GAY, EBENEZER
(15 August 1696, Dedham, MA-18 March 1787, Hingham, MA). Education: B.A., Harvard College, 1714. Career: Teacher, Dedham, MA, 1714; teacher, Hadley, MA, 1715; teacher, Ipswich, MA, 1715; minister, First Parish, Hingham, MA, 1717-87.
Ebenezer Gay has been called "the father of American Unitarianism." The title could as easily be conferred on a dozen other eighteenth-century liberal Congregationalists, anyone of whom could be considered a proto-Unitarian. Gay's claim to this title rests in part on his association with other liberals, including Jonathan Mayhew* and Charles Chauncy*, whom he admired, and Henry Ware·, who succeeded him as Hingham minister. It rests 100 on some of his own advanced views. But during his lifetime religious liberals were not required to depart from Congregationalism. Gay spent his life among Congregational ministers, befriending them, ordaining them, directing with them the religious life of New England.
The most distinctive feature of Gay's seventy-year ministry was his willingness to take unusual and sometimes unpopular stands. In an address to the Bingham militia in 1738 he argued that a soldier should not follow orders blindly. "I can't think, but that soldiers, who are press'd into a war, should be convinc'd of the lawfulness of it and should not be obliged to engage in it, on a blind presumption that there are good reasons for it, tho' they must not know them. All that are killed by them in an unjust war, are murdered." On the eve of the American Revolution Gay was preaching about the need for obedience to rulers and denouncing "mobbish fury." During the war with Britain the Hingham Committee of Safety, distrusting him, ordered that his house should be searched for weapons. The patriots confronted Gay, demanding his arms, and he brought forth his Bible.
Despite his coolness to the Revolution, Gay was still maintained as minister of Hingham-a tribute to his underlying popularity with his people. That popularity is something of a mystery because the one surviving portrait of Gay is the most notorious painting anywhere of a Puritan clergyman. He looks like a man who has just swallowed a whole lemon, the prototype of minister as avenging tyrant. But the real man was noted for moderation and a vein of humor. The humor finds its way into the legend of Gay and the thief: one night Gay discovered a man sneaking away from his barn with a load of stolen hay on his back. Gay quietly lit the hay on fire, and slipped away. He was gratified when he learned the next day that the man believed he had been smitten with fire from heaven, and intended to mend his ways.
The pastor who could dispatch a thief or a revolutionary committee, had little difficulty leading his parish into the age of the Enlightenment. He preached about rational religion; the Bible was necessary, but science supported its truths. This "supernatural rationalism" found its way into a famous lecture he delivered at Harvard in 1759 on natural religion. The lecture has been called "a locus classicus of liberalism." Gay joined Charles Chauncy and others in opposing the radical itinerant preachers of the Great Awakening. And he liberalized the organization of his church. In an age when Jonathan Edwards· was reviving the idea of limiting church membership in Northampton, Gay abolished public recitation of religious experience in Hingham as a prerequisite of church membership and opposed the idea of strict creeds and articles of faith. He did not preach against original sin and limited election-he simply omitted those doctrines from his sermons. In all of these measures he aligned himself with the liberal Congregationalists, but he still emphasized the role of Christ in salvation and was as critical of deists and atheists as of strict Calvinists.
On his eighty-fifth birthday Gay preached a sermon titled An Old Man's Calendar. In it he provided a classic description of aging within a spiritual, and fundamentally Puritan, framework: "As a ship which hath been long at sea, toss'd and weather beaten, which is shattered in its timber, and hath lost much-of its rigging, should do nothing in the case but work toward the port, there to find its safety and ease; so should a man, who having passed many storms and agitations of this world, is grievously battered and torn with age, strive only to die well, and to get safe into the harbors of eternal rest." A man should not go to his death bragging of his accomplishments, considering himself righteous in the eyes of God. Instead, Gay said, "Good men die repenting." And yet if a person has avoided an obsession with "worldly things," then "while our outward man is perishing, our inward man [may] be renewed day by day .... To die willingly, and go away rejoicing in hope of eternal life, is the crowning virtue of a good life." In its simplicity the sermon attracted much attention; it was published and republished in England and Europe as well as America.
On a Sunday morning in 1787, when he was ninety, Ebenezer Gay arose from bed, planning to preach. He felt ill, however, returned to bed, and was dead within an hour. Like many other New England ministers, not the least of his attainments was a long life.
Bibliography
A: Ministers are Men of Like Passions with Others (Boston, 1725); The Duty of a People to Pray for and Praise their Rulers (Boston, 1730); Well-Accomplish'd Soldiers (Boston, 1738); The Character and Work of a Good Ruler (Boston, 1745); The True Spirit of a Gospel-Minister (Boston, 1746); Natural Religion, as Distinguish'd from Revealed (Boston, 1759); An Old Man's Calendar (Boston, 1781).
B: AAP 8, 1-7; DAB 7, 194-95; NCAB 7,403; SHG 6, 59-66; Robert T. Edes, Parson Gay's Three Sermons [novel] (New York, 1908); "Lemuel Briant and Ebenezer Gay," in James W. Jones, Shattered Synthesis (New Haven, 1973), 131-42; Robert 1. Wilson m, The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, 1697-1787 (Philadelphia, 1984).
Ebenezer Gay has been called "the father of American Unitarianism." The title could as easily be conferred on a dozen other eighteenth-century liberal Congregationalists, anyone of whom could be considered a proto-Unitarian. Gay's claim to this title rests in part on his association with other liberals, including Jonathan Mayhew* and Charles Chauncy*, whom he admired, and Henry Ware·, who succeeded him as Hingham minister. It rests 100 on some of his own advanced views. But during his lifetime religious liberals were not required to depart from Congregationalism. Gay spent his life among Congregational ministers, befriending them, ordaining them, directing with them the religious life of New England.
The most distinctive feature of Gay's seventy-year ministry was his willingness to take unusual and sometimes unpopular stands. In an address to the Bingham militia in 1738 he argued that a soldier should not follow orders blindly. "I can't think, but that soldiers, who are press'd into a war, should be convinc'd of the lawfulness of it and should not be obliged to engage in it, on a blind presumption that there are good reasons for it, tho' they must not know them. All that are killed by them in an unjust war, are murdered." On the eve of the American Revolution Gay was preaching about the need for obedience to rulers and denouncing "mobbish fury." During the war with Britain the Hingham Committee of Safety, distrusting him, ordered that his house should be searched for weapons. The patriots confronted Gay, demanding his arms, and he brought forth his Bible.
Despite his coolness to the Revolution, Gay was still maintained as minister of Hingham-a tribute to his underlying popularity with his people. That popularity is something of a mystery because the one surviving portrait of Gay is the most notorious painting anywhere of a Puritan clergyman. He looks like a man who has just swallowed a whole lemon, the prototype of minister as avenging tyrant. But the real man was noted for moderation and a vein of humor. The humor finds its way into the legend of Gay and the thief: one night Gay discovered a man sneaking away from his barn with a load of stolen hay on his back. Gay quietly lit the hay on fire, and slipped away. He was gratified when he learned the next day that the man believed he had been smitten with fire from heaven, and intended to mend his ways.
The pastor who could dispatch a thief or a revolutionary committee, had little difficulty leading his parish into the age of the Enlightenment. He preached about rational religion; the Bible was necessary, but science supported its truths. This "supernatural rationalism" found its way into a famous lecture he delivered at Harvard in 1759 on natural religion. The lecture has been called "a locus classicus of liberalism." Gay joined Charles Chauncy and others in opposing the radical itinerant preachers of the Great Awakening. And he liberalized the organization of his church. In an age when Jonathan Edwards· was reviving the idea of limiting church membership in Northampton, Gay abolished public recitation of religious experience in Hingham as a prerequisite of church membership and opposed the idea of strict creeds and articles of faith. He did not preach against original sin and limited election-he simply omitted those doctrines from his sermons. In all of these measures he aligned himself with the liberal Congregationalists, but he still emphasized the role of Christ in salvation and was as critical of deists and atheists as of strict Calvinists.
On his eighty-fifth birthday Gay preached a sermon titled An Old Man's Calendar. In it he provided a classic description of aging within a spiritual, and fundamentally Puritan, framework: "As a ship which hath been long at sea, toss'd and weather beaten, which is shattered in its timber, and hath lost much-of its rigging, should do nothing in the case but work toward the port, there to find its safety and ease; so should a man, who having passed many storms and agitations of this world, is grievously battered and torn with age, strive only to die well, and to get safe into the harbors of eternal rest." A man should not go to his death bragging of his accomplishments, considering himself righteous in the eyes of God. Instead, Gay said, "Good men die repenting." And yet if a person has avoided an obsession with "worldly things," then "while our outward man is perishing, our inward man [may] be renewed day by day .... To die willingly, and go away rejoicing in hope of eternal life, is the crowning virtue of a good life." In its simplicity the sermon attracted much attention; it was published and republished in England and Europe as well as America.
On a Sunday morning in 1787, when he was ninety, Ebenezer Gay arose from bed, planning to preach. He felt ill, however, returned to bed, and was dead within an hour. Like many other New England ministers, not the least of his attainments was a long life.
Bibliography
A: Ministers are Men of Like Passions with Others (Boston, 1725); The Duty of a People to Pray for and Praise their Rulers (Boston, 1730); Well-Accomplish'd Soldiers (Boston, 1738); The Character and Work of a Good Ruler (Boston, 1745); The True Spirit of a Gospel-Minister (Boston, 1746); Natural Religion, as Distinguish'd from Revealed (Boston, 1759); An Old Man's Calendar (Boston, 1781).
B: AAP 8, 1-7; DAB 7, 194-95; NCAB 7,403; SHG 6, 59-66; Robert T. Edes, Parson Gay's Three Sermons [novel] (New York, 1908); "Lemuel Briant and Ebenezer Gay," in James W. Jones, Shattered Synthesis (New Haven, 1973), 131-42; Robert 1. Wilson m, The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, 1697-1787 (Philadelphia, 1984).