Background
John White Chadwick was born on October 19, 1840, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, United States to the family of a seafarer and shoemaker John White and Jane (Standley) Chadwick. He had two sisters.
45 Francis Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
In 1864 John White graduated from Harvard Divinity School.
131 Summer Street, Bridgewater, MA 02325, United States
John White studied at Bridgewater normal school.
John White Chadwick.
20 Main St, Exeter, NH 03833, United States
For a while, Chadwick studied at Phillips Exeter Academy.
John White Chadwick was born on October 19, 1840, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, United States to the family of a seafarer and shoemaker John White and Jane (Standley) Chadwick. He had two sisters.
John White Chadwick was initially to become a shoemaker. Although he was in the middle of an apprenticeship, he preferred to continue a non-trade education. In 1857 he managed to enter the normal school at Bridgewater. During his education there, he determined his calling in life was to become a minister. Then, for a while, John White studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and then went on to graduate from Harvard Divinity School in 1864.
Straight after graduation from Divinity School, Chadwick became the pastor of the Second Unitarian Church in Brooklyn. He served there until his death in 1904. John White was also minister of the American Unitarian Association.
Besides, the theologian wrote a great deal, both books and contributions to journals, including Origin and Destiny, Preacher and Reformer, and Later Poems.
Throughout his life Chadwick was a steadfast and consistent Unitarian.
As a theologian, Chadwick was concerned about the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution. He was also known as a supporter of the Free Religion movement.
Quotations:
"To reconceive the Bible, to reconceive the life and character of Jesus, to reconceive the universe and man and God, not with my own poor strength, but with the help of all the deepest, highest, noblest philosophical and critical and scientific thinking of the time - these are the tasks, which I have laid upon myself, and they have been worthy of my utmost consecration."
"I have valued science most for its aid to worship, for those wonders of the Known it has revealed to us, that make the great Unknown kindle for our imagination with splendors of incalculable good."
"I am only a writer of sermons, which I hardly preach to you at all, but READ in a monotonous and sometimes abominable manner… But of one thing I am sure - that I have had a conscience for the Word preached. Good, bad or indifferent, it has been as good as I could make it from week to week, from month to month, from year to year. I have permitted nothing to interfere with it, no pleasure, and no other work. I have given to it ample time and preparation, writing much more slowly and carefully than is the average custom of my ministerial brethren, reserving for the writing of each sermon three days of perfect disengagement from all meaner things; doing everything I could to enrich my sermons with the spoils of science, literature and art, asking first, last, and always, how I might make them helpful to your thought and life; and to the end that I might bring them home to your experience, drawing them forth out of my own, and preaching to myself much more directly and more consciously than to anyone of you."
John White Chadwick seldom trusted himself to spontaneous speech, but read his careful sermon—read it too with a certain monotony of style and voice. He was an artist bringing in his hand a sensitively wrought picture from his studio or a scholar thinking thoughts aloud. The texture of his thought was delicate and there was a rich broidery of literary allusion. So his regular congregation was small but all were closely united in mutual confidence and goodwill and most of all in pride and joy in their preacher.
Chadwick's son remembered him to have the sturdy truthfulness, the brave and loyal will, the tender reverential heart, the laughing, lyric quality of the mind.
On June 28, 1865, John White married Annie Horton Hathaway. Three children were born to them.