Earl Morse Wilbur

From Philosopedia.org

Wilbur, Earl Morse (26 April 1866 - 8 January 1956)

Morse, the son of a Vermont lawyer, was born in Jericho, Vermont. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1886, the youngest member of his class. In 1890, he graduated from the Harvard Divinity School with the degrees of A.M. and S. T. B.

Called the most prominent modern student of the history of Unitarianism, Wilbur described the historical development of Socinian and Unitarian theology.

He was a President of the Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California.

Wilbur wrote Our Unitarian History (1925) and later a two-volume History of Unitarianism (1945; 1952) were comprehensive in describing Unitarianism in Europe and America.

Assessments of Wilbur

Henry Wilder Foote, author of Three Centuries of American Hymnody, and Duncan Howlett have recorded facts about Wilbur's life and thinking [[1]].

A description of Wilbur by Alan Seaburg, on the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography website, describes how he rejected trinitarianism, how he married Thomas Lamb Eliot's daughter, how he took post-graduate courses at Oxford and the University of Berlin, how he learned Polish and Hungarian, how he earned a Guggenheim fellowship, and how it took 15 years to publish his 1945 and 1952 book with "authority and distinguished scholarship" [[2]].