Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham

Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (23 July 1793 – 3 April 1870) was an American Unitarian minister and pastor of the First Church of Boston from 1815 to 1850. Frothingham was opposed to Theodore Parker and the interjection of transcendentalism into the church. He also wrote sermons, hymns, and poetry.

Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham was born on July 23, 1793, in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Boston Latin School under the charge of Samuel Hunt. He graduated from Harvard College in 1811 at the age of eighteen and gave a commencement speech entitled "The Cultivation of the Taste and Imagination," which was described by Dr. Pierce as "written with purity and pronounced with elegance."

In 1812, Frothingham became the first Instructor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.

On March 15, 1815, Frothingham became an ordained Minister of the First Church in Boston. He remained there until March 1850.

Frothingham had been five years in the pulpit when the Unitarian controversy broke out. The American Unitarian Association was formed in 1825. In March 1835, the twentieth anniversary of his settlement in the First Church, he preached:

This is known by the name of the Unitarian controversy; and in so Darning it I believe that I am giving utterance, for the first time in this desk, to that party word. This alone is saying not a little in illustration of the spirit with which the offices of religion have been here conducted. . . . We remained almost at rest in that earthquake of schism. . . . We silently assumed the ground, or rather found ourselves standing upon it, that there was no warrant in the Scriptures for the idea of a threefold personality in the divine nature; or for that of atonement, according to the popular understanding of that word; or for that of man's total corruption and inability; or for that of an eternity of woe adjudged as the punishment of earthly offences; or indeed for any of the peculiar articles in that scheme of faith which went under the name of the Genevan reformer. . . . We have made more account of the religious sentiment than of theological opinions.

The dependence was on miracle. Frothingham said, in a sermon on the "Manifestation of Christ":

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