James Freeman Clarke

James Freeman Clarke was an American minister, theologian, and author, born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on April 4, 1810, and dead in 1888. He was the son of Samuel Clarke and Rebecca Parker Hull, but he was raised by his grandfather James Freeman, minister at King’s Chapel in Boston. That early Boston religious setting stayed with him. Clarke attended Boston Latin School, graduated from Harvard College in 1829, and completed Harvard Divinity School in 1833.

Ordained in the Unitarian church, Clarke first served as an active minister in Louisville, Kentucky, then a slave state. There he soon joined the national movement for the abolition of slavery. His theology was unusual for the conservative town, and several women reportedly walked out of his first sermon. In a letter to his friend Margaret Fuller, he described himself with painful humor: “I am a broken-winged hawk, seeking to fly at the sun, but fluttering in the dust.” The line suggests both his ambition and his sense of struggle.

In 1840 Clarke returned to Boston, and in 1841 he and his friends established the Church of the Disciples. The church gathered people who wanted to apply Christianity to the social problems of the day. Clarke believed ordination did not separate him from his congregation; they too were called to be ministers of the highest religious life. He served that church from 1841 to 1850 and again from 1854 until his death. He was also secretary of the Unitarian Association and, from 1867 to 1871, professor of natural religion and Christian doctrine at Harvard.

Clarke wrote steadily across many forms. He contributed essays to The Christian Examiner, The Christian Inquirer, The Christian Register, The Dial, Harper’s, The Index, and Atlantic Monthly. Along with sermons, speeches, hymnals, and liturgies, he published 28 books and more than 120 pamphlets. His books included Ten Great Religions, issued in two volumes from 1871 to 1883, Common Sense in Religion in 1874, Anti-Slavery Days in 1874, Self-Culture in 1880, and Every-Day Religion in 1886. He was among the first Americans to explore and write about Eastern religions.

His circle also shaped his work. Clarke edited the Western Messenger, a magazine meant to bring liberal religion and appeals for national duty and abolition to readers in the Mississippi Valley. It printed early poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Clarke’s friend and distant cousin, and Clarke became a member of the Transcendental Club with Emerson and others. He also encouraged Margaret Fuller’s writing and published her first literary review. After Fuller’s death in 1850, he worked with William Henry Channing and Emerson on The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, published in 1852.

Clarke’s reforming spirit reached beyond the pulpit. He supported human rights, women’s education, and women’s right to vote. As a Boston Latin School alumnus, he served on a committee of the Massachusetts Society for the University Education of Women, which helped establish Girls’ Latin School in 1878. Tempered and moderate in manner, he was described as both a reformer and a conciliator. For readers of quotations, Clarke’s appeal lies in that combination: moral seriousness without hardness, learning joined to public duty, and a steady belief that religion should meet the needs of actual people.