Frederick Merrick was an American clergyman and educator.
Background
Frederick Merrick was born on January 29, 1810, on the ancestral farm in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. His father, Noah, a first cousin of Pliny Merrick was in the fifth generation from Thomas Merrick who came to Massachusetts from Wales in 1636, settling first in Roxbury and then in Springfield; his mother was Statira Hays, of Hartford, Connecticut. His parents were pious Congregationalists, his grandfather having been a minister of that communion, but the novelty and vitality of the Methodist meetings attracted the boy, who was of an introspective turn.
Education
From his fifteenth year, Merrick worked as a clerk in a store in Springfield, Massachusetts, becoming a partner before he was twenty. In 1829, after a joyous and transforming spiritual experience, he joined the Methodist Society. Feeling called to be a minister, he attended the Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham and entered Wesleyan University at Middletown, Connecticut.
Career
In 1834, Merrick left college to teach in Amenia Seminary, in New York, a Methodist secondary school of which he was principal until 1838, when he was elected professor of natural science in Ohio University at Athens. At Athens he achieved marked influence and popularity and was much sought as a teacher by the Methodist colleges springing up in what was then the West. In 1841 he joined Ohio Conference on trial and in 1842-43 was pastor at Marietta. He was ordained elder in 1843. The churches of the state had embarked on the ambitious enterprise of founding a college at Delaware, and in that year Merrick became one of its financial agents. The Ohio Wesleyan University then consisted of a sulphur spring and the buildings and grounds of a bankrupt sanitarium, without faculty, students, or endowment. The college opened its doors in 1844 and in 1845 he began to teach natural science there, later (1851) transferring to the chair of moral philosophy. For a brief period he was acting president, and for forty years he was an auditor, financial watchdog, and emergency man in several crises. One of his critical decisions was called for in 1845 when he was asked to lead a Methodist Mission in China, an offer which he did not decline without a struggle. In 1860, 1864, and 1876 he was a delegate to the General Conference of his denomination, and at the centennial conference at Baltimore in 1884, which commemorated the founding of the Methodist Episcopal Church, he gave the closing message. He lectured frequently and his only published volume, Formalism in Religion (1865), is a series of lectures. He died at Delaware, Ohio, at the age of eighty-four.
Achievements
Views
Although Merrick was zealous to build up the University in buildings and funds, his first care was the character and religious life of its students, and his precept and example made the school a prolific mother of ministers and missionaries. He was a vigorous advocate of total abstinence and a militant foe of the liquor traffic. He opposed slavery and helped to operate the "underground railway. "
Personality
Merrick's diary reveals him as a man of intense devotion, who sought divine guidance through prayer for every action, great or small. Though he preached on many occasions, he lacked the greater gifts of pulpit eloquence. He had a singularly serene and steady habit of mind, based on a supreme faith in a loving and wise providence, and in his later years, he came to enjoy in the college community a unique reputation for saintliness.
Connections
Frederick Merrick married, in 1836, Sarah Fidelia Griswold of Suffolk, Connecticut.