Bible Encyclopedias
Summers, Thomas Osmond, D.D., LL.D.

Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

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an eminent divine of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, was born near Corfe Castle, Isle of Purbeck, Dorsetshire, England, October 11, 1812. He was trained by Dissenters, came to America while a youth, joined the Methodists in 1832, was converted the following year, soon began to preach, and entered the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1835. In 1840 he became a missionary in Texas, and was one of the first members of that conference; was transferred to the Alabama Conference in 1844, with which he ever afterwards remained connected, occupying for several years its most important charges, and afterwards engaged in literary work, as the editor of the Southern Christian Advocate (1846), of the Quarterly Review of the M.E. Church South (1855), and other periodicals. He acted as secretary of every General Conference of his Church, from its organization in 1845 to his death, which occurred during the session of that body at Nashville, Tennessee, May 5, 1882. During the civil war he served as a pastor in Alabama, and for several of his later years he was a professor in the Vanderbilt University. He was a man of encyclopmedic information, untiring diligence, and wide liberality of sentiment. He wrote and edited very many works for the press of his Church, and numberless articles of value for its journals See Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the M.E. Church South, 1882, page 125; Simpson, Cyclop. of Methodism, s.v.; Life by Fitzgerald (Nashville, 1884).