1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Peabody, Andrew Preston

20797591911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 21 — Andrew Preston Peabody

PEABODY, ANDREW PRESTON (1811–1893), American clergyman and author, was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, on the 19th of March 1811, and was descended from Lieut. Francis Peabody of St Albans, who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1635. He learned to read before he was three years old, entered Harvard College at the age of twelve, and graduated in 1826, with the single exception of Paul Dudley (class of 1690) the youngest graduate of Harvard. In 1833 he became assistant pastor of the South Parish (Unitarian) of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; the senior pastor died before Peabody had been preaching a month, and he succeeded to the charge of the church, which he held until 1860 In 1852–1860 he was proprietor and editor of the North American Review. He was preacher to Harvard University and Plummer professor of Christian morals from 1860 to 1881, and was professor emeritus from 1881 until his death in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 10th of March 1893. On the walls of Appleton Chapel, Cambridge, U.S.A., is a bronze tablet to his memory.

Besides many brief memoirs and articles, he wrote: Christianity the Religion of Nature (2nd ed., 1864), Lowell Institute Lectures; Reminiscences of European Travel (1868); A Manual of Moral Philosophy (1873); Christian Belief and Life (1875), and Harvard Reminiscences (1888). See the Memoir (Cambridge, 1896) by Edward J. Young.