Dictionary of Literary Biography on Samuel Willard
Samuel Willard, the son of Simon and Mary Sharpe Willard, was born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts. Upon his graduation from Harvard in 1659, he became minister at Groton, Massachusetts, serving until the destruction of Groton by Indian attacks in 1676. Willard was then called to preach at Third Church (commonly called Old South) in Boston, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Willard was an influential figure and a prolific writer, second only to the Mathers and Benjamin Colman in the number of works he had published. His writings display an orthodox view of the issues of his day, tempered by common sense. When, in 1671, Elizabeth Knap (or Knapp) put on an exhibition of apparent demonic possession attended by fits and convulsions which had many of the people of Groton suspecting that witchcraft had broken out in their midst, Willard was able to quell the furor and wrote a remarkably objective series of observations on the incident, "A briefe account of a strange and unusuall Providence of God, befallen to Elizabeth Knap of Groton in 1671-1672."
For the most part, Willard tended to be conservative and to side with the establishment in its consistent persecution of members of various religious sects, as his strong statement against toleration for the Anabaptists in Ne Sutor Ultra Crepidam ... (1681) clearly demonstrates. Yet, unlike some other Puritan ministers, Willard was flexible and able to bow to reason. In 1692, during the early stages of the witchcraft proceedings at Salem, he consistently aligned himself with the government position of advocating the vigorous prosecution and condemnation of people suspected of being witches, but he moved away from that stand when it became obvious to him that the judgments were in error. In a bold move, considering the theological climate at the time, Willard published anonymously in 1692 Some Miscellany Observations ... (popularly known as "The Dialogue between S. & B."), in which he sought a middle path of reconciliation between those citizens who favored trying and executing so-called witches and those who felt that the notion of accusing their neighbors of witchcraft bordered upon the ridiculous. A few years later, Willard acknowledged the error of his initial participation in the witchcraft delusion by publicly reading his confession before the congregation of Old South Church on 14 January 1697. Willard became vice-president of Harvard on 6 September 1701 and served until his death, retaining at the same time his association with the Old South congregation. In April 1707, Willard began to suffer from convulsion fits, and he died seven months later.
More than forty-five of Willard's works are extant in published form, the majority being typical Puritan sermons. In one of his most notable collections, The Barren Fig Trees Doom (1691), Willard maintained that church membership was "not only a title of dignity, but also an obligation to Service." His major work is A Compleat Body of Divinity ... (1726), a systematic compilation of years of monthly lectures delivered on The Shorter Catechism, compiled by the Westminster Assembly in 1644. Willard's massive work, the first printed in folio in America, was received with considerable interest and stands as a monument of orthodox Puritan theology.
Willard's works, ranging from sermons and theological treatises to observations of witchcraft and polemical responses to outspoken Quaker critics, show him to have been active in many different phases of colonial community life. He wrote in a traditional straightforward style and, while he was uniformly orthodox in his outlook upon life and religion, he was not dogmatic and showed a willingness to alter his views when reason dictated that it would be common sense to do so.
This is the complete article, containing 605 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
