Historical Materials

Reverend Amory Dwight Mayo (1823-1907) served as a minister in the Universalist Church in Gloucester from about 1846 to 1854. His style of preaching was uplifting and inspirational, and he sought to bring awareness of the presence of divinity in Nature to his congregation without going to the extremes of the Transcendentalists, particularly Emerson, who was regarded as atheistic and even heretical by some of the members of the Gloucester Lyceum. Lane would no doubt have heard Reverend Mayo's sermons at the church and his talks at the Lyceum, of which he was a loyal member and director. In 1854 Mayo resigned his post at Gloucester and moved to various locations in the Midwest, where his work took a more educational and administrative direction. Mayo's religious views were outlined in his published collections of sermons and a book, Graces and Powers of the Christian Life.(Boston: Abel Tompkins; 1852.)

Fitz Henry Lane: Family and Friends. (Gloucester, MA: Church & Mason Publishing; in association with the Cape Ann Historical Museum, 2007), 57fn; 112fn.