Chadwick, John White

CHADWICK, JOHN WHITE: American Unitarian; b. at Marblehead, Mass., Oct. 19, 1840; d. in Brooklyn Dec. 11, 1904. His father was a seafaring man, and he was apprenticed to a shoe-maker. But in 1857 he entered the State Normal School at Bridgewater, Mass., and while there determined to become a minister. From the Normal School he passed to Phillips Exeter Academy and the Divinity School of Harvard University, from which latter institution he was graduated in 1864. He was immediately asked to supply for three months the pulpit of the Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, N. Y., but made so favorable an impression that his relation became a permanent one and he was its pastor at the time of his death. Besides being well known as a preacher and lecturer and highly esteemed as a man, he won distinction as an author both in prose and poetry. He described himself as a "radical Unitarian," but he was heard with respect by those who most differed from him. Besides many other contributions to the press, he published: Life of Nathaniel Alexander Staples (Boston, 1870); A Book of Poems (1876, now in its 10th ed.); The Bible of To-day (New York, 1878); The Faith of Reason, a Series of Discourses on Leading Topics of Religion (Boston, 1879, 2d ed., 1880); Some Aspects of Religion (New York, 1879); Belief and Life (1881); The Man Jesus (Boston, 1881, 2d ed., 1882); Origin and Destiny (1883); In Nazareth Town: a Christmas Fantasy, and Other Poems (1883); A Daring Faith (1885); The Good Voices, Poems (Troy, N. Y., 1885); Charles Robert Darwin (Boston, 1889); Evolution and Social Reform (1890); Evolution of Architecture (New York, 1891); Evolution as Related to Citizenship (1892); George William Curtis: an Address (1893); The Old and the New Unitarian Belief (Boston, 1894); Theodore Parker (1900); William Ellery Channing (1903); and Later Poems (1905).