His father, Richard Moore, was of Irish ancestry; his mother, Nancy M. (Jones), of Scotch extraction.
In 1864 he married Mary A. Bishop, daughter of R. M. Bishop of Cincinnati, later governor of Ohio; Richard Bishop Moore [q. v. ] was one of their children.
At eighteen he had received practically no schooling but had read the Bible and a few histories.
In 1850 he entered an academy at New Castle, Ky.
He then taught and preached, and in 1855 entered Bethany College, Va. (now W. Va. ), graduating in 1858.
Thence he was called to a professorship in Kentucky University and later elected to a pastorate in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He accepted the pastorate conditionally, served as professor at Kentucky University for one year, 1866-67, at the same time teaching sacred rhetoric and ecclesiastical history at the College of the Bible, Lexington, and for two years thereafter delivered a brief course of lectures annually at Kentucky University.
From January 1865 to February 1866 he was pastor of the Jefferson Avenue Christian Church, Detroit, Mich.
During his Cincinnati pastorate he made his congregation the largest and most far-reaching in influence of any in his brotherhood.
As a result, during the convention of 1875, the Foreign Christian Missionary Society was formed.
While here, in 1881, he began to publish the Christian Commonwealth, which he edited actively for sixteen years, and by proxy through his eldest son, Paul, for five years more.
In 1896 he became dean of the Bible College of Missouri, a new school established in Columbia, Mo. , by the Disciples of Christ, adjacent to the University of Missouri, to train young men for the ministry and to supply to university students such religious studies as a tax-supported institution cannot offer.
From 1897 to 1900 he edited the Christian Quarterly, which he had founded and edited from 1869 to 1877.
In 1909 he moved to Florida, where he spent his remaining years.
He died at Orlando, at the age of ninety-four.
His best-known publications include The Living Pulpit of the Christian Church (cop.
1867), a series of sermons by representative ministers of the Disciples of Christ, with biographical sketches; a similar series, The New Living Pulpit of the Christian Church (1918); and A Comprehensive History of the Disciples of Christ (1909).
He was more than six feet tall, weighed nearly two hundred pounds, and wore a patriarchal beard reaching to his waist.
A man of tremendous vitality (he went swimming in Lake Michigan after he was ninety, and continued to preach until shortly before his death), he was a prominent figure in his denomination for more than half a century.
[F. M. Green, Christian Missions and Hist.
Sketches (1884); J. T. Brown, Churches of Christ (1904); J. W. Monser, The Literature of the Disciples (1906); J. H. Garrison, The Reformation of the Nineteenth Century (1901) and The Story of a Century (1909); Archibald McLean, The Hist.
of the Foreign Christian Missionary Soc.
(1921); A. W. Fortune, The Disciples in Ky. (1932); The Biog.
Encyc.
of Ky. (1878); J. F. Brennan, A Biog.
Cyc.
of Ohio (1879); Who's Who in America, 1910-11; Pensacola Jour. , Sept. 8, 1926; N. Y. Times, Sept. 9, 12, 1926; information as to certain facts from friends and relatives. ]
He was a member of the executive committee of the American Christian Missionary Society and of the committee to revise the church hymnbook (1864).
In 1874, realizing that the "Louisville Plan" was unsatisfactory, he called a meeting and urged the organization of a foreign-missionary society.
He remained in Columbia until 1909, serving for part of the time as chaplain and professor in the Christian College there, an institution for women, of which his wife was president.
His first wife died Apr. 14, 1888, and on Aug. 20, 1890, he married Emma S. Frederick of Carthage, N. Y.
His first wife died Apr. 14, 1888, and on Aug. 20, 1890, he married Emma S. Frederick of Carthage, N. Y.
They moved from Virginia to Kentucky and thence to Indiana, where Richard Moore died when William Thomas, the eldest son among six children, was nine years old.
