Joshua Soule


Joshua Soule was an American bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and then of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

Birth and rebirth

Born to Joshua and Mary Soule at Broad Cove in Bristol, Maine, Soule was the seventh child in a Norman-English family. He was the great-great-great-grandson of George Soule, who in 1620 arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts as a Mayflower Pilgrim, eventually becoming a prominent Duxbury landowner. In the autumn of 1781, not long after this 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. Joshua, the son of Joshua, married Sarah Allen in 1803.
Although his parents were 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 split of the M. E. Church, he sided with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Soule University in Texas was named in his honor in 1856. At that time there was another Methodist institution of higher learning named for Joshua Soule, Soule College in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
At the age of 85 he was worn out with labor and travel. He died in Nashville in 1867; his body was buried at the old Nashville City Cemetery. In 1876 it was reinterred on the campus of Vanderbilt University.

Selected writings

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