Gladden’s birth name is var­i­ous­ly re­port­ed as Sol­o­mon Wash­ing­ton Glad­den or George Wash­ing­ton Glad­den, but he lat­er dropped the first name. His fa­ther, a school teach­er, died when Wash­ing­ton was a young boy, and the fam­i­ly moved to New York. He mar­ried Eliz­a­beth Shores in 1852, and en­tered the O­we­go Acad­e­my, Ti­o­ga Coun­ty, New York, in 1855, then Will­iams Coll­ege in 1859. Af­ter work­ing as a news­pa­per re­port­er, he be­came an or­dained min­is­ter in 1860, and pas­tored in Brook­lyn, New York (1860); Mor­ris­an­ia, New York (1861-66); North Adams, Mass­a­chu­setts (1866-71); Spring­field, Mass­a­chu­setts (1875-82); and Co­lum­bus, Ohio. In Co­lum­bus, he was pa­stor of the First Con­gre­ga­tion­al Church for 32 years. From 1871-75, he was on the ed­it­orial staff of the New York In­de­pen­dent, and later, while pas­tor at Spring­field, he ed­it­ed the week­ly per­i­od­i­cal Sun­day Af­ter­noon. In 1891, he was a del­e­gate to the in­ter­na­tion­al con­gress of Con­gre­ga­tion­al­ists in Lon­don. He was al­so mod­er­a­tor of the Con­gre­ga­tion­al Church in Amer­i­ca, helped set­tle an an­thra­cite coal strike in 1902, and was known as a so­cial re­form­er. His works in­clude:

• Plain Thoughts on the Art of Liv­ing, 1868
• From the Hub to the Hud­son (Bos­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts: New Eng­land News Com­pa­ny, 1869)
• Working Peo­ple and Their Em­ploy­ers (Bos­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts: Lock­wood, Brooks, and Com­pa­ny, 1876)
• The Young Men and the Church­es, 1885
• Applied Chris­ti­an­i­ty, 1887
• Who Wrote the Bi­ble?, 1891
• The Church and the King­dom, 1894
• Ruling Ideas of the Pre­sent Age, 1895
• The Chris­tian Pas­tor, 1898
• Social Sal­va­tion, 1901
• Christianity and So­cial­ism, 1905
• Recollections, 1909

• Hughes, p. 403
• Hustad, p. 246
• Julian, p. 1565
• Nutter, p. 410
• Reynolds, p. 301

1. Behold a Sow­er! from Afar
2. Forgive, O Lord, the Doubts That Break
3. In the Bit­ter Waves of Woe
4. O Land of Lands, My Fa­ther­land
5. O Light of Light, With­in Us Dwell
6. O Lord of Life
7. O Mas­ter, Let Me Walk with Thee