The Day Breaking, If Not the Sun Rising of the Gospel with the Indians in New England (1865)
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John Wilson was an American Puritan clergyman in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the minister of the First Church of Boston from its beginnings in Charlestown in 1630 until his death in 1667.
Background
John Wilson was born about 1588, in Windsor, Berkshire, England, the son of William Wilson and Isabel Woodhall. His mother was a niece of Archbishop Grindal; his father was for a time Grindal's chaplain and, from 1583 to 1615, canon of Windsor.
Education
Wilson studied at Eton, where in 1601, "though the smallest boy in the school, " he won approbation by a Latin speech which he delivered before the Duc de Biron.
He went to King's College, Cambridge, as scholar in 1605 and three years later was promoted to a fellowship which would have taken care of him for life; but his conversion to the Puritan point of view by William Ames, and his refusal to conform in chapel, forced him to resign in 1610, just after taking the degree of Bachelor's degree. The Master's degree was awarded him in 1613.
Career
He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1610, but after reading law for a year or two he began preaching, and served as chaplain in several "Honourable and Religious Families, " among them that of Henry Leigh.
In 1618 Wilson became lecturer at Sudbury in Suffolk, where he seems to have remained until 1630, despite sundry suspensions for nonconformity. He sailed in that year for Massachusetts, and became teacher of the First Church in Boston, when it was first organized at Charlestown. He went to England in 1631, returning to Boston the next year. After another trip to England in 1634 and 1635, he remained in Boston at the First Church until his death, a spokesman of orthodoxy and a constant counsellor of the magistrates.
In 1637 Wilson went as chaplain in an expedition against the Pequots, and his services were later recognized by a grant of land. With the Rev. John Cotton he was at odds occasionally, especially in his unflinching and outspoken hostility to the Antinomians, but in spite of their disagreements the two men shared harmoniously the pulpit of the First Church from 1633 until Cotton's death in 1652.
At Sudbury Wilson wrote a long poem for children, A Song, or, Story, for the Lasting Remembrance of Divers Famous Works (London, 1626), reissued in Boston in 1680 as A Song of Deliverance. It is said that he wrote enough other verse to fill "a large Folio, " but most of this was not printed and is now unknown. His Latin elegy on John Harvard was printed in Cotton Mather's Magnalia (1702); his lines on Joseph Brisco were published in a broadside in Boston about 1657, and eight anagrams in verse appeared in Thomas Shepard's The Church-Membership of Children (1663) and John Norton's Three Choice and Profitable Sermons (1664). In prose he contributed prefatory matter to Samuel Whiting's A Discourse of the Last Judgement (1664), Richard Mather's The Summe of Certain Sermons (1652), and John Higginson's The Cause of God (1663). One of his sermons was printed as A Seasonable Watchword unto Christians (1677). Two other publications, The Day Breaking of the Gospell with the Indians (1647) and Some Helps to Faith (1625), have been ascribed to him. The former may be his; the latter is not.
John Wilson died on August 7, 1667, in Boston, Massachusetts. His funeral sermon was preached by local divine, Increase Mather, and he was buried in the King's Chapel Burying Ground in Boston.