Henry Ware
From Philosopedia
Henry Ware (1 April 1764 - 12 June 1845)
Ware was influential in the early years of Unitarianism in the United States. He was born in Sherborn, Massachusetts, and was said to have loved to play more than to farm - or to go to school. However, his classes were limited to six to ten weeks in the winter.
When he was fifteen, his father died, so his elder brothers generously pooled their small resources to enable him to attend and to graduate with an A.B. from Harvard College in 1785, the first scholar of his class.
After preparing for the ministry with Rev. Timothy Hilliard of the First Parish in Cambridge, he was called to Hingham's First Church ("Old Ship") in 1787, serving until 1805, when he was elected to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity in Harvard College. Some of the Overseers at Harvard opposed his election because he was understood to be a Unitarian. His predecessor, a Trinitarian by the name of Dr. Tappan, has a moderate Calvinist. Efforts were made to prevent a Unitarian's nomination. When Dr. Jedediah Morse published his opposition, the decision to accept Ware was affirmed by thirty-three to twenty-three.
This led to dissatisfaction by the "orthodox" clergy and Ware’s joining Harvard College was one of the earliest public manifestations of the growing split between Calvinists and liberals in New England, and the opposition voiced to his election by the Calvinists constituted the first phase of what became known as "the Unitarian controversy."
As described in Heralds of a Liberal Faith, Vol. 2,
- Dr. Pearson, who had been both a Professor and a Fellow in the College, the next year resigned both these offices, giving as a reason that “the University was the subject of such radical and constitutional maladies as to exclude the hope of rendering any essential service to the interests of religion by continuing his relation to it.” Dr. Morse also published a pamphlet, entitled “True Reasons on which the Election of a Hollis Professor of Divinity in Harvard College was opposed at the Board of Overseers.” This may be regarded as the beginning of the Unitarian controversy, which was prosecuted with great vigor until the lines between the two parties were distinctly drawn.
In this controversy Dr. Ware took no immediate part until the year 1820, when he published a volume entitled “Letters to Trinitarians and Calvinists, occasioned by Dr. Woods’s Letters to Unitarians,” which passed through three editions the same year. In 1821 Dr. Woods replied to these letters; and in 1822 Dr. Ware continued the controversy by an Answer to Dr. Woods’s second work, and to this Answer he subsequently added a Postscript, making a considerable pamphlet. This exchange of arguments was generally known as “the Wooden Ware controversy.”
Professor Ware, despite that early battle with the Calvinists, was so highly esteemed that he twice served as acting president of Harvard.
A key person in the formation of the Harvard Divinity School, which remained primarily Unitarian for decades and from which his debates with the Calvinists were disseminated in the 1820s, Ware retired in 1840.
His son, Henry Ware Jr. [[1]] followed his father as a Harvard Divinity professor and Unitarian theologian.
Harvard's Acting President from 1810, 1828-1829
Herbert F. Vetter has described online the two times that Ware was Acting President of Harvard, further explaining "the Unitarian controversy".
The Ware Lectures
In 1920, Harriet E. Ware of Milton, Massachusetts, bequeathed $5,000 to the American Unitarian Association for its unrestricted use. Two years later, on the evening of May 24, 1922, the first Ware lecture was given by the Rev. Frederick W. Norwood, pastor of the City Temple in London, England. The Lecture had been
- established in honor of the distinguished services of three generations of the Ware family to the cause of Pure Christianity.
The list of lecturers includes such diverse speakers as Norman Lear, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., May Sarton, Martin Luther King Jr., Linus Pauling, and Max Lerner].
