James Freeman Clarke

Protestant religious leader, born in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. He graduated from Harvard (1829) and became pastor of the Unitarian Church in Louisville, KY. He edited the Western Messenger from Louisville (1836–9), in which he published articles by, among others, Emerson and Hawthorne. He returned to Boston and founded the Unitarian Church of the Disciples (1841) and taught at Harvard Divinity School (1867–71). A supporter of temperance, the abolition of slavery, and women's suffrage, he wrote many books, including Ten Great Religions (1871).

James Freeman Clarke (April 4, 1810 - June 8, 1888), American preacher and author, was born in Hanover, New Hampshire.

He was prepared for college at the public Latin school of Boston, and graduated at Harvard College in 1829, and at the Harvard Divinity School in 1833. Clarke soon threw himself heart and soul into the national movement for the abolition of slavery, though he was never what was then called in America a radical abolitionist.

In 1839 he returned to Boston, where he and his friends established (1841) the Church of the Disciples. It brought together a body of men and women active and eager in applying the Christian religion to the social problems of the day, and he would have said that the feature which distinguished it from any other church was that they also were ministers of the highest religious life.

From 1836 until 1839 he was editor of the Western Messenger, a magazine intended to carry to readers in the Mississippi Valley simple statements of liberal religion, involving what were then the most radical appeals as to national duty, especially the abolition of slavery. Most of Clarke's earlier published writings were addressed to the immediate need of establishing a larger theory of religion than that espoused by people who were still trying to be Calvinists, people who maintained what a good American phrase calls "hard-shelled churches."

But it would be wrong to call his work controversial. Such books as Orthodoxy: Its Truths and Errors (1866) have been read more largely by members of orthodox churches than by Unitarians. In the great moral questions of his time Clarke was a fearless and practical advocate of the broadest statement of human rights.

Few Americans have done more than Clarke to give breadth to the published discussion of the subjects of literature, ethics and religious philosophy.

His Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence, edited by Edward Everett Hale, was published in Boston in 1891.