Woodbury M. Fernald

Fernald, Woodbury Melcher. (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, March 21, 1873--December 10, 1873, Boston, Massachusetts). He entered the Universalist ministry in 1835 and served churches of that denomination in Newburyport and Chicopee, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, for a few years. He then became a Unitarian, without entering the ministry of that denomination, and eventually joined the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in Boston. He did some traveling on behalf of this body, as far west as Wisconsin, in intervals of employment at the Custom House and, later, at the Post Office in Boston. He was author of books and essays, most of them expositions of Swedenborgian doctrine, and of a small amount of occasional verse, published in the periodicals of the day but never collected in a printed volume. In his private collection of his poems are a few hymns, only two of which appear to have had any public use. One beginning "Great Source of being, truth, and love" was written for the ordination of Rev. Thomas C. Adam as pastor of the West Universalist Society in Boston, March 12, 1845. The other, "When Israel, humbled of the Lord," a protest against slavery published in the Boston Journal, in July, 1861, was included, in part and considerably re-written, in The Soldier's Companion: Dedicated to the Defenders of their Country in the field, by their Friends at Home. This was published as the Army Number of the Monthly Journal, Boston, October, 1861, vol. II, No. 10, a small Unitarian collection of hymns and devotional readings. In this collection the hymn begins "When Israel's foes, a numerous host" and is attributed to "Rev. W. M. Fernald," though it is not included in this form in the author's private collection of his verse. None of his hymns appear to have had any further use.

--Henry Wilder Foote, DNAH Archives