The Biographical Dictionary of America/Allen, Joseph Henry

ALLEN, Joseph Henry, theologian, was born in Northboro, Mass., Aug. 21 1820; son of the Rev. Joseph and ---- (Ware) Allen, and a direct descendant of "Walter Allen of Durham county, England, who immigrated to America and settled at Dedham, Mass., in 1630. His father was pastor of the church at Northboro, 1816-'73, and his mother was a daughter of Prof. Henry Ware of Harvard college. He was graduated at Harvard, A.B. in 1840, and from the divinity school in 1843. He was minister of the Third Unitarian parish at Roxbury, Mass., 1843-'47; Washington, D.C., 1847-'50; Bangor, Maine, 1850-'57; private instructor at Jamaica Plain, Mass., 1850-'63; minister at Northboro, 1863-'66; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1877-'78; editor of the Christian Examiner, 1857-'69, and of the Unitarian Review, 1887-'94. He was lecturer on ecclesiastical history in Harvard, 1878-'82, and received from Harvard the degrees A.M., 1879, D.D., 1891. He was married in May, 1845, to Anna, sister of S. M. Weld, and a descendant of Thomas Welde, first minister of Roxbury. They had three sons, Richard Minot, Gardner Weld and Russell Carpenter. He is the author of "Ten Discourses on Orthodoxy" (1849); "Memoirs of Hiram Withington" (1849); "Manual of Devotion" (1852); "Hebrew Men and Times from the Patriarchs to the Messiah" (1861); "The Great Controversy of States and People"; "Fragments of Christian History to the Founding of the Holy Roman Empire"; "Christian History in its Three Great Periods" (3 vols., 1883); "Outline of Christian History, A.D. 50-1880"; Positive Religion" (1891); "History of Unitarianism" (1894): "Our Liberal Movement in Theology" (1897) and edited the Allen and Greenough Classical Series. He died in Cambridge, Mass., March 20, 1898.