ABSTRACT
Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 17 September 1855. Published in Autobiography, Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway (1904), I, 215–16.
Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907) was an American clergyman and author. After studying law for a year he became a Methodist minister in his native state of Virginia. In 1853, Emerson helped him to enter the Harvard Divinity school, from which he was graduated in 1854. His abolitionist views aroused hostility among his neighbours, and he was dismissed from a Unitarian church in Washington, D. C. From 1856 to 1861, he served as minister in the First Congregational Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and while there edited a liberal periodical named after its eastern predecessor, the Dial. During the Civil War, he lectured in England on behalf of the North. For more than twenty years (1863–84), he was minister of the South Place chapel, Finsbury, London. During this time he wrote voluminously for the London Press. In 1884, he returned to his native country to devote himself to literary work. He died in Paris in 1907. Among his works are: Tracts for To-day (1858), Republican Superstitions (1872), Idols and Ideals (1871), Demonology and Devil-Lore (1878), The Wandering Jew (1881), The Life of Thomas Paine (1892) and his Autobiography (1904) which is regarded generally as being especially valuable for its sketches of important personages in the nineteenth century who looked upon him as a leader of liberal thought.
