Puritan author deserving better remembrance than he has had, born at Roxbury, MA; graduated at Harvard 1673; began in 1680 to preach in Ipswich, and passed his life in that charge. Governor Andros as governor laid a tax on the province without consent of the assembly. Wise in 1687 advised Ipswich not to obey the order, as contrary to charter rights. For this he was arrested, and pleading Magna Charta was told by one of the judges not to think the laws of England followed him to the ends of the earth. He was fined, imprisoned, and deposed. After Andros’s fall he sued Dudley for denying him habeas corpus. By request of the legislature he went as chaplain in Phips’s expedition against Canada in 1690. He was a large and vigorous man, celebrated as a wrestler, and in the expedition was noted for his courage. In November, 1705, appeared anonymously Questions and Proposals, addressed to the New England churches, and ascribed to the two Mathers. Wise saw in it a plot to overthrow laic by clerical control in the church and answered at his leisure with The Church’s Quarrel Exposed (1710). M. C. Tyler says, “its invective, its earnestness, its vision of truth, and its flashes of triumphant eloquence, simply annihilated the scheme it assailed.” The topic was further handled in A Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches (1717), which fully evolves the democratic theory. The two were reprinted in one volume half a century later (1772), to do duty in the revolutionary struggle, and the correspondence of many of the sentences in the Declaration of Independence with the very expressions of Wise in this book, are suggestive of something like plagiarism. This volume was reproduced by the Congregational Board in 1860, as an authority upon that polity. (See Tyler’s History of American Literature, ii. pp. 104–116.) He favored inoculation, and thereby incurred “much popular odium.”
