SOURCE: "Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes," in Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, 1962. Reprint by Northeastern University Press, 1984, pp. 743-96.

In the following essay, Wilson provides a biographical sketch of Holmes.

With the Oliver Wendell Holmeses, father and son, the theology of Calvinism has faded, but its habits of mind persist. The father of Dr. Holmes was Abiel Holmes, a Connecticut preacher, who came to occupy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the pulpit of the First Congregational Church. He had been educated at the Yale Divinity School, which at that time stood somewhat to the left of the fundamentalist Princeton Theological Seminary but still kept closer to Calvinist orthodoxy than the Harvard Divinity School, already infected in the twenties with the fashionable Unitarianism. Abiel Holmes was himself not severe in the matter of doctrine: he appears in the novels of his son in the characters of...