Lewis, Samuel Seymour, Dd

Lewis, Samuel Seymour, D.D.

a minister of the Protestant Episcopal Church, was born in Springfield, Vermont, September 4, 1804. His early education was acquired in the district school, but at the age of fiteen he entered the High School at South Berwick, Maine, where he prepared for college. After entering Dartmouth, failing sight compelled him to dissolve his connection with it, and he entered into partnership with a friend in Utica, N.Y., and devoted himself to mercantile pursuits. Consulting a distinguished oculist in New York, he was assured that he was simply near-sighted, whereupon he immediately closed up his business, and entered Trinity (then Washington) College, Hartford, Conn. At the end of two years he graduated, August 6, 1829. Shortly after he entered the General Theological Seminary in New York city, but before the end of the year he was elected a tutor in Trinity College, which post he held until he was ordained deacon, June 10, 1832. In the fall of that year he took charge of Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and in the following year he was admitted to priest's orders. Accepting an invitation from Mobile, he went there in the latter part of 1835, occupying the only parish in the city, and that a feeble one. Here he remained for ten years. He died there July 9, 1848. His style of preaching was of the evangelical type, and he was especially successful as a pastor. See Sprague, Annals of the Amer. Pulpit, 5:714.