Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham

Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (23 July 1793 – 3 April 1870) was an American Unitarian minister and pastor of the First Church of Boston from 1815 to 1850.

He graduated from Harvard College in 1811 at the age of eighteen and gave a commencement speech entitled "The Cultivation of the Taste and Imagination," which was described by Dr. Pierce as "written with purity and pronounced with elegance."

In March 1835, the twentieth anniversary of his settlement in the First Church, he preached: This is known by the name of the Unitarian controversy; and in so Darning it I believe that I am giving utterance, for the first time in this desk, to that party word.

... We silently assumed the ground, or rather found ourselves standing upon it, that there was no warrant in the Scriptures for the idea of a threefold personality in the divine nature; or for that of atonement, according to the popular understanding of that word; or for that of man's total corruption and inability; or for that of an eternity of woe adjudged as the punishment of earthly offences; or indeed for any of the peculiar articles in that scheme of faith which went under the name of the Genevan reformer.

Frothingham said, in a sermon on the "Manifestation of Christ": Is there one there, who thinks he requires no miraculous evidence in support of his religious convictions, who feels satisfied with the proofs that the unaided mind can furnish for itself?

I can understand how the Jewish populace in an excited hour should demand the liberation of Barabbas; I can almost enter into the feelings of those who, in a season of great depression, should empty every convict's cell, saying, let us supplicate the holy and frowning heavens together, for we are all transgressors alike.

But, in a state of society like our own, with institutions so free from abuse and so full of mercifulness, it is hard to comprehend why there should be such a feverish sensibility in favor of the abandoned, and so intense a wish for something better than the laws.

But that fame was bought by many years of steady rejection of all that is popular with our society, and a persevering study of books which none else reads, and which he can convert to no temporary purpose.

Ward Brooks Frothingham was born November 16, 1828, and resided for a time in Burlington, serving in two town offices.

In the introduction to a translation of the first of the Elegies of Propertius, a writer in the Augustan Age of Roman poetry, Frothingham says: The last, which is, indeed, the leading, reason [for presenting the version] is the opportunity that it gives of comparing some of the purest sentiments of classical antiquity respecting the state of the dead, with those of the simplest minds that have the advantage of Christian education.