American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

GORDON, GEORGE ANGIER

(2 January 1853, Oyne, Scotland-25 October 1929, Brookline, MA). Education: B.D., Bangor Seminary, 1877; B.A., Harvard College, 1881. Career: Minister, Second Congregational Church, Greenwich, CT, 1881-84; minister, Old South Congregational Church, Boston, 1884-1929.

George Angier Gordon once described himself as "the only Trinitarian left in New England." This comment indicates how the erosion of traditional Congregational ideas continued through the nineteenth century. It also suggests Gordon's sense of humor. He was more of a theological moderate than a conservative, and on certain points he was so progressive that he was suspected of heresy.

Gordon took an unusual path to enter one of the leading pulpits of Congregationalism-Old South Church in Boston. He was born on a farm in Aberdeenshire,
Scotland, and migrated to the United States when he was eighteen. He worked for three years as a manual laborer and might have remained a laborer all of his life without the support of his minister, Luther Angier, whose name he added to his own in appreciation. With Angier's help, Gordon gained admission to Harvard College; he graduated with honors in 1881.

After three years as a clergyman in Connecticut Gordon was called to the pulpit of Old South Church. Following a Puritan tradition of marital links among the clergy, he chose as bride Susan Huntington Manning, daughter of his predecessor at Old South.
In important respects Gordon was a theological liberal. He rejected the doctrines of arbitrary election, limited atonement, and universal depravity. He credited man with free moral agency in accepting or rejecting atonement. And he emphasized Christ's moral example more than his sacrificial death. These views worried his parishioners, but he won them over with his good humor and theological moderation.

He soon proved to be less of a radical than some feared. Like other liberals he narrowed the distance between God and man, stressing the humanity of Christ, and the spiritual attributes of man. But he also asserted that Christ was uniquely divine, the preexistent son of God. In The Christ of To-day (1895), his first and most important work, he upheld the doctrine of the Trinity.

George Gordon's ministry was characterized by an emphasis on he fatherliness of God, individual freedom, and ethical progress optimistic positions that suited well his own affable humor and the optimistic temper of America at the dawn of the modern age.

Bibliography
A: The Christ of To-Day (Boston, 1895); Immortality and the New Theodicy (Boston, 1897); The New Epoch for Faith (Boston, 1901); Ultimate Conceptions of Faith (Boston, 1903); Through Man to God (Boston, 1906); Religion and Miracle (Boston, 1909); Humanism in New England Theology (Boston, 1920); My Education and Religion: An Autobiography (Boston, 1925).
B: DAB 7, 419-21; NCAB 22, 307-8; NIT 26 October 1929, 17; SH 5, 24.