William Bentley › Texts

William Bentley (June 22, 1759, Boston, Massachusetts – December 29, 1819, Salem, Massachusetts) was minister, scholar, columnist, and diarist. His ancestors were early Puritan settlers to New England. He lived with his grandfather, William Paine, a well-to-do landowner, who sent him to North Writing School at the age of six, where he studied Latin and Greek. At the age of fourteen, his grandfather enrolled him in Harvard University. After graduating, he taught at Boston Latin School North Writing School, and then became a Greek and Latin tutor at Harvard University while attending graduate classes in theology. He was one of the first New England minister to profess unitarian beliefs and was a close friend of James Freeman, the first minister in the United States to call himself a Unitarian. In 1783 he was invited to be a candidate for assistant minister at Second Congregational(East) Church in Salem, Massachusetts, where he served until his death. The senior minister was James Diman, a Calvinist, who opposed Bentley's appointment; Diman allowed him to preach but not to administer the sacraments. The congregation, however, preferred Bentley's more liberal views. He prized morality and good works over Calvinist grace and faith. He wrote twice-weekly columns for the Salem newspapers summarizing foreign and domestic news. He owned a very large library, second only to Thomas Jefferson's, and kept a diary all of his life.

Dianne Shapiro, from "Annals of the American Pulpit" by William B. Sprague, Vol 8, New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1865; and "Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography" accessed 1/29/2017