In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

13  T W O An Act of Wholesome and Pure-hearted Admiration Emerson’s First Biographer, George Willis Cooke In 1918, to commemorate his seventieth birthday, the Free Religious Association of Boston hosted a reception for George Willis Cooke at the Unitarian Building on Beacon Street. It was a mild April afternoon, punctuated with light rain, and the turnout was good—some two dozen ministers attended, and many old friends, including Edward Waldo Emerson , to honor the man one attendee called a “preacher, scholar, writer, lecturer, historian, courageous pioneer and prophet.” Cooke had been an active lecturer for four decades; he wrote the most comprehensive history of American Unitarianism and a half-dozen books on the New England Transcendentalists; he was at work on an ambitious study entitled The Social Evolution of Religion (1920). And he remained a tireless activist for what he called “collectivism” in religious and economic thought. But despite a lifetime spent championing progressive causes, Cooke always fit uneasily into the institutions of liberalism and had gotten none of the public recognition traditionally given to American religious thinkers: no honorary degrees, few invitations to speak at the major denominational meetings, no calls to the pulpit at what are today called the “tall steeple churches” of prestige and influence. Forty years earlier, in 1878, Cooke’s fate would have been hard to anticipate . But already, early in his career, there were signs of an uncomfortable relationship with religious institutions that would lead him to sympathize with Emerson’s writings—and in time, to become Emerson’s first biographer . In 1878 Cooke was preaching at the Unity Church (a Unitarian congregation ) in Indianapolis, his fourth parish in six years. Based upon what 14 C H A P T E R T W O we know of his prior service as a minister in rural Wisconsin and Michigan , it is clear that his would be no conventional Unitarian ministry, even by the very flexible standards used to measure liberal Christianity at that time. Cooke must have felt some pressure to succeed in Indiana, at the age of 30, married with two young daughters; nevertheless, he would last only two years there, and by early 1880 he had relinquished his pulpit to head to New England, specifically to Concord, Massachusetts, to meet his hero Ralph Waldo Emerson. — I — Cooke’s experience in Indianapolis enacts a pattern of rebellion and retreat that marks the history of Unitarianism beyond the Alleghenies at least since the 1820s, when the American Unitarian Association first sent emissaries to the Midwest in hopes of securing a foothold in a religious climate weakened by sectarian fighting. What’s more, it reflects some specific religious and cultural tensions of its place and time, as well as Cooke’s growing admiration for Emerson. Cooke brought to Indianapolis a long history of liberalism and an educational wanderlust that foreshadowed his peripatetic career as a minister. Born in rural Comstock, Michigan, on April 23, 1848, he spent two years in the college preparatory program at Olivet College in Michigan (1866–1868) and two more years (1868–1870) at the Jefferson Liberal Institute in Wisconsin, a struggling school sponsored by the Universalists and destined to collapse financially in less than a decade. In 1870 he was off to the Meadville (Pennsylvania) Theological School, finishing a short course as a “certificated undergraduate” two years later. Following stints at Sheboygan (eight months) and Sharon, Wisconsin (three years), he became the minister of the First Unitarian Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, in February 1876. Under Cooke’s leadership the Grand Haven congregation grew in size, and he was unanimously called to settle there. As he told his lifelong confidante and fellow minister Jabez T. Sunderland, with the tentativeness that often characterized Cooke’s relationships with his congregations, “I guess I’ve been growing in the liking of the people, and they begin to think I may be all right. I am inclined to think we are doing well here at present. I hope so.” But Cooke’s liberalism went down hard in Grand Haven, within his congregation and outside it, and he got an early lesson in sectarianism that would color his denominational affiliation for the rest of his career: An Act of Admiration 15 We have had much to contend with—have much opposition from other churches here. And this opposition is bitter, underhanded and mean. For instance, we are called Spiritualists in disguise. . . . Some are afraid I am too radical &c. The Universalists in the Society...

Share