The Incarnation: A Sermon Preached at the Ordination of Rev. Calvin S. Locke, Over the Unitarian Church and Society in West Dedham, Wednesday, December 6, 1854 (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Incarnation: A Sermon Preached at the Or...)
Excerpt from The Incarnation: A Sermon Preached at the Ordination of Rev. Calvin S. Locke, Over the Unitarian Church and Society in West Dedham, Wednesday, December 6, 1854
The birth of a soul in the corporeal form and life, amidst means of grace and religious opportunities, is the prelude to the spir'it's birth into an inwardflife of holiness. It is the vestibule to the religious life, which is lhid with Christ In God. Yet it is only the portal; it is not the very birth In the spirit of holy principles and affections; that comes we know not how nor whence, except that it must come from the fountain Of original energy. We are not to confound occasions with the Omnipresent {spirit which works by them. Using Opportunities, we are yet not to ascribe to humaii agencies that which is wroughtby the Divine power. Train the child in the nurture of the Lord, but remember that its spirit cannot be redeemed from the besetting presence Of evil, and born to holiness, without the inspiration of the Almighty breathing through its nature; and pray for that to Work through your agency.
Christ's supernatural advent instructs us to look above nature for the coming of spirit in nature, and to see God in the spiritual as well as In the natural birth. The holiest leadings and most blessed exercises of our souls, intelligible in experience, are mysterious in their causation, and we'can rest only in the thought that'all gooddesires do proceed from the Central and Underived Being; and the ripe saint who has done most With Opportunities, and put to best uses nature and life, will bend with awe and humility before an inward Redeemer, and say with Paul, By the grace of God I am what I am.
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The Gospel Applied to the Fugitive Slave Law: A Sermon Preached to the Third Congregational Society of Hingham, on Sunday, March 2, 1851 (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Gospel Applied to the Fugitive Slave Law...)
Excerpt from The Gospel Applied to the Fugitive Slave Law: A Sermon Preached to the Third Congregational Society of Hingham, on Sunday, March 2, 1851
WE are to do all things in the name of the Lord Jesus. We are to do nothing in which, with the thought of Jesus in our minds, we cannot invoke God's aid.
We are to acknowledge ever the divine Mastership of Jesus, appealing to his authority as paramount to all other in questions of duty. We are to ask, What is the mind, the intention, of Christ? How do his precepts and life apply to this or that case in which we are to act? And, when the world inquire why we maintain a particular principle or pursue a particular course as Christians, we ought to be able to answer, that we act in obedience to the truth as it is in Jesus.
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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
The Gospel Applied to the Fugitive Slave Law: A Sermon Preached
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Oliver Stearns was an American Unitarian clergyman and theologian. His eminent successful work led to his appointment to the Parkman Professorship of pulpit eloquence and pastoral care in the Harvard Divinity School, in succession to Convers Francis, and to a lectureship in Christian theology in succession to George E. Ellis.
Background
Oliver was born on June 3, 1807 in Lunenburg, Massachussets, United States, was through his father, Major Thomas Stearns, descended from Isaac Stearns, who was admitted freeman of Watertown, Massachussets, in 1631. Through his mother, Priscilla, daughter of Hon. Charles Cushing of Hingham, Massachussets, he was a descendant of Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard College. He was a nephew of Asahel Stearns, and uncle of Luther Stearns Cushing.
Education
Educated in the Lunenburg district school with added tutoring from the local clergyman and a term in the academy at New Ipswich, New Hampshire, he entered Harvard College at the age of fifteen and graduated in 1826, ranking second in his class.
Career
After a year of teaching in a private school in Jamaica Plain, Stearns was influenced by William Ellery Channing to enter the Harvard Divinity School, combining study there with the office, for two years, of tutor in mathematics in the college.
Graduating in 1830, he was ordained pastor of the Second Congregational Society (Unitarian), Northampton, Massachussets, and remained there until April 1, 1839, when, on account of ill health, he resigned. Unable, because of his health, to accept a call to Newburyport, he later became pastor of the Third Congregational Society in Hingham, Massachussets, where he was installed in April 1840, and where he remained sixteen years.
There were occasions when irritated listeners walked out while he was preaching. During his Hingham pastorate he developed a theological method reconciling the older Unitarian thought with the newer Transcendentalism, and he found his truer vocation when.
When President Eliot reorganized the school in 1870, Stearns was given the office of dean, and under the title of Parkman Professor of Theology, taught systematic theology and ethics. In 1878, aged seventy-one, he resigned, and lived in retirement in Cambridge until his death.
After a preliminary effort in "Peace Through Conflict" (Monthly Religious Magazine, November 1851) he published further articles (Christian Examiner, September 1853, September 1856), in which he asserted that this progressive development is a story of intuitive reason interpreting revelation, with a safeguard against private aberration by the intention to seek truth in the light of the Holy Catholic Church.
This development is more than a human process. The divine is immanent in it. Man's growing spiritual experience is an "evolution of the divine life through human nature. "
The same law, Stearns held, governed the history "not only of Christian theology, but of that Christian life which gives theology the law of its form and the sap of its growth".
In his Meadville instruction, he applied this thought with imperfect consistency and with a version of Christian beginnings now supplanted by modern criticism. In his Harvard period, ever receptive to new currents of thought, he assimilated some of that criticism, as is evidenced in a paper dealing with the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, the last of his rare publications.
He retired in 1878 and died in Cambridge on July 18, 1885.
(Excerpt from The Incarnation: A Sermon Preached at the Or...)
Religion
Stearns was probably the first theologian in America to profess belief in evolution as a cosmic law, even before Herbert Spencer's adoption of the idea, though his own interest was in establishing a theory of historical development for Christian thought. His purpose was to unite the old dependence on Biblical revelation with the Transcendentalist reliance on present intuition, and at the same time, to find a relative justification of doctrines elaborated in stages of Christian history.
Connections
On May 14, 1832, he was married to Mary Blood, daughter of Hon. Thomas H. and Mary (Sawyer) Blood of Sterling, Massachussets; she died on June 10, 1871, and on July 2, 1872, he married Mrs. Augusta Hannah (Carey) Bailey. By his first wife he had six sons and two daughters.