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Manly, Basil, D.D.

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Manly, Robert Woolf, D.D.

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a Baptist divine and educator of note, was born in Chatham County, N. C., Jan. 28, 1798. At the age of sixteen he became a member of a Baptist Church, and not long after began speaking in public, though he was not regularly licensed till 1818. He preached his first sermon in Beaufort, S. C., and must have made a favorable impression, for he at once received an offer of aid from a society for the education of ministers, and commenced his studies. In December, 1819, he entered the junior class in South Carolina College, and graduated with the highest honor in 1821. He immediately entered into an engagement to preach in the Edgefield District, and was ordained in March, 1822. A Church was formed at Edgefield Court-house about a year later, of which he was pastor for three years, gaining a wide reputation as a preacher in upper South Carolina. He was called in 1826 to the pastorate of the Baptist Church in Charleston, and continued there eleven years, during which time he not only sustained and extended his reputation as a preacher, but was active in the cause of liberal and theological education, effecting the establishment of what is now known as Furman University, at Greenville, S. C. At that period theological instruction was included in the plans of this and similar institutions. Dr. Manly lived to see the Baptists of the South concentrate their energies upon the establishment and support of a single theological seminary. He took a lively interest in this matter, partly, no doubt,, from a sense of the disadvantages under which he had himself labored; for, though a good scholar, he was a self-educated theologian. He was chosen in 1837 to the presidency of the University of Alabama, and administered the office for about eighteen years with eminent ability and success. In 1855 he returned to Charleston, and to the pastoral office over one of the four churches that now existed in place of the one to which he had formerly ministered. He was subsequently engaged as a missionary and evangelist in Alabama, and as a pastor at Montgomery. He died at Greenville, S. C., Dec. 21, 1868. As a preacher, Dr. Manly was eminently popular. His discourses, though instructive and convincing, were also charged with the elements of emotional power, and, with all his success as an educator, this was the work in which he most delighted. Dr. Manly wrote a "treatise on Moral Science," which was for years a text-book in Southern colleges. It indicated a high order of talent. See New Amer. Cyclop. 1868, p. 450, Drake, Dict. Amer. Biog. s.v. (L. E. S.)