(Joseph Fort Newton's work The Builders: A Story and Study...)
Joseph Fort Newton's work The Builders: A Story and Study of Freemasonry, first published in 1914, is perhaps his most famous work, and is commonly regarded as a masterpiece on the subject of the spirit and history of Freemasonry. The Builders looks into the deep ancient past to glean the roots of this secretive organisation, Fort Newton looks at the Dionysian Artificers and Roman Collegia amongst others to accurately consider the roots and spirit of the movement. It also clears up some common misconceptions about the movement, by looking to the past.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
(Symbolism is the language of Freemasonry. But what is sym...)
Symbolism is the language of Freemasonry. But what is symbolism? Why does Masonry use it? Who else has used symbolism? Some of the great minds in Masonic history (Albert Mackey, Joseph Fort Newton, Oliver Day Street, H. L. Haywood and more) answer these and other questions concerning the Masonic method of teaching as well as explain the symbolism of the Masonic degrees. This is an indispensable work for anyone seeking to better understand Freemasonry and its practices.
The Eternal Christ: Studies in the Life of Vision and Service
(Trieste Publishing has a massive catalogue of classic boo...)
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(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Joseph Fort Newton was an American clergyman and author. He was ranked among the top 5 Protestant Clergyman in the United States.
Background
Joseph Fort Newton was born on July 21, 1876 in Decatur, Texas, United States. He was the third son and fifth of eight children of Lee Newton and Sue Green (Battle) Newton. His father came from a family of migrating Tennesseans; after serving in the Confederate Army he returned to Texas and became a sometime teacher, Baptist preacher, and lawyer. His mother was descended from the Battle, Fort, and Ligon families of early Virginia; educated at Mary Sharpe College in Tennessee, she was trained to be a teacher.
Education
Joseph received most of his education from his mother; while he earned his own money by odd jobs and cotton farming, he studied classical languages and literature under her tutelage. In 1895 he enrolled in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville, Kentucky.
Despite his limited formal education, he received four honorary degrees and was elected to honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa.
Career
Newton subscribed to the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Atlanta Constitution and tested his own literary propensities by writing articles for the Texas Baptist and Herald. Newton's forebears had been Baptists for generations, and even though he began early to question their sectarian exclusiveness and evangelical doctrines, it was assumed that he would enter the Baptist ministry. Thus he was ordained on April 20, 1895, and soon thereafter became pastor of a small Baptist church at Rose Hill, Texas.
Newton served as associate chaplain at a nearby prison, reported religious news for the Courier-Journal, and heard a variety of preachers from Rabbi Adolphus Moses to the revivalist Dwight L. Moody. He read widely, often in books frowned on by the faculty--mystics like William Penn, liberals likesmall Baptist church at Rose Hill, Texas.
Frederick William Robertson, and traditionalists like John Henry Newman. Even more, he absorbed the poets and essayists--"no words can ever tell my debt to Emerson"--and testified later that such writers "have always taught me more and better theology than the theologians". Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) confirmed Newton's predilections against reactionary dogmas; and William Henry Fremantle's The World as the Subject of Redemption (1885) "influenced all my thinking for years, because it talked in terms of salvation, not salvage". Along with several other activist students, Newton came to the defense of the seminary president, William Heth Whitsitt, when the latter outraged Baptist conservatives by denying the historical continuity of Baptist churches from the time of Christ. The controversy deepened Newton's disillusionment with the Baptists. He left the seminary in 1897 to preach briefly to one faction of the First Baptist Church in Paris, Texas, which had recently divided over conflicting interpretations of the Lord's Supper. After trying unsuccessfully to unite his congregation with the First Christian Church, he left Texas and the Baptists permanently.
In 1900 Newton accepted the invitation of Robert C. Cave, a former Disciples of Christ minister, to join him at the Nonsectarian Church in St. Louis; thus began his transition to a broad churchmanship free from creedal requirements and ritual tests of fellowship. Two years later he set out in search of new fields and "a church of my own".
He first went to Boston to prowl the haunts of Emerson, inspect historic churches, hear noted preachers, and sample the ideas of William James and Josiah Royce. Then, in March 1903, he journeyed to Dixon, Illinois, where a wealthy layman backed him in organizing a nonsectarian People's Church.
During his five-year pastorate in Dixon, Newton fought municipal corruption as chairman of the Law and Order League, became active in the Masonic order, lectured regularly on "Great Men and Great Books, " and wrote his first book, a biography of Reverend David Swing, whom he had admired since seminary days.
In 1908 he moved to the Liberal Christian Church (Universalist) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Here the local newspaper printed his sermons weekly, gathering them monthly into pamphlets and yearly into books; and these, along with reprints in the Christian Century, were distributed in England as well as the United States. His Tuesday evening talks on "Christ in Modern Literature" soon secured for him a lecture-ship at the State University of Iowa. There he met Franklin B. Sanborn, who had custody of the correspondence between Theodore Parker and William H. Herndon, a former law partner of Abraham Lincoln. After studying these letters and other early Lincolniana, Newton wrote Lincoln and Herndon (1910). Meanwhile, he had been discovering the church fathers, especially those of mystical bent, which moved him to write What Have the Saints to Teach Us? (1914).
The circulation of Newton's sermons in England brought him an invitation from London's famed City Temple when that pulpit fell vacant in 1915. His move the following year from the comparative obscurity of Cedar Rapids to the "Cathedral of British Nonconformity" astonished other churchmen and made him "for weeks the most talked of preacher in the world".
Newton spent three years in the limelight of churchgoing London. "If we did not have three thousand [in the congregation], " he confided, "we were disappointed".
In November 1919 he returned to assume the pastorate of the Church of the Divine Paternity (Universalist) in New York City, from which base he filled a busy schedule of preaching at numerous colleges, lecturing to various cultural organizations, compiling four annual volumes of Best Sermons (1924 - 1927), editing The Master Mason (a monthly magazine) and contributing to The Christian Century.
Newton had always had the broadest of ecumenical sympathies and regarded denominational peculiarities as "barbed-wire entanglements about the Altar of God". Thus in 1925, when Thomas J. Garland, the Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania, suggested that he might be at home in that communion, Newton soon assented.
Installed at the Memorial Church of St. Paul in Overbrook, Pennsylvania, he served first as lay reader and was subsequently ordained deacon on January 16 and priest on October 28, 1926.
In 1930 he became co-rector of St. James's Church in Philadelphia, and in 1935 was designated "Special Preacher to the Associated Churches" in an attempt to unite St. James's with a neighboring church, St. Luke and the Epiphany. The union not being consummated, he assumed leadership of the latter parish in 1938 and served there until his sudden death of a heart attack in 1950, at his home in Philadelphia. He was buried at St. David's Church in Devon, Pennsylvania.
From October 1932 to January 1944 Newton wrote a newspaper column called "Everyday Living, " syndicated by United Features; and from 1944 until his death he furnished the "Saturday Sermon" to the Philadelphia Evening-Bulletin.
He was a 33rd Degree Mason, member of the advisory board of the Federal Council of Churches, and sometime lecturer to the College of Preachers at the Washington (D. C. ) Cathedral.
But in spite of his literary gifts and popular appeal, Newton had his critics. Evangelicals complained that he quoted poets and other literati far more than Holy Scripture. The Christian Century found his pastorates in New York and Philadelphia an "anticlimax" because his pulpit eloquence failed to engage the moral issues of postwar America. There were other contradictions.
Achievements
Newton served as grand chaplain of the Grand Lodge, helped establish a National Masonic Research Society.
In 1939 a poll of 25, 000 ministers voted him one of the five foremost Protestant clergymen in America.
Newton explained that Episcopalianism was "midway between an arid liberalism and an acrid literalism, " occupying a "central strategic position" that promised eventually to draw all Christians together.
He maintained his faith in God during an age of growing secularism, and, to judge from thousands of responses to his newspaper devotionals, he helped many others to find a similar hopeful faith.
Personality
Newton recognized the horrors of war, but in numerous patriotic addresses he glorified military heroes. He preached movingly of brotherhood, but he assumed Anglo-Saxon superiority, spoke contemptuously of "Japs, " and repeatedly used "black" to signify evil. His penchant for mysticism led him to a credulous acceptance of occult phenomena, while his confidence in human nature overrode his realism on the force of the demonic in history.
Quotes from others about the person
"Through twenty years Dr. Newton has been a more prolific producer of high-class sermons than any other preacher of the period".
Connections
On June 14, 1900, at Louisville, Newton married Jennie Mai Deatherage of Sanders, Kentucky, a church organist whom he had met during his seminary days. They had two children, Joseph Emerson and Josephine Kate.
