Minot Savage
From Philosopedia
- Savage, sitting on his summer house porch
Savage, Minot Judson (10 June 1841 - 22 May 1918)
Minot Judson Savage, who was born in Norridgewock, Maine, joined the Congregational Church there at the age of thirteen. He enrolled at the Bangor Theological Seminary and, after serving for a year during the Civil War with the Christian Commission, graduated in 1864. He was ordained at Bangor and commissioned by the Home Missionary Society as a missionary to California. In 1867 he was settled over the Congregational Church in Framingham, Massachusetts, and in 1869 he became minister of the Congregational Church in Hannibal, Missouri.
Struggling with his orthodoxy, he resigned in 1872 from his church in Hannibal, joining the Unitarian fellowship. In 1873, after serving the Third Unitarian Church in Chicago, Illinois, he was called to the Church of the Unity in Boston, Massachusetts, serving until 1896. For the next 10 years, he served as the associate minister of the Church of the Messiah in New York City.
Savage was a popular preacher and speaker who affirmed the religious interpretation of evolution, modern biblical criticism, and comparative religion. His extemporaneous sermons were written down and widely distributed in pamphlet form as "Unity Pulpit" and "Messiah Pulpit." He was the author of several theological books, including poetry, hymns, and the influential Religion of Evolution (1876), one of the earliest attempts to extract religiously satisfying and optimistic conclusions from evolutionary theory. He developed a spiritualistic faith in personal survival after death and published Life Beyond Death in 1899 as a tribute to his son Philip Henry, who had died at the age of 31 earlier that year.
Minot served on the board of directors of the American Unitarian Association, on the Council of the National Conference, and as a delegate to the International Council. He received an honorary doctor of divinity degree from Harvard in 1896.
While attending the annual Unitarian meetings in Boston, he died in 1918.
The Beacon Press’s 1937 Hymns of the Spirit contained Savage’s words for a pantheistic hymn (which has been modified as “Why Seek Afar For Beauty?” Although unpublished, the hymn has been taped by Warren Allen Smith with his somewhat modified words and performed with his music):
- Why seek afar for beauty?
- Look, it glows In dew-wet grasses all about your feet;
- In birds, in sunshine, childish faces sweet,
- In stars and mountain summits topped with snows.
- Go not abroad for happiness.
- For, see, It is a flower blooming at your door.
- Bring love and justice home, and then no more
- Will you wonder in what dwelling joy may be.
- In wonder-workings, or some bush aflame,
- Men look for God and fancy him concealed.
- But in Earth’s beauty nature stands revealed,
- While grass and flowers and stars spell out her name.
Unitarian Catechism
Philip Hewett, in a 29 May 2007 e-mail to a UU History Discussion Group, agreed with Andrew Hill that V. Emil Gudmundson's The Icelandic Unitarian Connection (Winnipeg, 1984, pp. 146 and 158) describes Bjorn Petursson's Icelandic translation [Unitar Katkismus] of Minot Judson Savage's "Unitarian Catechism."
Hewett Hill [mailto:amckhill@gmail.com) added:
- I possess a copy of the catechism, but unfortunately can't lay hands on it in a hurry because my library is in process of chaotic reorganization. However, I can confirm that Andrew is correct in his assumption that this is in fact a translation of Savage's Unitarian Catechism made for the emerging Unitarian congregations in Manitoba. These came into being as a result of the discovery by the large number of Icelandic immigrants that Lutheranism in North America was far more conservative than what they had been accustomed to in their Lutheran state church in Iceland. So they split two ways, and there was often fierce intolerance on the part of those who moved to the right against those who looked for a freer faith and eventually became Unitarian. That notwithstanding, in the old days when the Bishop of Iceland visited Winnipeg he preached at the Lutheran church in the morning and the Unitarian church in the evening.
- Since my book on Unitarians in Canada ("Unitarians in Canada" 2nd ed. pp. 140-144, 183-191) has been mentioned, and is still in print, as Emil Gudmundson's book is not, I should mention that Emil read and approved my account of the development of the Icelandic movement, which will be found on pages 140-144.
