Hillis

of that faith in Madison. He also opposed all
secret societies, and believed that no Christian
could properly belong to one. His first wife,
whom he married in 1812, was Ealia Werden, by
whom he had three children; his second, Mar-
garet Burk, by whom he had two children.

[Ind. State Jour., 1837, 1842, 1845 ; journals of the
House and Senate of Ind., 1823-44; W. W. Woollen,
Biog. and Hist. Sketches of Early Ind. (1883) ; letters
of John Dumont to James H. Stewart (election of
1837), in Stewart, Recollections of the Early Settle-
ment of Carroll County (1872); information from de-
scendants.] W.O.L.

HILLIS, NEWELL DWIGHT (Sept. 2,
i8s8-Feb. 25, 1929), clergyman, author, was
born at Magnolia, Iowa, the son of Samuel
Ewing and Margaret (Hester) Hillis. On his
father's side he was descended from John Hillis,
who settled in Chester County, Pa., about 1690,
and on his mother's, from an ancestor who came
to Pennsylvania from Amsterdam in 1740. Fire
swept away his parents' property and the family
removed to Nebraska, where Newell could get
only a common-school education in the intervals
of work on the farm. He was already an insa-
tiable reader. At the age of seventeen he en-
tered the service of the American Sunday School
Union and became a successful organizer of
Sunday schools and union churches in Nebraska,
Utah, and Wyoming, often sleeping in dugouts
and deserted log houses, sometimes in the vicin-
ity of hostile Indians. He established the first
Sunday school in Wyoming, in a saloon. He
graduated at Lake Forest College, 111., in 1884,
and in 1887, at McCormick Theological Sem-
inary, Chicago. On Apr. 14 of this year he mar-
ried Annie Louise Patrick of Marengo, 111., who
later achieved some prominence as a writer.
Called to the pastorate of the First Presbyterian
Church of Peoria, 111., he was ordained by the
Presbytery of Peoria on May I, 1887. From
1890 to 1895 he was pastor of the First Presby-
terian Church of Evanston, 111., whence he was
called, December 1894, to succeed Prof. David
Swing in the pulpit of Central Church (inde-
pendent), Chicago. Here he attained widening
reputation as preacher and lecturer.

In 1899 he was called to Plymouth Congrega-
tional Church, Brooklyn, made famous by the
pastorates of Henry Ward Beecher and Lyman
Abbott, and accepted the invitation notwith-
standing the strong efforts of his Chicago par-
ishioners to retain him. The difficulties arising
from changing conditions in the older part of
Brooklyn he met successfully by his brilliance
as a preacher and by practical contributions to
social betterment. He carried to completion the
Plymouth Institute, an organization for educa-

Hillis
tional and recreational purposes, and secured its
endowment. The stained-glass windows, which
were his project, depicting great events and lead-
ers in the history of freedom, drew week-day
throngs to the church. He was greatly inter-
ested in city planning and preached a series of
discourses on the duty of making cities beautiful.
His illustrated lecture, "A Better America," was
used by the government during the World War
and is now widely employed by patriotic agen-
cies. He felt deeply the importance of the early
entrance of the United States into the war and
between August 1914 and April 1917 he lec-
tured in 250 cities on the nation's moral obliga-
tion to join the Allies, a procedure which sun-
dered many friendships and brought him thou-
sands of threatening letters. When the first Lib-
erty Loan was announced he was selected by the
group of American bankers to write the state-
ment regarding it sent out to the American
churches. In connection with each of the
"drives" he toured the country, at one time being
the central figure in the raising of one hundred
million dollars in forty-six days, speaking three
and four times a day in the cities of thirty states.
The British government published one of his ad-
dresses as a war document and distributed nine
million copies. A too-sanguine promotion by
Hillis of investments in Canadian timber lands
resulted in financial embarrassments which for
several years caused him anxiety, severe criti-
cism, and chagrin, and led to harassing law-
suits. Throughout the ordeal, however, his
church stood by him loyally.
He had unusual capacity for utilizing effec-
tively the results of wide reading. Attractive
thought and kindling imagination, fused in sym-
pathetic eloquence, combined to make him a
speaker and writer of great charm. His sermons,
which he never wrote before delivery, were re-
ported stenographically and revised on Monday
mornings. During his Plymouth pastorate of
twenty-five years more than a thousand of these
were printed, one each week, in the Brooklyn
Eagle, a record unsurpassed except by Charles
H. Spurgeon of London. Hillis delivered about
a hundred lectures each year and wrote an arti-
cle weekly for the press. A cerebral hemorrhage
in January 1924 terminated his active ministry;
but after eight months of complete rest he was
able to preach frequently and to travel somewhat
extensively with his wife. He also completed a
long-planned life of Christ. Among the twenty-
five or more books by him, of which over a mil-
lion copies have been issued, are A Man's Value
to Society (1896), The Investment of Influence
(1898), Great Books as Life-Teachers (1899),