"Every-Day Religion" James Freeman Clarke Hand Written Letter For Sale

Up for sale "Every-Day Religion" James Freeman Clarke Hand Written Letter Dated 1881. 

ES-7572

James

Freeman Clarke (April

4, 1810 – June 8, 1888) was an American theologian and author. Born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on

April 4, 1810, James Freeman Clarke was the son of Samuel Clarke and Rebecca

Parker Hull, though he was raised by his grandfather James Freeman, minister

at King's Chapel in

Boston, Massachusetts. He attended the Boston Latin School, and

later graduated from Harvard College in 1829, and Harvard Divinity School in

1833. Ordained into the Unitarian church he first became an active minister

at Louisville, Kentucky, then

a slave state, and soon threw himself into the national movement

for the abolition of slavery.

His theology was unusual for the conservative town and, reportedly, several

women walked out of his first sermon. As he wrote to his friend Margaret Fuller, "I am a broken-winged hawk, seeking to

fly at the sun, but fluttering in the dust." In

1839 he returned to Boston where he and his friends established (1841)

the Church of

the Disciples which brought together a body of people to apply

the Christian religion to

social problems of the day. One of the features that distinguished his church

was Clarke's belief that ordination could make no distinction between him and

them. They also were called to be ministers of the highest religious life. Of

this church he was the minister from 1841 until 1850 and again from 1854 until

his death. He was also secretary of the Unitarian Association and, in

1867-1871, professor of natural religion and Christian doctrine at Harvard. Clarke

contributed essays to The Christian Examiner, The Christian

Inquirer, The Christian Register, The Dial, Harper's, The Index, and Atlantic Monthly. In addition to sermons, speeches,

hymnals, and liturgies, he published 28 books and over 120 pamphlets during his

lifetime. Clarke edited the Western Messenger, a magazine intended

to carry to readers in the Mississippi Valley simple

statements of liberal religion and what were then the most radical appeals to

national duty and the abolition of slavery. Copies of this magazine are now

valued by collectors for containing the earliest printed poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a

personal friend and a distant cousin. Clarke became a member of the Transcendental Club alongside

Emerson and several others. For

the Western Messenger, Clarke requested written contributions from

Margaret Fuller. Clarke published Fuller's first literary review—criticisms of

recent biographies on George Crabbe and Hannah More.[5] She later became the first full-time book

reviewer in journalism working for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. After Fuller's death in 1850, Clarke worked

with William Henry Channing and

Emerson as editors of The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli,

published in February 1852. The trio censored or reworded many of Fuller's

letters; they believed the public interest in Fuller

would be temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure Nevertheless,

for a time, the book was the best-selling biography of the decade and went

through thirteen editions before the end of the century.

In 1855, Clarke purchased the former site of Brook Farm, intending to start a new Utopian community there. This never came to pass, instead

the land was offered to President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War; the

Second Massachusetts Regiment used it for training and named it "Camp

Andrew". In November 1861, Clarke was in Washington, D.C. with Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe. After hearing the song "John Brown's Body",

he suggested that Mrs. Howe write new lyrics; the result was "Battle Hymn of the

Republic". The

people of Boston held a public celebration honoring Italian unification on

February 23, 1871, featuring Edwin Percy Whipple as

a speaker and a poem by Clarke titled "A Hymn for the Celebration of

Italian Unity" based on the "Battle Hymn of the Republic". In 1874, he was elected as a member of

the American Philosophical Society. A

portrait of Clarke painted by Edwin Tryon Billings hangs

in the Boston

Public Library.