[1] After a short stint as a printer in Kentucky, Pentecost attended Colgate University in upstate New York, and after graduating in 1872, he entered the Baptist ministry.
In 1871, while pastoring the Rockville Center, Long Island Baptist Church, he married Laura Anderson, the daughter of a successful Brooklyn confectioner.
Hugh Pentecost took on another assignment in Westerly, Rhode Island; in 1877, his wife, Laura, died of rheumatic fever.
Pentecost became widely known for his eloquent sermons and his support for anti-poverty causes, Georgist land reform, socialism, and nonresistance.
In 1887, he began to make speeches for Henry George's Anti-Poverty Society,[5] ran and lost a race for mayor of Newark on the United Labor ticket,[6] and delivered a sermon in protest of the hanging of the Haymarket martyrs.
Fellows withdrew the appointment, and Pentecost prepared a statement, in which he disavowed his protests against the Haymarket hangings, and stated that "he who says that I am or ever was a Socialist or Anarchist, says what is not true."
He argued that the "vice crusades" little more than hypocritical cover for the Republican Party's ambitions to unseat Tammany Hall in the New York City government.
Instead of crackdowns by city government, he argued, all vice laws should be repealed, as "The true remedy for all evil is in freedom.