If D. Randall MacRae, hero of J. Wesley Ingles's prizewinning Christian novel Silver Trumpet had never heard of Wharton (a not-even-thinly-veiled fictional equivalent of Wheaton College in Illinois), it was because he was a modern young pagan who had wandered into an evangelistic tent meeting out of nothing more than idle curiosity. If he had had any acquaintance at all with American fundamentalist Christianity, he would not have had to wonder about Wharton/Wheaton. He would have known. In the years between the two world wars – especially the late thirties and early forties, the period of time when Edward Carnell was an undergraduate – for a young person brought up in a devout Christian home, indoctrinated in a fundamentalist church, possessed of a desire for an academically respectable but religiously safe college education, there was no other place to go but Wheaton. That is not strictly true, of course, but in such matters it is the perception that counts. And in those years Wheaton had managed to build up, among a truly national constituency, a reputation not only for excellence but for superiority.

To some extent the reputation was deserved.