The University of Glasgow, which Drennan himself had attended from 1769 to 1772, had become the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. In their defence of what Drennan called "the restless power of reason", a new generation of Scottish thinkers had drawn on the republican ethos of Presbyterian resistance to royal and episcopal imposition. In the cases of David Hume (1711-1776), Adam Smith (1723-1790) and Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) they also drew directly upon the work of the Irish Presbyterian Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746). At Glasgow Hutcheson had held the Chair of Moral Philosophy and had led those in the Church of Scotland opposed to the Old Light Calvinist doctrines of a fallen humanity. But his influence would also reach Ireland via America. Hutcheson's early "Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue" (1725), introducing his "perennial association of unalienable rights with the collective right to resist oppressive government", served at Harvard College as a textbook as early as the 1730s. Thomas Jefferson's appeals to sentiment in the Declaration of Independence (broadcast in August 1776 by the Belfast "News Letter") are thought to reflect Hutcheson's influence.