George Peck (clergyman)

George Peck, born August 8, 1797, in Middlefield, New York, and died on May 20, 1876, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He is buried in Forty Fort Meeting, near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Luther Peck, a blacksmith, and his wife, Annis nee Collar. He and his four brothers became ministers in the Methodist Episcopal Church. One, Jesse T. Peck, became a bishop. The trend in his family toward the Methodist ministry led his grandson, Stephen Crane, to say: "Upon my mother's side, everyone in my family became a Methodist clergyman as soon as they could walk, the ambling-nag, saddlebag, exhorting kind."

George Peck received his Exhorter's License in 1815 and, in 1816, his local preacher's license. He served a year on the Cortland Circuit as a circuit rider, during which he visited small villages and hamlets throughout western New York, preached in the open air and people's parlors, occasionally in a church, without remuneration. In 1816, he joined the Genesee Conference.

He also helped to found Cazenovia Seminary, and became its president in 1835. Later, he convinced local farmers and businessmen to fund a Methodist Episcopal Seminary in Kingston, Pennsylvania, called Wyoming Seminary. After several two year pastoral assignments (two years was the standard in the Methodist Episcopal church at the time), he became editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review, the denomination's primary periodical, and general book editor of the denomination's publishing program from 1848–51; he followed this with a term as editor of the Christian Advocate, from 1852-53.

In the 1860s and 1870s, he took an active role in supporting the Holiness movement. The movement gained widespread support for its emphasis on which called upon adult conversions through which individuals sought Christian perfection; its sentimentality also created controversy and its critics claimed that the movement undermined the reality of the social gospel.

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