Joshua Soule

Joshua Soule

Methodist Episcopal bishop
Born August 1, 1781
Bristol (now Bremen), Maine
Died March 6, 1867
Nashville, Tennessee

Joshua Soule (August 1, 1781 - March 6, 1867) was an American bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church (elected in 1824), and then of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

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Birth and rebirth

Born to Joshua and Mary (Cushman) Soule at Broad Cove in Bristol (now Bremen), Maine, Soule was the fifth child in a Norman-English family. He was the great-great-grandson of George Soule from Eckington, England, who in 1620 arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts as a Mayflower Pilgrim, eventually becoming a prominent Duxbury landowner. [1] In the autumn of 1781, not long after the Joshua Soule's birth, the Soules moved to Avon where his father, a former sea captain from Duxbury, was an original settler along the Sandy River. Although his parents were both strict Presbyterians, the adolescent Joshua Soule converted to the Methodist Episcopal faith in 1797, joining the New England Annual Conference in 1799.

Ministry

He became known as a "Boy Preacher," and an opponent of Calvinism, Unitarianism and Universalism. Tall, dignified and able, Soule was ordained, both deacon and elder, by Bishop Richard Whatcoat. He was appointed a presiding elder at the age of 23, placed in charge of the state of Maine. He also served as a book agent for the M.E. Church. In 1820, he was elected bishop, but declined consecration because the General Conference had adopted a policy he could not approve. He did accept episcopal consecration upon being elected again in 1824.

In the 1844 division of the M.E. Church, he sided with the South. Soule University was named in his honor in 1856. At the age of 72 he was worn out with labor and travel. He died in Nashville, Tennessee. His body was buried first at the old Nashville City Cemetery, but in 1876 reinterred on the campus of Vanderbilt University.

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Selected writings

Biographies

References

  1. ^ George Soule of the Mayflower and his descendants for Four Generations, by John E. Souel, Milton E. Terry and Robert S. Wakefield, Second Edition, Published by General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1995, pg. 72

See also