He “used the refinement of sensory taste as a metaphor to describe the felt effect of grace, relying on the term relish to describe the heightened ability to perceive the good that was…a primary consequence of regeneration” (65). He, then, “learned from the Scots, appeal to sentiment was appeal to the faculty of aesthetic and moral perception that can be sharpened by practice – by repeated perception of beauty in object and action. In both terminologies, taste perception denotes the individual ability to perceive directly and immediately the beautiful, good, and true, an ability that motivates right action” (68).
Dwight had “a vision of an American community unified in the public happiness that follows from the individual virtue of its members, a vision made reality, he belied, by the public discourse of virtuous leaders” (69). This means that “Dwight’s theory and practice of public discourse was founded upon his conviction that a few man like himself has the authority to speak for the many in American…That doctrine…worked explicitly against democratic transformation of public discourse that would enact a politics of equality and diversity” (76).