia Presbyterians to establish Hampton-Sydney College. Subsequent chapters explore the struggle to establish a free-standing theological seminary independent of Hampton-Sydney College, the impact of the Civil War upon Southern Presbyterians as well as the seminary, and the tumultuous debate surrounding the seminary's move from its rural locale to Richmond after the Civil War. Chapters also examine the place of Union Seminary in the theological debates between conservatives and liberals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the early twentieth-century effort to broaden Union's reach beyond the South, and the post-World War II boom in mainline Protestantism and its impact upon the seminary. The final two chapters review how the professionalization of the faculty and the secularization of American culture affected the faculty, curriculum, and student body, as well as detail the recent efforts to reshape the seminary's program in order to better meet the needs of a declining church in a changing culture.

Sweetser devotes attention to five themes in his analysis of Union's history. He explores how the definition of an educated ministry has changed over the past two hundred years. Second, he analyses how Union functions as both a “Southern” and a “national” institution in different ways in different periods of its history. He also looks at how the seminary engaged the world in both its particular setting and also through its graduations. Fourth, he explores how seminary students and graduates attempted to resolve tensions between conserving a religious and cultural tradition while at the same time advocating reform. Finally, he surveys the seminary's influence upon both the denomination and theological education.

Sweetser's work will interest both students of Presbyterian history and American higher education. The author does an admirable job of connecting the history of Union Seminary with the rise and dramatic decline of mainline Protestantism in general and the Presbyterian Church in particular. He examines how every major ecclesiastic conflict, such as the schism between Old and New School Presbyterians in 1837, the formation of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America in 1861, and the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the 1910s–1930s, impacted the seminary. The volume also explores how developments in higher education affected the seminary's faculty, curriculum, and mission. This includes an insightful analysis of how academic specialization, represented by the PhD degree and ongoing advanced scholarly research, challenged the faculty's understanding of their vocation as preparing pastors for the ministry.

Sweetser is a graduate of Union Seminary, a visiting professor of church history at Union's Charlotte campus, and the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. A Copious Fountain is an institutional history par excellence. While written by a loyal insider with a deep affection for the institution, the author avoids hagiography. This is not to say that he is uncritical. For instance, he shows little affection for the Reformed theology of R. L. Dabney that dominated the Southern Presbyterian Church well into the early twentieth century. Nor does Sweetser avoid describing some of the less flattering episodes in the seminary's history, such as the divisive theological conflict between theology professor Douglas Ottati and New Testament professor Jack Dean Kingsbury over the deity of Jesus Christ.

The volume is meticulously researched. Sweetser seemingly left no source unexamined. He draws upon a remarkable range of primary sources, including official seminary documents, private journals, personal correspondence, local newspapers, and host of obscure published works. In a work that runs more than six hundred pages, he covers virtually every major aspect of the seminary's history—curriculum, faculty, finances, major theological developments, and its relationship to the denomination—and numerous minor issues, including the location of the outhouses behind the seminary building in Hampton-Sydney (there were six located behind Penshurst Hall, p. 133) and the number of borrowers who used the library in 1948 (there were 912 registered users, p. 290). Although the level of detail might overwhelm some readers, A Copious Fountain offers a fascinating window into two hundred years of Presbyterian church history and theological education.