Background
Aaron Bancroft was born on November 10, 1755 in Reading, Massachusetts to Samuel Bancroft and Lydia Parker.
Aaron Bancroft was born on November 10, 1755 in Reading, Massachusetts to Samuel Bancroft and Lydia Parker.
During his residence in Harvard College (1774 - 78) he marched with the Minute Men of Reading to Cambridge after Bunker Hill. After his graduation he read theology with the Reading pastor, Thomas Haven, and was licensed to preach.
Early in 1780, with permission from the Massachusetts authorities and urged by John Barnard, a Loyalist exile, he sought a career in Nova Scotia where his oldest brother was a prominent jurist. There, however, he found the New England colonists too divided to form permanent churches, and the intolerance and extravagance of itinerant preachers confirmed his leanings to Arminian positions. Returning in July 1783, he spent the autumn as substitute for the invalid pastor of the church in Worcester, and there also a year later, having meantime declined a call to Stoughton and being rejected at East Windsor, Connecticut, because of his Arminian heresies, he preached as a candidate for the now vacant pulpit. A majority being firm Calvinists, the town, March 1785, refused to settle Bancroft, or to appoint two ministers of divergent views, or to support two societies. The minority, still subject for some years to taxation for the town church, established a voluntary society which had the unpopularity of being, apart from Boston, the first "poll" parish instead of a territorial organization, the first secession from a Congregational Church on doctrinal grounds, and the first church which in its formulas expressly condemned written creeds and accepted only the Bible as the sufficient rule of faith and practise.
Ordained, February 1, 1788, as an avowed Arminian, Bancroft was shunned by church neighbors and only by taking pupils and boarders could eke out a meager support, but gradually his high character, ability, and public spirit won him a widespread esteem which was heightened by his Life of Washington (1807), a popular work often reprinted. His parish, having at first only one professed Unitarian member, followed Bancroft's guidance after the outbreak of the Unitarian controversy in 1815, and in 1822 published his Sermons on Christian Doctrine, a systematic formulation which had several editions in England and America. Bancroft contributed discussions to the Christian Register, and in 1825, aged seventy, overcame a disinclination to church division and joined the younger liberals in organizing the American Unitarian Association which he served as president with executive talent to 1836.
His sermons show an unusual grasp of the history of Christianity, and their Theory of the doctrine is the best illustration of the thought of his time and circle, and is not affected by the newer tendencies emergent in Channing. Holding the common view that Scripture must be consistent, he accepted the Arian of Pauline and Johannine texts as dominant over the humanitarian view of Christ.
By his marriage with Lucretia, daughter of Judge John and Mary (Church) Chandler he had thirteen children, prominent among whom were the historian George Bancroft and Mary, wife of John Davis, governor of Massachusetts.