George Boardman the Younger

Who was George Boardman the Younger?

George Dana Boardman the Younger was born in Burma, the son of the Baptist missionaries George Dana Boardman and Sarah Hall Boardman. He returned to the United States as a boy and attended first Worcester Academy from which he graduated in 1846, then Brown University, where he graduated in 1852. He continued his education at the Newton Theological Institution and graduated in 1855.

In 1855, he became pastor of the Baptist church in Barnwell, South Carolina, but his views on the slavery question impelled him to exchange his charge in 1856 for a church further north. He was pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Rochester, New York, until 1864, and pastor of the First Church, Philadelphia, from 1864 to 1894. In June, 1899, he established at the University of Pennsylvania the permanent lectureship known as the "Boardman Foundation in Christian Ethics." He was president of the Christian Arbitration and Peace Society and of the American Baptist Missionary Union. His most important production is a monograph, Titles of Wednesday Evening Lectures. It embraces 981 of his lectures, delivered between 1865 and 1880, and comprises a complete exegesis of the Bible.