An American Unitarian clergyman. He was born in Hanover, N. H., and graduated at Harvard in 1829, and at the Cambridge Divinity School in 1833. He was then called to become pastor of a Unitarian church in Louisville, Ky. In 1841 he assisted in founding the Church of the Disciples, Boston, of which he was pastor from 1841 to 1850, and from 1853 until his death. He was a friend of Emerson and Channing, a supporter of the anti-slavery movement, and secretary of the American Unitarian Association in 1859–62. He was also for many years one of the overseers of Harvard, where he was professor of natural religion and Christian doctrine (1867–71), and lecturer on ethnic religions (1876–77). Besides a vast number of articles contributed to current journals and magazines, Dr. Clarke published many works, including: “Theodore” (1841), a translation from the German of De Wette; “Campaign of 1812” (1848); “Eleven Weeks in Europe” (1852); “Christian Doctrine of Prayer” (1854, new ed. 1874); “The Hour Which Cometh and Now Is” (1864, 3d ed. 1877); “Orthodoxy: Its Truths and Errors” (8th ed. 1885); “Steps of Belief” (1870); “The Ten Great Religions” (2 vols., 1871–83; vol. i., 22d ed. 1886; vol. ii., 5th ed. 1886); “Common Sense in Religion” (1874); “Essentials and Non-Essentials in Religion” (1878); “Manual of Unitarian Belief” (1884); “Anti-Slavery Days” (1884); and “Vexed Questions” (1886).

Personal

  Dr. Clarke’s name is intimately linked with the Transcendentalists of New England; for, although he can hardly be described as one of the leaders in that movement, he was in many ways so closely connected with its leaders, and was so imbued with its spirit that, when its history comes to be fully written, it will be found that his influence, though quiet, was far from insignificant.

  He was well-nigh a perfect teacher. His Bible-classes, and his classes of history and literature, which in the work of his church he regularly carried on, were stimulating and suggestive. He was so fond of young people that they could hardly fail to learn from him. “Everything I know of the Norse mythology,” said a young student, who will one day be teaching others in the same line, “I learned from him as we sat together, summer evenings, on the piazza.”

  Mr. Clarke’s preaching was as unlike as possible to that of Theodore Parker. While not wanting in the critical spirit, and characterized by very definite views of the questions which at that time were foremost in the mind of the community, there ran through the whole course of his ministrations an exquisite tone of charity and good-will. He had not the philosophic and militant genius of Parker, but he had a genius of his own, poetical, harmonizing. In after years I esteemed myself fortunate in having passed from the drastic discipline of the one to the tender and reconciling ministry of the other…. Our minister was a man of much impulse, but of more judgment. In his character were blended the best traits of the conservative and of the liberal. His ardent temperament and sanguine disposition bred in him that natural hopefulness which is so important an element in all attempted reform. His sound mind, well disciplined by culture, held fast to the inherited treasures of society, while a fortunate power of apprehending principles rendered him very steadfast, both in advance and reserve. In the agitated period which preceded the civil war and in that which followed it, he in his modest pulpit became one of the leaders, not of his own flock alone, but of the community to which he belonged.

General

  James Freeman Clarke, a grandson, through his mother, of the first avowed Unitarian minister in the United States, is, if not the most gifted, at least among the most earnest, industrious, energetic, and influential of contemporary Unitarian ministers. He has a mind of singular comprehensiveness, and as open to the reception of error as to the reception of truth. He is an eclectic, or, rather, a syncretist, and holds it his duty to accept all opinions, whether true or false, as equally respectable. As a Unitarian, he comprehends both wings of the denomination, accepts both extremes, without troubling himself about the middle term that unites them. He is rarely impressed with the importance of logical consistency, and feels no difficulty in maintaining that, of two contradictory propositions, both are true, or both are false.

  Through all his active life Dr. Clarke has been a prominent advocate of freedom and friend of humanity, and has been distinguished for his broad and genial sympathies with sects and parties of the most varied or antagonistic views, while yet holding firmly to his own clear and well-defined opinions. This strength of conviction and catholicity of spirit, taken in connection with his large resources of thought and illustration, his keenness and cogency of argument, his ample range of knowledge and inquiry, and his simplicity and force of expression, have gained him a commanding influence among men.

  An attractive and scholarly account [“Ten Great Religions”] of the most important religious systems that have appeared.

  Allied to the “Channing Unitarians” by his reverential spirit and non-iconoclastic temper, and yet willing to study and to get benefit from advanced and novel schools of thought, within and without his own denomination…. In his books,—“The Christian Doctrine of Forgiveness,” “The Christian Doctrine of Prayer,” “Steps of Belief,” “Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors,” and “Common-Sense in Religion,” we find a distinct Christian sentiment by no means universally prevalent in the Transcendental movement. Dr. Clarke, while sharing in most of the intellectual movements which affected New England thought after 1830, left … no original, formative literary work of the first class, his labor having been chiefly in the constant exercise of preaching. Clarke’s “Ten Great Religions” (two series), though interesting, is rather an industrious gleaning in previously tilled fields, than a force such as one feels at first-hand in Max Müller’s lectures on comparative religion.

  “The Doctrine of Prayer” was circulated widely among thoughtful people of all communions, and was read with such interest that many were moved to write personally to the author. This gave to him the position he was well adapted to fill, of mediating between different communions, and of showing to each what were the merits of the other. It was a good thing for us (of the Unitarian Church) that we had a man who brought us and the Orthodox people nearer to each other, and there were few among us in whom the Orthodox had the same confidence that they had in him…. “The Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy” was a second book which did great good in showing to earnest persons, on both sides of the imagined gulf between the Liberal and the Evangelical Churches, that it was not very much of a gulf after all. Indeed, wherever people read his books, they found out, what may be regarded as a general truth, that most intelligent Christians, so far as their everyday religion goes, are in practical agreement, though probably without knowing it. When they come to state occasions, and to the full-dress uniform of established creeds and confessions, they appear, of course, in a different array.

  He deliberately accepted the tendency to good or evil in a doctrine as a test of truth and all the doctrines appealed to him pre-eminently as calculated to increase the amount of goodness in the world and soothe its sorrow and distress. He was not a profound thinker nor a careful scholar, and he did not win the audience of those who care a great deal for serious thinking and for careful study. Of this he was aware, and by it he was not troubled, for he had great compensations. He spoke to hundreds once a week, he wrote for many thousands every day. The circulation of his writings was immense, and it answered the prayer of his youth, for it brought into the communion of his invisible church thousands who were not of the Unitarian fold. No other has done so much to commend Unitarianism to orthodox believers, and few, if any, have done more to break down the sectarian divisions of our American life.