As a boy he worked on his father's farm, attending school winters, and at the age of seventeen became himself a teacher of district schools.
On Sept. 27, 1797, he was ordained pastor of the Congregational Church of Fitchburg, Massachussets, and on Oct. 20, he married Zervia, daughter of Dr. Jonathan Fox of Hollis, by whom he had eleven children.
Accordingly, in his twenty-first year, giving his father a promissory note for the value of his services during the remainder of his minority, he went to the New Ipswich Academy for further preparation and in the spring of 1792 entered Dartmouth College.
He then pursued studies in theology, first, under Rev. Samuel Austin [q. v. ] of Worcester, Massachussets; and later, while teaching in Hollis and at the New Ipswich Academy.
His first pastorate lasted but five years and gave rise to serious dissensions.
This fact brought him into conflict with Universalists and other liberals in his parish, and prompted him in 1800 to deliver and publish a series of six sermons on eternal judgment.
Although his church supported him loyally, disaffected members of the parish employed all possible measures to force his resignation, and finally on Aug. 29, 1802, an ecclesiastical council dissolved the pastoral relation.
His ministry here was successful and happy.
He became involved in 1815 in a famous controversy with William Ellery Channing, 1780-1842 [q. v. ].
In June of that year the Panoplist published a review attributed to Jeremiah Evarts [q. v. ], of American Unitarianism; or a Brief History of the Progress and Present State of the Unitarian Churches in America, a pamphlet containing portions of Thomas Belsham's biography of Rev. Theophilus Lindsley, a leader of English Unitarians.
Channing in a published letter addressed to Rev. Samuel C. Thacher [q. v. ] took emphatic exception to the characterization of American Unitarians in this review.
Worcester replied in A Letter to the Rev. William E. Channing (1815), and an exchange of pamphlets followed during which Worcester wrote a second and a third letter, both published in 1815.
He was also prominent in organized efforts to combat intemperance.
His duties as corresponding secretary for the American Board became so heavy that in 1819 Rev. Elias Cornelius was made associate pastor of the Tabernacle Church.
In 1844 his body was removed to Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Massachussets More than thirty of his sermons and addresses were published; a collection of these, Sermons on Various Subjects, appeared in 1823.
To provide orthodox churches with a suitable hymnal, he also issued in 1815 Christian Psalmody, an abridgment of Watts's psalms and hymns, with select hymns from other authors and select harmony.
[S. A. Worcester, The Descendants of Rev. William Worcester (1914); S. M. Worcester, The Life and Labors of Rev. Samuel Worcester, D. D. (2 vols. , 1852); W. B. Sprague, Annals of the Am.
Pulpit, vol.
Worcester was an inflexible Hopkinsian Calvinist.
The controversy contributed no little to the growing separation in name and in fact of the liberal and orthodox factions in the Congregational body.
In 1799, while still in Fitchburg, he had been associated with the forming of the Massachusetts Missionary Society.
He felt that he was not "made for a farmer, " and in spite of violent opposition from his father, he determined to fit himself for a profession.
