Background
James Walker was born in what was a part of Woburn, now Burlington, Massachussets, the son of James Walker, commissioned major-general by President Adams in 1798, and of Lucy (Johnson) Walker, a descendant of Edward Johnson, 1598-1672.
James Walker was born in what was a part of Woburn, now Burlington, Massachussets, the son of James Walker, commissioned major-general by President Adams in 1798, and of Lucy (Johnson) Walker, a descendant of Edward Johnson, 1598-1672.
Prepared for college at the school at Groton, Massachussets, afterward Lawrence Academy, he graduated from Harvard College in 1814.
After assisting Benjamin Abbot at Phillips Exeter Academy for a year, he studied divinity at Cambridge under Henry Ware and received his license to preach on May 15, 1817. He accepted the call of the Harvard Church in Charlestown and was ordained on April 15, 1818. In the controversy between the Trinitarians and Unitarians he immediately became a leader among the "liberals. " He was an organizer of the American Unitarian Association in 1825, and he contributed to the American Unitarian Tracts and to The Christian Examiner, which he edited from 1831 to 1839. In July 1839 he resigned his pulpit to become Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity at Harvard. In 1853 he became president of the university. His administration was competent but uneventful; when he intended to retire in 1858 the faculty unanimously requested that he remain, on the grounds of public duty. In 1860 he resigned on the plea of advancing years. Though a theological liberal in the 1820's, he was temperamentally conservative and cautious. He kept clear of all reform agitations, regarded Theodore Parker as a "phenomenon, " and made it a rule never to preach about anything until people in the omnibus had stopped talking about it. His pamphlet, "Philosophy of Man's Spiritual Nature in Regard to the Foundations of Faith, " in the American Unitarian Tracts was eagerly seized upon by young Transcendentalists for its assertion "that, to a rightly constituted and fully developed soul, moral and spiritual truth will be revealed with a degree of intuitive clearness, and certainty, equal at least to that of the objects of sense". However, in such a passage he was simply repelling scepticism by the argument that innate faculties exist in the soul for the apprehension of spiritual truth; he was following implicitly the lead of the Scotch Realists, from whom he derived almost his entire thought. In 1849 he edited Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers and in 1850 Thomas Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. Drawing upon these sources, he became the preeminent expounder of the metaphysics of early nineteenth century Unitarianism, of a common-sense rationalism combined with a simple piety and a lofty ethical tone. Thoroughly provincial, he traveled out of New England only twice, to deliver ordination sermons in Baltimore and in Cincinnati. He was devoid of esthetic interests, his sermons are closely knit but sententious. His contemporaries sometimes complained that he lacked decision, which they attributed to his faculty for seeing all sides of all questions. His last years he spent in Cambridge, an honored and dignified figure. He published Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Harvard College in 1861, and another collection was issued after his death, Reason, Faith, and Duty (1876).
He was an erudite but not original mind.
On December 21, 1829, he married Catherine Bartlett, the daughter of George Bartlett of Charlestown. They had no children.