DEEMS, CHARLES (ALEXANDER) FORCE (1820-1893)

This article appears in Volume V07, Page 922 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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DEEMS, CHARLES (ALEXANDER) FORCE (1820-1893) , American clergyman, was born in

Baltimore

BALTIMORE
BALTIMORE, GEORGE CALVERT, 1ST BARON (C. 1580—1632)

, Maryland, on the 4th of December 1820. He was a precocious child and delivered lectures on temperance and on Sunday. schools before he was fourteen years old. He graduated at Dickinson College in 1839, taught and preached in New

York

city for a few months, in 1840 took charge of the Methodist Episcopal church at Asbury, New

Jersey

JERSEY
JERSEY, EARLS OF

, and removed in the next year to North Carolina, where he was general agent for the American Bible Society. He was professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of North Carolina in 1842-1847, and professor of natural sciences at Randolph-

Macon

MACON
MACON, NATHANIEL (1758-1837)

College (then at Boydton, Virginia) in 1847-1848, and after two years of preaching at Newbern, N. C., he held for four years (1850-1854) the presidency of Greensboro (N.C.) Female College. He continued as a Methodist Episcopal clergy-man at various pastorates in North Carolina from 1854 to 1865, for the last seven years being a presiding elder and in 1859 to 1863 being the proprietor of St Austin's Institute, Wilson. In 1865 he settled in New

York

City, where in 1866 he began preaching in the chapel of New York University, and in 1868 he established and became the pastor of the undenominational Church of the Strangers, which in 1870 occupied the former Mercer Street Presbyterian church, purchased and given to Dr Deems by Cornelius Vanderbilt; there he remained until his death in New York city on the 18th of November 1893. He was one of the founders (1881) and president of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy and for ten years was editor of its organ, Christian Thought. Dr Deems was an

earnest

EARNEST (probably a corruption of the obsolete arles or erles, adapted from Lat. equivalent arrha, due to a confusion with the adjective " earnest," serious, O. Eng. eornust, cognate with Ger. ernst)

temperance advocate, as early as 1852 worked (unsuccessfully) for a general prohibition law in North Carolina, and in his later years allied himself with the Prohibition party. He was influential in securing froth Cornelius Vanderbilt the endowment of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a man of rare personal and literary charm; he edited The Southern Methodist Episcopal Pulpit (1846-1852) and The Annals of Southern Methodism (1855-1.857); he compiled Devotional Melodies (1842), and, with the assistance of Phoebe Cary, one of his parishioners, Hymns for all Christians (1869; revised. 1881); and he published many books, among which were: The Life of Dr

Adam

Clarke (1840);
1 An Anglo-French law term meaning a " scroll " or strip of parchment, cognate with the English " shred." The modern French ecroue is used for the entry of a name on a prison register.
DEEMS
922
The

Triumph

TRIUMPH (triumphus)

of Peace and other Poems (184o) ; The Home Altar (1850); Jesus (1872), which ran through many editions and several revisions, the title being changed in 188o to The Light of the Nations; Sermons (1885); The Gospel of Common Sense (1888); The Gospel of Spiritual Insight (1891) and My Septuagint (1892). The Charles F. Deems Lectureship in Philosophy was founded in his honour in 1895 at New York University by the American Institute of Christian Philosophy.
His Autobiography (New York, 1897) is autobiographical only to 1847, the memoir being completed by his two sons.

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