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WHICH WAY? 
 
 A STUDY OF 
 UNIVERSALISTS 
 
 AND 
 
 UNIVERSALISM 
 
 BY 
 
 LEWIS B. FISHER 
 
 RYDER UNIVERSALIST HOUSE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
 
 universalist publishing house 
 Boston and Chicago 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1921 
 UNIVERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE 
 
 OCT r ?A 
 
 §>C!.AS27368 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Preface 4 
 
 Introduction by Hon. R. S. Galer, Presi- 
 dent of the Universalist General Con- 
 vention 5 
 
 I. Which Way? 9 
 
 II. Universalist Creeds 15 
 
 III. Some Pioneers of The Way 22 
 
 IV. John Murray and Thomas Potter 29 
 
 V. Hosea Ballou 36 
 
 VI. A Bit of New England Church History. . 48 
 
 VII. The Andover Creed and Calvinism in 1806 58 
 
 VIII. Walter Balfour 66 
 
 IX. Hell 78 
 
 X. Damnation 89 
 
 XI. Endless Torment 96 
 
 XII. The End of the World 103 
 
 XIII. The Second Coming of Jesus 113 
 
 XIV. The Way of the Ages 123 
 
PREFACE 
 
 We are often asked for a brief, plain statement 
 of what Universalists have believed in days past and 
 of what they are believing now, in this new age, 
 with its new Bible, its new science, its new psychol- 
 ogy, sociology, economics and theology. 
 
 I know of no such statement that can be given 
 to these inquirers. This book is an effort to make 
 such a statement. It is not written mainly for Uni- 
 versalist preachers, nor for our well-trained laity, 
 although it is hoped that it may not prove useless 
 for such. 
 
 It is written chiefly for those who do not know 
 much about Universalists but who have a desire to 
 know, and who are willing to give a little time to the 
 study of the subject. 
 
 For the general history of the denomination the 
 best books to read are the two large volumes by Rev. 
 Richard Eddy, D. D., entitled "Universalism in 
 America." Smaller books are Fisher's "Brief His- 
 tory of Universalism" and the later book by Rev. 
 John Coleman Adams, D. D., "Universalism and the 
 Universalist Church." This last-named little book 
 has an excellent Universalist Bibliography. 
 
 All these, and other books or periodicals on the 
 subject, can always be obtained from the Universal- 
 ist Publishing House, 176 Newbury St., Boston, or 
 from the Universalist Western Headquarters at 
 6010 Dorchester Ave., Chicago. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Some people who profess to believe that 
 theology is out of date may refuse to read 
 this book. It is fairly certain, however, that 
 if they will read the first two chapters they 
 will read all of them. For this is a book 
 which takes the facts and arguments of the- 
 ology and makes them breathe and live. 
 No arid discussion of obsolete theories, but 
 a vivid, moving story, is contained in these 
 pages — a modern miracle, if you please. 
 
 The author has not made the mistake, too 
 common in our days, of asserting that beliefs 
 do not matter ; that theology is out of date ; 
 that there are only superficial differences 
 between the Churches. In its underlying 
 philosophy Universalism is farther from 
 Luther than Luther was from Leo the Tenth. *\ 
 The author knows that beliefs move the 
 world, and that without them but little 
 progress would be made. It is also evident 
 that he appraises historic origins at their 
 true value. Just as you cannot understand 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 the climate of to-day without studying the 
 storm-swept seas of paleozoic ages, or the 
 religion of ancient Israel without some 
 knowledge of Babylonian and Canaanitish 
 origins, so you cannot rightly interpret the 
 religious movements of to-day without know- 
 ing the story of their underlying causes. 
 Thoughts have their roots deep in the past, 
 and the study of to-day inevitably leads to 
 the study of all the yesterdays. 
 
 It is not only historical but constructive 
 criticism that we find. There is no love for 
 mere attack, but a profound anxiety for the 
 truth. The author proves his thesis out of 
 the living and growing science of philology. 
 The Bible receives a modern interpretation 
 which squares it with the language of to-day 
 and the facts of experience, and rescues it 
 from the absurdities of literal translation 
 and traditional theology. I know of no book 
 that traverses this ground so briefly yet so 
 thoroughly, or in so delightful a manner. 
 Dr. Fisher has placed the entire Universal- 
 ist Church under obligation for this timely 
 and valuable study. 
 
 There is yet another admirable feature 
 to which I must call attention. There is no 
 attempt to shift the burden of personal re- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 sponsibility to an indefinite social entity, 
 which has become the fashion in some quar- 
 and spiritual rather than economic forces 
 will solve all problems. The book is lumi- 
 ters. Sin and salvation are both personal, 
 nous with these truths, without which there 
 would be but little excuse for the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 History, philology, theology, unite to 
 make this a delightful and valuable addition 
 to Universalist literature. 
 
 Roger Sherman Galer. 
 
I. WHICH WAY? 
 
 Universalists are often asked to tell 
 where they stand. The only true answer to 
 give to this question is that we do not stand 
 at all, we move. Or we are asked to state 
 our position. Again we can only answer that 
 we are not staying to defend any position, we 
 are on the march. No Protestant Church 
 to-day can tell where it stands or what posi- 
 tion it defends. 
 
 We are not stationary nor are we defend- 
 ing any final position. The Church of Rome 
 is the only Church that stands to-day and 
 defends an unchanging position. Even this 
 old and conservative body now and then 
 shows signs of growing pains, but it counts 
 these as dangerous symptoms to be sharply 
 suppressed. Most people, being conserva- 
 tive, or under the same law of inertia that 
 prevails in matter, are therefore attracted 
 to the old Mother Church, and this fact gives 
 to her great numerical strength and enables 
 her to present an imposing front. 
 
 But no Protestant Church to-day is as 
 sure about finalities as is the Catholic 
 Church, and for this reason Protestants 
 suffer in numbers and in solidarity. 
 
 We do not stand still, nor do we defend 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 any immovable positions, theologically speak- 
 ing, and we are therefore harder to count 
 or to form into imposing bodies. We grow 
 and we march, as all living things forever 
 must do. The main questions with Univer- 
 salists are not where we stand but which 
 way we are moving, not what positions we 
 defend but which way we are marching. 
 Our main interest is to perceive what is true 
 progress, and to keep our movements in line 
 with that, and not to allow ourselves to move 
 round and round in circles simply, like 
 Fabre's insects, or like a squirrel in its cage. 
 Of course we can always say that we stand 
 for God and man, for Jesus Christ and the 
 Holy Spirit, for the Bible and the immortal 
 soul, for redemption from sin, and for a 
 human race that, in some day yet to be, shall 
 learn to move on in harmony with God. But 
 all these words and phrases take on new 
 meanings, and therefore need new defini- 
 tion, in each succeeding age. Nothing is 
 clearer than the fact that the old definitions 
 do not meet the needs of the new day, or that 
 the old theologies do not function for the 
 new occasions. Our worn phrases are always 
 losing their old meanings, and must forever 
 be finding new meanings in the light of new 
 experiences. 
 
 10 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 All good men and women to-day want a 
 gospel that functions for the individual and 
 for society, but the gospel that functioned 
 for these yesterday fails to-day, and the 
 gospel for to-day will have to meet 
 the enlarging knowledge and experience of 
 to-morrow. 
 
 What may probably be more disturbing 
 to minds that tend to inertia, which are 
 dreading changes, and stoutly demanding 
 final and authoritative statements and defini- 
 tions, is that they will never get what they 
 want in this or in any other possible world. 
 What such people think they want is not 
 what they truly need. No human word ever 
 has reached or ever will reach finality of 
 meaning. Each living age always has defined 
 religion in the light of its own experiences, 
 and all ages to come will do the same. 
 
 Our attempt here then is to show which 
 way Universalists are moving, rather than 
 where they stand or what positions they 
 occupy. If the inquirer is impatient with 
 this indefiniteness and demands at once 
 some final and fixed statements of unchang- 
 ing and absolute authority, I confess that I 
 do not know how to satisfy him. 
 
 There was a time when he might have 
 been referred to the graveyard, but with the 
 
 11 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 latest discoveries about matter he is denied 
 even that refuge to-day. That the body 
 returns to dust we may perhaps still confi- 
 dently affirm, but what dust is no mortal 
 man to-day knows. It is certainly not the 
 dead thing that the Bible writer thought it 
 was when he wrote. To-day the Ethics of 
 the Dust are far more wonderful than even 
 John Ruskin saw, and the wonders of mat- 
 ter fill the soul with awe. The Rock of Ages 
 is no longer a fixture on which selfish souls 
 may lazily slumber, but has, paradoxically 
 enough, somehow got transformed into a 
 brave craft out on the high seas of life and 
 love and thought. 
 
 This situation is very wholesome, but it 
 is certainly trying for an indolent spirit 
 that is attempting to be a Protestant, and 
 especially is it trying for Protestant preach- 
 ers and teachers. 
 
 Professor Coe, of Union Theological 
 Seminary, sums the situation as follows : 
 
 "Every intelligent Catholic has definite and cor- 
 rect ideas as to what his priest stands for, and of 
 the meaning of membership in the Catholic Church. 
 This gives the advantage of a unified and deter- 
 mined front, indeed, but the ulterior problem here 
 concerns the ends prescribed by the hierarchy to 
 the faithful. To save one's own soul by obeying an 
 autocratic spiritual authority, and to contribute to 
 the final and complete triumph of this autocracy, — 
 
 12 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 this conception of spiritual life, duty and destiny 
 makes the problem of the priest too simple. He 
 can fulfill his essential functions by performing 
 certain prescribed operations in his strictly official 
 capacity, and teaching certain doctrines and duties 
 already strictly formulated. The problem of the 
 Protestant minister goes many fathoms deeper than 
 this." 
 
 Yet Professor Coe, in a feverishness not 
 common in a teacher so thoughtful, talked 
 about the breakdown of the Protestant min- 
 istry, precisely because that ministry, work- 
 ing on its problems so truly called "many 
 fathoms deeper," has not produced the same 
 results that the priest produces. 
 
 The thoughtful, earnest Protestant 
 preacher or teacher, trying to lead his people 
 along the Way, never has produced and 
 never will and never should produce the 
 material results that the priest produces by 
 massing men in fixed and final positions 
 where they stay to be counted. 
 
 Universalists do not regret these facts 
 about life, light, truth, growth or change. 
 We glory in these moving, living visions and 
 gladly pay the price for following them. We 
 are afraid of nothing except finalities. What 
 we greatly desire is ever more abundant life, 
 and what we most fear is that our search for 
 this life may dwindle into feverish and ill- 
 
 13 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 advised motions. Which way? is the only 
 big and vital question, for a living, growing 
 spirit, in this living universe, filled with the 
 Living God. The only stand we take is that 
 we refusetostandatall,andtheonly position 
 we defend is that no position is final. 
 
 14 
 
2. UNIVERSALIST CREEDS 
 
 Universalists, like all Protestants, have 
 always been timid about their own princi- 
 ples. We, with all Protestants, have affirmed 
 the liberty of each soul to think for itself, 
 itself to judge what is truth, to follow its 
 "inner light/' accountable to no human 
 authority, but to God only. 
 
 But no sooner do we affirm this principle, 
 than we become afraid of our own decision, 
 and begin to try to make human statements 
 that have absolute authority. We love lib- 
 erty, and at the same time harbor suspicion 
 that nobody can be safely trusted with it. 
 Therefore, having thrown off the authority 
 of popes, our fathers looked with fear on 
 the throne thus vacated, and tried to put 
 the Bible in the empty chair. 
 
 But the evident truth is that God has 
 never provided a pope nor a book that is 
 final, absolute authority over the spirit of 
 man. 
 
 These authorities failing us, we have 
 tried to formulate creeds on which we could 
 make a final stand. In 1790 a company of 
 Universalists spent fourteen days together 
 in Philadelphia trying to write a creed and 
 make a plan of church organization, strong 
 
 15 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 enough to make them one body, and yet elas- 
 tic enough not to deprive one of them of the 
 right to think and do according to his own 
 inner light. They worked long and diligently 
 at this difficult task, and gave us our first 
 creed of five articles. In 1803, thirteen years 
 later, our fathers, and presumably our 
 mothers, although their presence is not em- 
 phasized in the records, met at Winchester, 
 N. H., and reduced the Philadelphia creed, 
 which they preferred to call a profession of 
 faith, to three articles, as follows : 
 
 Article 1. 
 
 We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and 
 New Testaments contain a revelation of the char- 
 acter of God, and of the duty, interest and final 
 destination of mankind. 
 
 Article 2. 
 We believe that there is one God, whose nature is 
 love, revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one 
 Holy Spirit of Grace, who will finally restore the 
 whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness. 
 
 Article 3. 
 We believe that holiness and true happiness are 
 inseparably connected, and that believers ought to 
 be careful to maintain order and practice good 
 works, for these things are good and profitable un- 
 to men. 
 
 We make no apologies for this creed. Con- 
 sidering its date, we are very proud of it, 
 and confidently affirm that no Church of that 
 
 16 
 
UNIVERSALIS? CREEDS 
 
 time can show a creed as true. Thousands of 
 Universalists can and do often repeat this 
 Winchester Profession of Faith. 
 
 The makers of this creed, however, had 
 no idea that it was a final or inerrant utter- 
 ance, no word or syllable of which could ever 
 be changed without disrupting the universe. 
 
 They had all had some bitter experiences 
 with the creeds of their time, and were not 
 over sure of the possibility nor of the desira- 
 bility of such human attempts to make final 
 expressions of the inexpressible. They, 
 therefore, there and then voted to attach to 
 the profession a saving clause. 
 
 "Yet while we, as an Association, adopt a gen- 
 eral profession of belief, we leave it to the several 
 churches and societies ... to continue, or to 
 adopt within themselves, such more particular ar- 
 ticles of faith as may appear to them best under 
 their particular circumstances, provided they do not 
 disagree with our General Profession. And while we 
 consider that every church possesses within itself 
 all the powers of self government, we earnestly 
 and affectionately recommend to every church and 
 society, to exercise the spirit of Christian meekness 
 and charity toward those who have different modes 
 of faith or practice, that where the brethren can- 
 not see alike, they may agree to differ, and let 
 every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. ,, 
 
 As the years passed, later Universalists, in 
 their great and commendable desire for a 
 more compact and efficient working Church, 
 
 17 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 sometimes forgot the saving clause, and 
 stressed the very words of the creed as the 
 one absolute condition of fellowship for all. 
 
 It thus came to pass that for more than 
 half a century the Winchester Profession 
 was almost as much a red flag of controversy 
 and challenge among us as it ever was a 
 symbol of authority. Rev. I. M. Atwood, 
 D. D., the wise and beloved president of our 
 Canton Theological School for more than 
 twenty years, used to say that he himself 
 could say the Winchester creed without doing 
 violence to his intelligence, but when some 
 of the brethren began to insist that to change 
 a word of the old creed was almost equiva- 
 lent to the sin against the Holy Ghost, he 
 thought some changes would better be made 
 in behalf of the life and liberty of the 
 Church. 
 
 In 1899, Universalists reached a truce of 
 fatigue rather than the victory of any par- 
 ticular faction, if there were factions, and 
 agreed to adopt as our symbol what we have 
 since called our "Five Principles." These 
 are: 
 
 The Universal Fatherhood of God. 
 
 The Spiritual authority and leadership of His Son, 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 The trustworthiness of the Bible as containing 
 a revelation from God. 
 
 IS 
 
UNIVERSALIST CREEDS 
 
 The certainty of just retribution for sin. 
 The final harmony of all souls with God. 
 
 To these Five Principles we followed our 
 fathers by adding the following "saving 
 clause:" 
 
 "The Winchester Profession of Faith" is com- 
 mended as containing these principles, but neither 
 this nor any other form of words is required as a 
 condition of fellowship, provided always that the 
 principles above stated be professed." 
 
 The arrangement seems to have solved the 
 creed problem of the Universalist Church. 
 Since its adoption we have gained steadily 
 in unity of spirit and of action. 
 
 It is true that every preacher and parish 
 may use any form of statement of belief that 
 they see fit. Everybody insists, however, 
 whatever creed he adopts, that "the princi- 
 ples above stated" are always central in it. 
 While these varied versions often display a 
 certain mental agility, and some imagination 
 may often be needed to find in them our 
 "Principles," the matter has never yet been 
 brought into any ecclesiastical court among 
 us, and there is no disposition anywhere to 
 resort to such measures of repression or lim- 
 itation. We have been kept busy in some 
 quarters explaining that by the spiritual 
 authority of Jesus we never mean the same 
 as intellectual or political or ecclesiastical 
 
 19 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 authority, but the greater authority the 
 Master expressed when he said "I am the 
 Way." 
 
 We also insist that by final harmony of 
 all souls we never mean what a wise and 
 much loved teacher, Prof. George B. Foster, 
 once described as "a theory that makes this 
 a world of joyless work, and that a world of 
 workless joy." Our final harmony is found 
 in walking forever in the Way, and not in 
 arriving at some fixed estate. 
 
 The words "universal salvation" might 
 express our thought if only salvation could 
 forever cease to mean getting into a final 
 good place and keeping out of a final bad 
 place, and take on its true meaning of 
 spiritual health and sanity, and glad, free 
 walking in the Way. 
 
 Universalists, somehow, always mean, 
 whatever form of words they use, that every 
 soul must learn better and better forever to 
 live and work with its "Senior Partner," 
 God, and that no soul can be permanently 
 left out of this partnership, without hope- 
 lessly bankrupting the firm. Rev. Charles 
 Alden says that the true firm name is "God 
 and Sons," and that all the trouble arises 
 because so many members of the firm are 
 silent partners and not active. 
 
 20 
 
UNIVERSALIST CREEDS 
 
 So the creed makers among the Univer- 
 salists have never supposed that they were 
 speaking last words, but have simply been 
 trying to turn searchlights ahead on the 
 Way. 
 
 Rev. Frederic W. Perkins, D. D., speaks 
 for all of us when he says : 
 
 "Any man who appreciates and claims his herit- 
 age as a Christian freeman uses a creed as a cry 
 to rally believers, rather than to expel heretics. 
 That is a vital distinction. Is the Church a citadel 
 of faith to be defended, or an army of the faithful 
 to be led? In the latter case the creed is not a 
 pass-word but a battle hymn, and its power and 
 value are not in the words of the song so much as 
 in the uniting spirit that it sings. We waste our 
 time trying to erect creedal barriers against our 
 foes. They are not likely to importune us to enter. 
 Rather must we send our cry to the hearts of our 
 friends, wherever they may be, inside our Church 
 or without, confident that any Christian of the free 
 mind and loving spirit can understand a fellow 
 freeman when he speaks." 
 
 21 
 
3. SOME PIONEERS OF THE WAY 
 
 Universalists are those who hold the faith 
 that, under the universal fatherhood of God, 
 sometime all human souls will learn to walk 
 upward and onward together in the Way. 
 The Way is not safety first, but always 
 service first. 
 
 The names and addresses of the pioneers 
 in this faith we do not know, and in this 
 world will not know. Some day we may find 
 them out. Surely those of this Way have 
 been greater benefactors of mankind than 
 those have been who could see only endless 
 division and hopeless discords in this race 
 to which we all belong. 
 
 We do not know who it was that first 
 perceived that all the members of a tribe or 
 a clan were blood brothers and sisters, who 
 should behave toward each other accord- 
 ingly. Who later enlarged this idea to make 
 it include all the tribes in a given territory 
 as having common interests that could be 
 best conserved by federation, we do not 
 know. We do not know who first dreamed 
 of a brotherhood of states or of a league of 
 all nations. As a fact even up to our own 
 time all this has been hardly more than a 
 dream of the few. 
 
 22 
 
SOME PIONEERS QF THE WAY 
 
 The great masses of mankind have be- 
 lieved in angry, jealous gods, dividing their 
 friends from their enemies in endless separa- 
 tion, and have tried to act like the gods they 
 worshipped. 
 
 Politicians and profiteers and militarists 
 have so far generally had their wicked way, 
 and blocked all these aspirations toward a 
 united human race under the true and Living 
 God. 
 
 Only a few have seen thatthe dream of a 
 human race walking together in the Way 
 can never come true by the strong killing the 
 less strong, or by the rich robbing the poor, 
 or by ecclesiastics threatening fires of end- 
 less vengeance. Belief in a God who is not 
 Himself of this wicked way is the first need 
 in inducing men to leave such ways. The 
 way of the wicked shall perish. Help hasten 
 the day. 
 
 Zoroaster, the Prophet of Persia, saw 
 the race of man engaged in an age-long bat- 
 tle between the good and the evil. The in- 
 visible spirits of light or of darkness fought 
 with man on one side or the other in this 
 warfare from which there is no discharge. 
 The result was to be a final and complete 
 victory of the forces of light. The scholars 
 are not agreed as to whether Zoroaster 
 thought that the wicked ones would be de- 
 
 23 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 stroyed entirely, or finally be cleansed from 
 their wickedness by the purifying fires 
 through which all must pass. Thoughtful 
 men, however, always know that to annihi- 
 late a wicked soul, in the effort to cure it, is 
 not a victory of the good at all, but the com- 
 pletest possible victory of evil. 
 
 Professor James once used a phrase 
 about pouring out the baby with the bath 
 that is an apt description of that theology 
 that holds to the annihilation ot wicked souls. 
 To kill the sinful soul in the effort to cure 
 it, is never a successful spiritual operation, 
 any more than the surgeon counts his work 
 successful when the patient dies under his 
 knife. 
 
 Dr. George A. Gordon rightly declared 
 that if God succeeds Universalism must be 
 the result, and Universalists do not count the 
 destruction of souls, nor their endless tor- 
 ment, nor the passive permitting of them to 
 destroy either themselves or the moral uni- 
 verse, as consistent with faith in a God that 
 succeeds. 
 
 Universalists have a fondness for Zoro- 
 aster, even if there is some question as to 
 exactly what he meant by a victory of the 
 good. Modern men cannot go with him in 
 his dualism, nor in his visions of angels and 
 
 24 
 
SOME PIONEERS OF THE WAY 
 
 demons, although his personifications of the 
 invisible forces of the universe appeal always 
 to the poetic sense. 
 
 If the traditions are correct as to the 
 date of the death of Zoroaster it is not impos- 
 sible that he was living in 586 B. c. when 
 Nebuchadnezzar carried Judah captive into 
 Babylonian exile. Fifty years later it was 
 Cyrus the Persian, the Zoroastrian, who, 
 becoming master of Babylon, aided the Jews 
 to go back to Palestine and rebuild their city 
 and their temple. It is interesting to reflect 
 on the influence the contact of two religions 
 here had on our religion to-day. In the Book 
 of Isaiah the reader comes face to face with 
 a great prophet of the Jews who declares 
 that Jehovah girded Cyrus, and called him 
 by his name, although Cyrus had not known 
 Jehovah. This spectacle of Jehovah actually 
 using a man of another race and another 
 religion to accomplish his purposes greatly 
 enlarged the mind of the Jew. He began to 
 see the universals. He began to perceive 
 that the Eternal doeth His will in the armies 
 of heaven and among the inhabitants of the 
 earth, until at last to Him every knee shall 
 bow and every tongue confess His name. 
 The Prophet caught the idea that his people 
 were not to be the military tyrants of the 
 
 25 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 world, crushing all their enemies under iron 
 heels. But rather Judah was to be "The Suf- 
 fering Servant," who should not fail nor be 
 discouraged until he should have set justice 
 in the earth. Let Jews and Christians alike 
 remember this, for, before Jesus came, 
 thought never reached nobler vision. Not 
 many in Israel, however, could long sustain 
 themselves at such spiritual heights. 
 
 The Hebrew saw his people in cruel and 
 insulting captivity among the nations. Not 
 yet could they love and forgive their enemies. 
 Rather they began to expect a Messiah, a 
 soldier like David, who should come with 
 vengeance in his hand, destroying all their 
 enemies and making the Jew the supreme 
 military nation on earth. This sort of Jew- 
 ish Messianic expectation had grown very 
 strong by the time Jesus came, and his early 
 disciples, being Jews, were full of the belief 
 in a Messiah of military prowess destroying 
 their haughty foes with the sword. 
 
 This crude, revengeful Messianism 
 largely shaped the reports of Jesus' life and 
 teachings, although it is all as far from the 
 real Jesus as East from West. 
 
 Few modern men and women have yet 
 risen to such a sentiment as this that Dr. 
 Kohler taught his students : 
 
 26 
 
SOME PIONEERS QF THE WAY 
 
 "Our modern conceptions of time or of space 
 admit neither a space nor a world period for the 
 reward and punishment of souls, nor any intoler- 
 able conception of eternal joy without useful action, 
 and eternal agony without any moral purpose. 
 Modern man knows that he bears heaven and hell 
 within his own bosom." 
 
 Zoroaster then, and the great Prophet of 
 Isaiah, are pioneers of the Way. The teach- 
 ings of Jesus and of the makers of our New 
 Testament will be spoken of in coming 
 chapters. 
 
 We barely notice here the names of a 
 few pioneers of the Way among the teachers 
 of the Christian Church during the early 
 centuries. 
 
 Hosea Ballou 2nd (1) and Edward 
 Beecher (2) and Rev. J. W. Hanson (3) 
 have made clear all the facts w r e know about 
 the Universalism of the teachers of those 
 times. 
 
 Beecher maintained that of the six theo- 
 logical schools of the early Church, four 
 taught universal restoration, one taught an- 
 nihilation and one only taught endless 
 torment. 
 
 Beecher and Hanson are both confident 
 
 (1) Ancient History of Universalism. 
 
 (2) The Doctrine of Scriptural Retribution. 
 
 (3) Universalism in the First Five Hundred Years 
 of the Christian Church. 
 
 27 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 that real Universalism was never condemned 
 by any General Council nor endless punish- 
 ment ever taught by any ecumenical creed. 
 In a local council at Constantinople in 544 
 A. D. Origen's doctrine was for the first 
 time officially condemned and anathematized. 
 
 Dr. Hanson shows, however, that what 
 was really condemned was "The fabulous 
 pre-existence of souls and the monstrous 
 restitution that follows from it." Whatever 
 may have been intended, it is certain that 
 there is no condemnation of real Universal- 
 ism in those words, but only of a certain 
 method of reaching Universalist conclu- 
 sions, for which no one to-day would contend 
 for a moment. 
 
 In the books referred to, and in many 
 others, any reader can find full accounts of 
 Clement and Origen and the Gregories and 
 Theodore and other teachers who believed 
 and taught that Jesus was stronger than 
 Satan, good stronger than evil, love more 
 enduring than hate, and that at last God 
 shall be all in all. 
 
 These teachers differed as to the proofs 
 of this conclusion, but they were one in the 
 conviction that such a conclusion must some- 
 how be reached or the universe sink into 
 darkness and chaos. 
 
4. JOHN MURRAY AND THOMAS 
 POTTER 
 
 From the fifth century of our era to the 
 eighteenth, Universalists are not conspicu- 
 ous. For a long time the "dark ages" was 
 the term applied to the earlier of these cen- 
 turies. To-day the preferred name is the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 We know to-day that God does not leave 
 Himself entirely without witness in any age, 
 and that no age, therefore, is entirely dark. 
 Surely centuries that gave us Dante and Ber- 
 nard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi and 
 some of the abler schoolmen, and men of 
 these types, should not be thought of as 
 entirely dark. In the main, however, always 
 gladly noting the exceptions, the earlier of 
 these ages were times of ignorance and 
 superstition. 
 
 To a frightful extent, in those ages, re- 
 ligion, so called, was a belief in demons 
 thronging the earth and the air, an angry 
 God up in the sky in a fixed spot called 
 heaven, and a Christ chafing with passion to 
 get hold of his enemies and get even with 
 them. 
 
 One view of Christ was that which the 
 Jewish Messianism had fastened on the 
 
 29 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 Christian Church. Jesus is in the sky only 
 temporarily. He is very soon to come in the 
 clouds, with trumpets and fire and all his 
 angels, to set up a judgment seat, and re- 
 ward his friends and get even with his 
 enemies. 
 
 As the year one thousand approached, 
 the words of Peter that with God a day was 
 as a thousand years and a thousand years as 
 one day, were in many minds, and a vague 
 terror was aroused in countless souls that the 
 Day of the Lord was at hand. The orthodox 
 view, since Augustine, however, had curi- 
 ously modified this New Testament view. 
 Jesus is not to come to earth again, he has 
 gone into the sky to stay. As men die they 
 are to go up into the sky at once, or, some 
 said, they are to lie in their graves until all 
 are dead, and all rise together into the sky, 
 and there is a judgment throne up there 
 which tries them all and sends them to 
 heaven or hell. There is nothing like this 
 in the New Testament. That almost in- 
 variably teaches that Jesus is coming back to 
 earth very soon, in that generation, that he 
 is to come down miraculously out of the sky, 
 his angels with him, and set up judgment 
 on earth, at once. 
 
 The current exhortation was never 
 
 30 
 
JOHN MURRAY AND THOMAS POTTER 
 
 "Prepare to die," but always, "Watch for 
 his coming." 
 
 These two views, the one that Jesus is to 
 come here to earth in material physical form 
 to judge all men, and the other view, that 
 men are to die and go up into the sky to be 
 judged, are both in the world still, side T)y 
 side, and it is high time that both of them 
 were dismissed forever. Neither view is a 
 correct guide to the Way. 
 
 In America Universalists date a revival 
 of their ideas from the coming of John Mur- 
 ray (1) . Murray was born in Alton, England, 
 in 1741 and came to this country in Septem- 
 ber, 1770, a young man under thirty. His 
 landing at a place called Good Luck in what 
 vas then the wilderness of New Jersey, and 
 his strange meeting with Thomas Potter, 
 maketheidylofthe Universalist Church (2). 
 
 Potter had built a church at Good Luck, 
 and, while any passing preacher was always 
 welcomed to it, yet none of them preached 
 to suit Potter, and he was steadfastly await- 
 ing a preacher whom the Lord would surely 
 send, who would preach the real everlasting 
 Gospel. When Murray arrived. Potter un- 
 hesitatingly greeted him as the preacher he 
 
 (1) Life of Rev. John Murray. 
 
 (2) John Murray's Landfall, by Nehemiah Dodge. 
 
 31 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 had long expected. From this beginning 
 John Murray went on his preaching itinerary 
 all over America as then it was. He finally 
 settled at Gloucester, Mass., where he mar- 
 ried Judith Sargent, the daughter of one of 
 the leading colonial families. The Sargent- 
 Murray House still stands, and, owing largely 
 to the efforts of Rev. Levi M. Powers, D. D., 
 it has been restored to its original appear- 
 ance and is a striking and beautiful example 
 of a fine colonial dwelling much appreciated 
 in the city where it stands. Murray later 
 moved to Boston, where he died in 1815. 
 
 In 1870 Universalists gathered in large 
 numbers at Gloucester for the celebration of 
 the hundredth anniversary of the landing of 
 Murray in America. 
 
 In 1920 they met again in the same spot, 
 for the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary 
 of the same event (1). 
 
 John Murray had been converted from 
 Calvinism to Universalism by a London 
 preacher named James Relly. The Rellyan 
 theology was simply Calvinism made Uni- 
 versal. That is, only the elect are saved, 
 but everybody is elect. Or, put in 
 another way, Christ had redeemed all men 
 by his death on the cross, so all men are 
 
 (1) From Good Luck to Gloucester, by F. A. Bisbee. 
 
 32 
 
JOHN MURRAY AND THOMAS POTTER 
 
 saved. No mortal man can do a thing toward 
 deserving or earning any salvation whatever. 
 All men are saved only by the grace of God, 
 His undeserved and unearned love to man. 
 This grace is made effective by the blood of 
 Jesus shed upon the cross. In some way that 
 blood paid the price or the penalty of all 
 human sin, so all are redeemed. 
 
 Elhanan Winchester was a noted con- 
 temporary Universalist preacher, and the 
 two men often met and were friends, and yet 
 friends with something between them. Win- 
 chester believed that sinners had to pass 
 through punishment, in some cases eons of 
 it, to cleanse them from sin. Murray re- 
 garded this theology with open contempt as 
 salvation by punishment, whereas, as he saw 
 it, salvation was by grace, the free gift of 
 God to all. 
 
 Relly had written a book called "Kelly's 
 Union," which Murray always put second 
 only to the Bible. This book taught the mys- 
 tic union of all souls with Adam, in which all 
 fell with him, and the even deeper union 
 with Christ by which all are saved in him. 
 
 Murray's theology is no more artificial 
 and out of date than is all the theology of his 
 day. It is always to be estimated in the light 
 of the age in which Murray lived. It was 
 
 33 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 simply the Orthodoxy of his day extended to 
 include all souls. 
 
 "Calvinism Improved" is the correct de- 
 scription of Murray's theology, and this is 
 the title given it by Rev. Joseph Huntington, 
 D. D., who was the learned pastor of the 
 Congregational church at Coventry, Conn., 
 from 1763 to his death in 1794. Dr. Hun- 
 tington gave the above title to a very vigor- 
 ous defence of Universalism which he 
 wrote, which doctrine he ardently believed, 
 although he doubted the wisdom of saying 
 much about it. Rev. Charles Chauncey, D. 
 D., pastor of the First Congregational 
 Church of Boston from 1727 until his death, 
 was the author of a book entitled "The Sal- 
 vation of All Men," in which he too made 
 Calvinistic theology save all mankind, by 
 making all mankind the elect for whom 
 Christ died. 
 
 Thus all the Universalists of America 
 were in the beginning entirely orthodox, 
 drawing from Calvinistic premises Univer- 
 salist conclusions. 
 
 Mr. Murray was often asked, "If all are 
 saved, why preach?" A similar question 
 might be put to any Calvinist, of course. If 
 no "elect" can be lost, and no "non-elects" be 
 saved, why preach? Murray was in the 
 
 34 
 
JOHN MURRAY AND THOMAS POTTER 
 
 habit of answering this question by saying 
 that while all were redeemed not all were 
 yet saved. 
 
 To Murray redemption was something 
 that was done for every member of the 
 human race, by the blood of Jesus Christ 
 shed on the cross. But salvation is for each 
 individual to have a personal consciousness 
 and experience of this redemption in his own 
 soul. 
 
 There is a great truth for all the ages in 
 John Murray's idea of the reason why the 
 world always needs preachers and teachers. 
 All are redeemed, but only a few at any 
 given time know it. Everybody in all the 
 world needs to be told the fact, and taught 
 to understand and grasp it. The love of God 
 does always enfold all human souls whether 
 they know it or not. The law of God always 
 works in all human souls whether they know 
 it or not. Salvation is to know these won- 
 derful facts in personal experience and to 
 respond to them in loving obedience. For 
 this purpose the world will always need 
 preachers and teachers. 
 
 John Murray and Thomas Potter and 
 Elhanan Winchester were men of the Way, 
 and Universalists will always love to honor 
 their memories. 
 
 35 
 
V. HOSEA BALLOU 
 
 Hosea Ballou was born in Richmond, 
 N. H., in 1771, and died at his home in Bos- 
 ton in 1852 (1). 
 
 His father was a Calvinistic Baptist 
 preacher who got such a living as he could 
 by farming, and preached because he could 
 not help it. His mother died in his infancy. 
 The home, therefore, was that of the 
 pioneers of that time and place, save that it 
 sorely missed the much-needed mother. 
 Ballou, like Abraham Lincoln, never went to 
 school a year in his life, and for the same 
 reason, namely, there were no opportunities 
 within the reach of either of them. Com- 
 pared with Jonathan Edwards of the gen- 
 eration preceding, or with Channing and 
 Emerson, his contemporaries, Ballou suffers 
 as far as college education goes. From the 
 viewpoint of mental industry and native 
 ability to read and think, he stands the test 
 of comparison much better. 
 
 By some, however, Ballou has been dis- 
 missed as an ignorant defender of an upstart 
 and dangerous theology. Buckham, for in- 
 stance, in his volume on "Progressive Reli- 
 
 (1) Hosea Ballon, a Marvelous Life Story, Safford. 
 Also Hosea Ballou and the Gospel Renaissance of the 19th 
 Century, Adams. 
 
 36 
 
HOSEA BALLOU 
 
 gious Thought in America" has only this 
 word for him: Extremists, like Hosea 
 Ballou, aflame with zeal against the doc- 
 trine of endless punishment. 
 
 This estimate of Hosea Ballou puts the 
 writer of it in the class with "Punch," who 
 saw Abraham Lincoln only as the "Illinois 
 Ape," or the "rail-splitter." 
 
 One has long since apologized to the 
 world for his mistaken estimate, the other 
 will do so in due season. 
 
 That in our day there is so little need for 
 any one to be aflame with zeal against the 
 doctrine of endless punishment is due to 
 Hosea Ballou more than to any other man. 
 This achievement will appear supremely 
 great only to him who appreciates what a 
 horror that doctrine was to all sensitive 
 souls in Ballou's time. Channing, as a 
 child, was perplexed and tortured that his 
 father, after listening to a Hopkinsonian 
 sermon of that day, could softly 
 whistle to himself in careless strains 
 as they were riding home. It seemed to the 
 sensitive child as if his father should have 
 shrieked with terror. 
 
 Ballou did not move among the scholars 
 any more than Lincoln did, but, like Lincoln, 
 he knew and loved the common people, and 
 
 37 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 struck off the shackles of terror and super- 
 stition that enslaved them as no other man 
 has ever done. He thought his way from 
 the Calvinism unmitigated of his youth, into 
 Universalism, with only the slightest assist- 
 ance from any other Universalist. His one 
 book was the Bible, and from that he formu- 
 lated his theology with almost no other aid. 
 Chadwick says that : 
 
 "Ballou was not a learned, not an educated man, 
 but that he knew his one book, the Bible, as well as 
 any man could know it, who knew no other. He 
 was a great preacher and a greater soul. It was 
 not by exegesis but by humanity that he prevailed. 
 He warmed the heart of the Eternal, as the Calvin- 
 ists had made him, at his own loving breast. We 
 cannot honor him too much. ,, 
 
 At the age of twenty he began to preach, and 
 after a few failures found himself, and there- 
 after grew in power steadily until he became 
 as famous as any preacher of that day. This 
 fame was far from being uniformly friendly 
 or complimentary, indeed in many quarters 
 he was regarded as having horns and tail 
 and cloven foot. People were so accustomed 
 to their chains that they felt uneasy when 
 they were removed, and thought their souls 
 imperilled by one who offered them freedom. 
 We are nowhere told that the people that 
 Moses led out of slavery ever gave him a vote 
 
 88 
 
HOSEA BALLOU 
 
 of thanks, but rather that they often accused 
 him of leading them into deadly peril. 
 
 Ballou preached three times each Sunday 
 to his own crowded church in Boston, and 
 nearly every week day in some other place 
 within his reach. His books and pamphlets 
 and the paper he edited went everywhere. 
 Everybody in New England knew of him, 
 even if some, who never personally met him, 
 insisted on calling him "Old Ballou." 
 Usually they were more respectful after 
 meeting and hearing him. 
 
 In 1805 he wrote a book, which has 
 passed through a score of editions, and which 
 is still known and read among us, named 
 "Ballou on the Atonement." This book, as 
 edited by Dr. Adams, and with his introduc- 
 tion, should be studied (1). 
 
 It would be idle to claim that, in its lit- 
 erary form; this little book is a Harvard 
 Classic, but for those who are willing to be 
 patient with its form and to look for its 
 meanings it is one of the epoch-making books 
 of the world. It is not unlikely that a 
 thoughtful reader will find as much in this 
 book that has stood the test of time as he 
 would find in Edwards, or in the theology of 
 Channing. 
 
 (1) Ballou on the Atonement. John Coleman Adams. 
 89 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 In "Ballou on the Atonement" appears 
 for the first time Universalism that is differ- 
 ent from "Calvinism Improved," and in it 
 appears also all the substance of Channing's 
 Unitarianism, fifteen years before Channing 
 stated it. 
 
 Probably Ballou did not sympathetically 
 perceive all that the different ages had 
 meant as they tried to express the various 
 ideas of the atonement under the figures of 
 sacrifice, ransom, injury to God's honor, the 
 dignity of the infinite law against sin, or 
 the sacredness of a debt. It seemed to him 
 that all these theories of atonement were 
 alike wrong, in that they all attempted to 
 make Jesus on the Cross do something to 
 change, or to appease, or to satisfy God. 
 
 To Ballou it was incredible that God 
 could be, or needed to be, changed. It was 
 perfectly self-evident that man was the 
 party that needed to be changed, and so Bai- 
 lout thought reversed all the old theories of 
 atonement, and made the Cross of Christ 
 God's supreme attempt to change man. 
 Ballou held to the sovereignty of God as 
 stoutly as ever Calvin did, but it was the 
 sovereignty of fatherhood and not of 
 satanism. 
 
 The sovereign purpose of God to recon- 
 
 40 
 
HOSEA BALLOU 
 
 cile the universe to Himself— note that the 
 Scripture never says to reconcile Himself to 
 the universe — by the way of the Cross of 
 Christ, is a purpose that can never be per- 
 manently defeated. 
 
 Ballon came to believe that the Bible 
 doctrine of sin and its sequencesrelatedonly 
 to this present world and to flesh and blood. 
 He saw clearly that punishment is natural 
 consequence, and not an artificial, arbitrary, 
 postponed penalty. To wait a long time, 
 until a sinner dies, and then put him into a 
 literal lake of fire, was a clumsy procedure 
 which Ballou could not conceive of God as 
 using. When a soul sinned, then and there, 
 in the soul, began the natural, inevitable, 
 immediate sequences of sin. That these dis- 
 astrous sequences would continue as long as 
 the soul sinned, Ballou never doubted, but 
 he interpreted the Bible as teaching of sin 
 and its sequences as they are in this world 
 only. In evaluating Ballou's thought here it 
 is only fair to remember the limits he set for 
 himself. He never discussed the question of 
 what reason, orinference, or philosophy may 
 think about the future life. He confined 
 himself entirely to the question, "What do 
 the Scriptures teach ?" His answer to this 
 question was that the Scriptures concern 
 
 41 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 themselves only with sin and its consequences 
 in this life, in this world. Modern Biblical 
 scholarship is far more in accord with 
 Ballou on this point than is commonly 
 known. All agree that in the Old Testament, 
 sin and its sequences are dealt with as of 
 this life and this world only. 
 
 As for the New Testament, the key to it 
 is that the age before the Messiahisthenand 
 there ending, that the new age has then and 
 there arrived. That generation, some stand- 
 ing there, were to see the Son of Man come 
 in his glory with all his Holy Angels. To 
 apply these vivid texts to a life beyond the 
 grave, when they so clearly refer to an old 
 age then ending and a new age then begin- 
 ning, was a strange blunder of which Ballou 
 was never guilty. What human reason or 
 philosophic speculation might guess about a 
 future life, was a point Ballou did not dis- 
 cuss. He was sure that the Bible concerned 
 itself with this world, and this life. No Bible 
 scholar to-day would contend, against Ballou, 
 that the most solemn appeal of Amos to pre- 
 pare to meet God referred to a life beyond 
 the grave, or that the still more searching 
 call of the New Testament, "Watch, for ye 
 know not the day nor the hour when the 
 Lord comes," refers to death or to some 
 
 42 
 
HOSEA BALLOU 
 
 remote future life. Ballou believed that the 
 Bible supported Emerson, in the vigorous 
 protest that he made, and that so many have 
 made in our own time, against the hurtful 
 notion that the sequences of sin could be 
 postponed to some other world, or that the 
 law against sin failed to function here and 
 now. 
 
 Ballou undoubtedly did attach an im- 
 portant agency to death. It was like taking 
 a soul out of a dark into a light place. It 
 was a complete change of environ- 
 ment. Not in itself did it ever save a soul, 
 but it might make a soul see a great light, 
 repent of sin, and so be saved by the Cross 
 of Christ. This is not so different from the 
 doctrine of the effect of environment which 
 is accepted by all to-day. 
 
 If Ballou underrated the power of a sin- 
 ful will to resist God, that error is not so 
 disastrous as the opposite notion that a 
 wicked human will can permanently wreck 
 God and His moral universe. 
 
 Somehow modern men must bring Ed- 
 wards on the Will and Ballou on the Atone- 
 ment and Tousey (1) together. 
 
 The only view of the atonement that will 
 function in our age is the view suggested by 
 
 (1) The Problem of Human Destiny as conditioned 
 by Free Will. Tousey and Abbott debate. 
 
 43 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 the mind of every true penologist, that every 
 prison, or every institution that deals with 
 sin and sinners, must be, not a place of aim- 
 less torment, nor of wicked vengeance, but 
 a moral hospital for the study of souls, and 
 the cure of soul diseases. It will not make 
 light of the disease, but neither will it make 
 light of the love and power of God, and the 
 consecrated, scientific, trained men and 
 women that work with God for the cure of 
 souls. The Cross of Christ is the world's 
 visible symbol of the Eternal, bending to our 
 human needs. The soul that knew no sin, 
 dying there for us who do sin, the good 
 dying for the bad, the wise dying for the 
 unwise — this is the Way of the Cross. 
 
 This is the Atonement that God made, 
 that Christ makes, that every good man and 
 woman must make. 
 
 So a critical, thoughtful reader of the 
 Bible will have an increasing respect for 
 Ballou's contention that the Scriptures 
 relate to the life that now is, and to the 
 setting up of Christ's spiritual kingdom in 
 this present world. Those who insist on re- 
 ferring texts about sin and punishment to 
 death and to the future, and on reading into 
 them detailed descriptions of another world, 
 are infinitely farther from the truth to-day 
 than Ballou was in his day. 
 
 44 
 
HOSEA BALLOU 
 
 The Orthodox world, however, believed 
 then, and perhaps suspects even now, that 
 Ballou's Universalism made light of sin. It 
 has seemed to many that he made the love 
 of God a sort of mere "good-naturedness 
 with sin," and surely it is never that. It is 
 good that men protest against that, but it is 
 unjust to suppose that Ballou ever taught 
 it. The only sign that Channing ever made 
 that he knew that he had in Boston a fellow 
 pastor named Ballou was a contemptuous 
 charge that he flung out that somebody, he 
 did not say who, but somebody, taught "that 
 death changed and purified the mind." 
 Ballou indignantly denied that any intelli- 
 gent Universalist ever taught that. 
 
 Channing did not know either that he 
 had a neighbor named Garrison. It is said 
 that he met Garrison once and shook hands 
 with him, but did not know whom he was 
 greeting. He had no more sympathy with 
 or understanding of the hard-hitting, sturdy- 
 fighting editor of "The Liberator" than he 
 had with Ballou. 
 
 He utterly failed to appreciate the 
 change that Ballou made over the Murray 
 theology, and the battle for liberal Christian 
 thinking Ballou was waging. Channing did 
 not like fighters ; they were too rude for his 
 
 45 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 cultured tastes, but yet it must be confessed 
 that when driven to it Channing was a noble 
 warrior later. 
 
 Universalists have sometimes ventured 
 to compare with Lincoln's Gettysburg ad- 
 dress the words with which Ballou closed 
 his book on the Atonement. 
 
 They are far better words for mankind 
 to believe and practice than are the words 
 of Edwards in his sermon on "Sinners in the 
 Hands of an Angry God." Here are 
 Ballou's words: 
 
 "The fulness of times will come, and the times 
 of the restitution of all things will be accomplished. 
 Then shall truth be victorious and all error flee to 
 eternal light. Then shall universal songs of honor 
 be sung to the praise of him who liveth forever and 
 ever. All death, sorrow and crying shall be done 
 away, pains and disorders shall be no more felt, 
 temptations no more trouble the lovers of God, nor 
 sin poison the human heart. 
 
 "The blessed hand of the once Crucified shall wipe 
 tears from off all faces. transporting thought. 
 Then shall the blessed Saviour see of the travail of 
 his soul and be satisfied. 
 
 "Then shall the great object of the Saviour's mis- 
 sion be accomplished. Then shall the question be 
 asked, '0 death, where is thy sting?' But death 
 shall not be to give the answer. And '0 grave 
 
 46 
 
HOSEA BALLOU 
 
 where is thy victory?' But the boaster shall be 
 silent. The Son shall deliver up the Kingdom to 
 the Father, the eternal radiance shall smile, and 
 God shall be all in all." 
 
 47 
 
VI. A BIT OF NEW ENGLAND CHURCH 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 The way we are moving can always be 
 illuminated by a study of the way along 
 which theology has moved in the past. In 
 the year 1636, which was only sixteen years 
 after the Pilgrims landed, and the time that 
 the Puritan exodus to America was getting 
 under way, the General Court of the colonies 
 founded a college. Two years later John 
 Harvard gave to it his library of three hun- 
 dred volumes, and one-half of his estate, 
 so the college took his name. 
 
 There may be some things that our Puri- 
 tan ancestors did that we are willing to 
 forget, but that they, out of their poverty, 
 founded this great university is imperish- 
 able glory. 
 
 Until the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century Harvard College was fully in line 
 with the prevailing theology. While this 
 theology was Calvinistic, it was yet not 
 all of one type, but fell into several divisions, 
 in which our fathers were deeply interested, 
 but which are mostly forgotten by us. The 
 main group was made up of those who called 
 themselves the "Old Lights," or the "Old 
 Sides." These stood proudly and unmoved 
 on Calvinism straight. There is a story 
 somewhere that one of them once rebuked 
 
 48 
 
A BIT OF NEW ENGLAND CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 an ardent youth who advocated foreign mis- 
 sions, with the sharp words, "Sit down, 
 young man; if God has elected any heathen 
 to be saved, He will save them without any 
 of your help." 
 
 They presented theology in very cold and 
 formal ways, in long intellectual sermons. 
 They constantly bewailed the indifference to 
 religion among the people, and the dreadful 
 worldliness they saw around them, but there 
 was no effort to overcome this by any emo- 
 tional revival methods. Formal religious 
 education, by logical, thoughtful sermons 
 and lectures, was the way to which the dig- 
 nified churches of America clung, as they 
 had learned in the Church of England. 
 
 In 1734 Jonathan Edwards began to 
 preach his awful sermons, of which the one 
 entitled "Sinners in the hands of an Angry 
 God" has come to be the best known. He 
 was followed by such men as Gilbert Ten- 
 nent, and others, and the result was the 
 most remarkable wave of spectacular emo- 
 tionalism that America had seen, known as 
 "The Great Awakening." Those who advo- 
 cated this method of revivalism were known 
 as the "New Lights," or the "New Sides." 
 These two groups were not always nice in 
 the language they flung at each other. 
 
 49 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 Whitefield, in these years, came from 
 England to America seven times. No more 
 wonderful religious orator has lived than was 
 Whitefield. He could speak outdoors to 
 twenty thousand people, so that the farthest 
 man could hear every word. When we are 
 forced to sit before a preacher who does not 
 know how to project his voice over even the 
 three front rows of seats, we pray for a 
 return of Whitefield. At the fairs, no show- 
 man could compete with him, and the crowds 
 deserted the "movies," or whatever then 
 corresponded to them, and flocked to the 
 preacher. The formal dignified churches of 
 America, as of England, doubted the useful- 
 ness of Whitefield's methods, and often told 
 him so in language that could not be misun- 
 derstood, while he in turn told the "Old 
 School" that they were "Dumb dogs, half 
 devils and half beasts, unconverted, spir- 
 itually blind, and leading their people to 
 hell." 
 
 Such were the fine spiritual amenities of 
 our ancestors. 
 
 Besides this division into old and new 
 lights, there was another theological group- 
 ing that has a certain interest to us, as 
 history. 
 
 Edwards, followed by a group of preach- 
 
 60 
 
A BIT OF NEW ENGLAND CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 ers, one of whom was Hopkins, of Newport, 
 where Channing grew up, stressed the in- 
 finite majesty and sovereignty of God. He 
 had nothing whatever to do, to all eternity, 
 but to contemplate His own glory. Man 
 had no moral power or will whatever. Man 
 was to think only of the glory of God. For 
 this glory, Hopkins taught, man should be 
 willing and glad to be endlessly damned. 
 Man was an insect, the glory of God was 
 all. This fine disinterestedness was known 
 as Hopkinsonianism, and a Calvinist of the 
 Old School had no dealings with a Hopkin- 
 sonian. 
 
 All these groups, however, were in entire 
 agreement as to the literal, endless hell of 
 material fire, into which the non-elect went 
 at death, and an angry God nursing His ma- 
 jestic glory in the sky. 
 
 The Great Awakening was followed by a 
 reaction that left the American churches at 
 their lowest ebb, from about 1750 to 1800. 
 This reaction was in part the natural conse- 
 quence of a period of such intense emotion- 
 alism, and was also partly due to the in- 
 tense absorption of the minds of Americans 
 in wars and politics. 
 
 The Indian wars, and the Revolution, 
 and the struggle to form our new govern- 
 ment and constitution, absorbed the minds 
 
 51 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 of men, and religion and churches suffered. 
 It was during this period of the low ebb of 
 religion, that John Murray did much of his 
 work. 
 
 He was one of Washington's chaplains, 
 and did much to aid the people, in the awful 
 disorder and chaos that always have followed 
 and always will follow war, as long as 
 human beings insist on such insanity. 
 
 In one way Murray was the means of 
 shaping New England theology curiously. 
 Murray always taught that Christ died on 
 the Cross, not only for the elect, but for all. 
 All are elect. Now Jonathan Edwards the 
 younger adopted this same view. How, then, 
 could he escape being a Universalist? 
 Edwards and his school escaped the Univer- 
 salist conclusion, from their premise that 
 Christ died for all, by going back to an idea 
 of the atonement invented by Grotius. 
 
 That idea is known as the governmental 
 theory of the atonement. It is based on the 
 majesty and glory of God's law. That law 
 must be upheld, whatever happens. Christ 
 did not die for individual men — me or you — 
 but Christ died to uphold the dignity of 
 God's law against sin. That law being vin- 
 dicated, God could do as He pleased about 
 forgiving individual sinners. 
 
 52 
 
A BIT OF NEW ENGLAND CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Walker thinks that, even if this was the 
 theory of the atonement that filled New 
 England, it was about the worst possible 
 theory, since every devout Christian feels 
 that Christ died for "me." So thought 
 Hosea Ballou in 1805. Universalists, even at 
 that early date, had madethemselves enough 
 known to make it logically necessary to adopt 
 either their views or else this governmental 
 theory of the atonement. 
 
 During all these years of mechanical and 
 artificial theology, in which the emphasis 
 seems to have been on exalting God and 
 doing nothing for man, there were many 
 Universalists and Unitarians, and other 
 liberals. 
 
 Wearied with the clash of theologies, for 
 some time the feeling was against attempt- 
 ing any new liberal organizations. The idea 
 was for liberals to stay in the established 
 churches, to avoid all doctrinal controver- 
 sies, to quietly preach religion that all could 
 unite on, and make no new sects. This was 
 the temper of Channing, and of many others. 
 It was the feeling of Mayhew, Chauncey, 
 Huntingdon, and Briant, all of whom were 
 Universalists. George de Benneville, a child 
 of the French refugees in America, landed 
 in Philadelphia the year John Murray was 
 born, and preached Universalism in that 
 
 53 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 vicinity all his remaining life, but made no 
 movement toward a separate sect. It does 
 not appear that Murray at first thought of a 
 separate church. Adams Streeter and Caleb 
 Rich — the latter being the ancestor of John 
 Dewey of modern fame — preaching in 1775, 
 appear never to have heard of Murray at 
 that time, and to have made no plans for a 
 new denomination. Whether for good or for 
 evil we may not be sure, but this irenic 
 temper was not long continued. One reason 
 for new sects was that until 1834, in Massa- 
 chusetts, the Congregational Church was the 
 established order, and all who did not belong 
 to another church had to support that one. 
 The matter of taxation, therefore, made for 
 formation of new sects. 
 
 But the taxing was not the main reason 
 for this. Calvinism was aggressive and per- 
 sistent, and liberals were forced to separate 
 or be suffocated. 
 
 The Universalists, many years before any 
 formal Unitarian organization in America, 
 met in 1790 in Philadelphia, and in 1803 in 
 Winchester, N. H., and adopted a creed and 
 planned a separate denomination. 
 
 Hosea Ballou published, in 1805, his book 
 on the Atonement, which was hardly of a 
 compromising temper. 
 
 54 
 
A BIT OP NEW ENGLAND CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 But the event which shook New England 
 was the appointment of Henry Ware, the 
 Unitarian, to a professorship in Harvard 
 College, which meant that the controlling 
 body of that ancient seat of learning had 
 become Unitarian in 1805. The storm clouds 
 began to gather, but it was about 1815 before 
 the tempest broke. 
 
 It was 1815 when Belsham in England 
 wrote a life of Lindsey, in which book he 
 included a chapter on American Unitarian- 
 ism. Jeremiah Evarts, a staunch Calvinist, 
 published this chapter, with a long preface 
 of his own, and circulated it all over New 
 England. 
 
 Evarts said that this chapter convicted 
 the Unitarians of New England of dishon- 
 esty in covertly teaching or hypocritically 
 concealing their opinions, and he stoutly de- 
 manded that all Unitarians be denied the 
 Christian name, and excluded from all Chris- 
 tian courtesy and fellowship. For ten years 
 and more Hosea Ballou had been proclaiming 
 all the Unitarian principles, but now Chan- 
 ning and Harvard College Unitarians were 
 forced either to keep silent under Evarts' 
 pamphlet or else make a stand and be 
 counted. 
 
 So the Universalists first and then the 
 
 55 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 Unitarians are in the field. Many ask to-day 
 why these two liberal denominations are not 
 one. The answer to this is not easy, as the 
 smallest differences, even long after they are 
 forgotten, often build the highest and stiff est 
 fences between sects. Chadwick, the biogra- 
 pher of Channing, gives this answer to the 
 question why Universalists and Unitarians 
 are not one denomination. He says : 
 
 "The early Universalist societies were recruited 
 more in Baptist and Methodist quarters than among 
 the Congregationalists, and on more democratic 
 social lines. The early Unitarians, as socially aris- 
 tocratic, were naturally averse to a promiscuous 
 salvation. Men might be born free and equal (the 
 habitual misquotation), but that they died so was 
 another matter not lightly to be maintained. " 
 
 Perhaps it was too much to expect that 
 the Harvard College scholar and the plain 
 man from the New Hampshire hills should 
 start arm in arm and walk side by side. It 
 may be that their spiritual children can not 
 even yet comfortably forget the old inherited 
 divergence. 
 
 It may be that a still more vital reason 
 that helped to separation, in the formative 
 years, was the fact that Channing and the 
 majority of New England Unitarians were 
 not yet Universalists. Belsham and some 
 of the English Unitarians were frank believ- 
 
 56 
 
A BIT OF NEW ENGLAND CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 ers in final universal salvation, but it was a 
 long time before Channing came to so large 
 a place. 
 
 These causes of separation are, however, 
 merely historical. There can be no real 
 reason why, at any time that it appears to 
 best advance the Kingdom of Christ, thaf all 
 Liberal Christian people, in all present ex- 
 isting denominations, should not feel and 
 practice the happiest Christian unity. 
 
 57 
 
VII. THE ANDOVER CREED AND 
 CALVINISM IN 1806 
 
 The growing strength of the Universal- 
 ists, and the absorption of Harvard College 
 by the Unitarians, resulted, in 1806, in a 
 strong Calvinistic movement to go up to 
 Andover and build one institution that no 
 Unitarian could ever steal and no Univer- 
 salist corrupt. It might not be just easy 
 to tell a Unitarian from a Universalist, but 
 Calvinists swore that, if the English lan- 
 guage could do it, they would draw up one 
 creed that would forever define the differ- 
 ence between both these pestiferous sects 
 and Orthodoxy. To make this forever cer- 
 tain, the Orthodoxy of New England drew up 
 the once famous, now forgotten, Andover 
 Creed. 
 
 This Andover Creed can not be forgot- 
 ten too much, nor buried any too deep, to 
 satisfy Universalists. It has a certain in- 
 terest, however, as a historical document, 
 and since we are so far from it that it cannot 
 possibly rouse any animosities in anybody, 
 we dig it up and print it here. 
 
 In its day it had a value. To produce it 
 all the factions, the old lights and the new, 
 the old sides and the new, strict Calvinists 
 
 58 
 
THE ANDOVER CREED AND CALVINISM IN 1806 
 
 and strict Hopkinsonians, all forgot their 
 differences, to make a solid front against 
 Unitarians and Universalists and all other 
 dangerous heretics named in the document. 
 
 As a statement of exact theology its 
 value is less, because it is a compromise. 
 The reader can skip it without any offence, 
 but if he wants to know the "pit from which 
 he was digged and the rock from which he 
 was hewn," he would better take a half hour 
 or so and read it. 
 
 Here is the Andover Document: 
 
 "Every Professor shall be an orthodox and con- 
 sistent Calvinist, and after a careful examination 
 by the visitors with reference to his religious prin- 
 ciples, he shall, on the day of his inauguration, pub- 
 licly make and subscribe a solemn declaration of his 
 faith in Divine Revelation, and in the fundamental 
 and distinguishing doctrines of the Gospel, as ex- 
 pressed in the following Creed, which is supported 
 by the infallible Revelation which God constantly 
 makes of Himself in His works of creation, prov- 
 idence and redemption, namely: 
 
 "Creed of the Institution. 
 
 "I believe that there is one and but one living 
 and true God; that the word of God, contained in 
 the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is 
 the only perfect rule of faith and practice; that 
 agreeably to those Scriptures, God is a Spirit, in- 
 finite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, wis- 
 dom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth; 
 that in the Godhead are three persons, the Father, 
 the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and that these three 
 are one God, the same in substance, equal in power 
 
 59 
 
WHICH . WAY 
 
 and glory; that God created man after His own 
 image in knowledge, righteousness and holiness; 
 that the glory of God is man's chief end, and the 
 enjoyment of God is supreme happiness; that this 
 enjoyment is derived solely from conformity of 
 heart to the moral character and will of God; that 
 Adam, the federal head and representative of the 
 human race, was placed in a state of probation, and 
 that, in consequence of his disobedience, all his 
 descendants were constituted sinners; that by 
 nature every man is personally depraved, destitute 
 of holiness, unlike and opposed to God, and that, 
 previous to the renewing agency of the Divine 
 Spirit, all his moral actions are adverse to the char- 
 acter and glory of God; that being morally inca- 
 pable of recovering the image of his Creator, which 
 was lost in Adam, every man is justly exposed to 
 eternal damnation, so that except a man be born 
 again, he cannot see the kingdom of God; that God 
 from His mere good pleasure, from all eternity, 
 elected some to everlasting life, and that He en- 
 tered into a covenant of Grace, to deliver them out 
 of this state of sin and misery, by a Redeemer; that 
 the only Redeemer of the elect is the Eternal Son 
 of God, who for this purpose became man, and con- 
 tinues to be God and man, in two distinct natures 
 and one person forever; that Christ as our Redeem- 
 er executes the office of a Prophet, Priest and King; 
 that, agreeably to the covenant of Redemption, the 
 Son of God, and He alone, by His suffering and 
 death, has made atonement for the sins of all men; 
 that repentance, faith and holiness are the personal 
 requisites in the gospel scheme of salvation; that 
 the righteousness of Christ is the only ground of 
 a sinner's justification; that this righteousness is 
 received through faith, and this faith is the gift 
 of God, so that our salvation is wholly of Grace; 
 that no means whatever can change the heart of a 
 sinner and make it holy; that regeneration and sanc- 
 
 60 
 
THE ANDOVER CREED AND CALVINISM IN 1806 
 
 tification are effects of the creating and renewing 
 agency of the Holy Spirit; and that supreme love to 
 God constitutes the essential difference between 
 saints and sinners; that by convincing us of our sin 
 and misery, enlightening our minds, working faith 
 in us, and renewing our wills, the Holy Spirit makes 
 us partakers of the benefits of redemption ; and that 
 the ordinary means by which these benefits are 
 communicated to us are the word, sacrament and 
 prayer, and that repentance unto life, faith to 
 feed upon Christ, love to God and new obedience, 
 are the appropriate qualifications for the Lord's sup- 
 per, and that a Christian Church ought to admit no 
 person to its holy communion before he exhibits 
 creditable proof of his godly sincerity; that per- 
 severance in holiness is the only method of making 
 our calling and election sure; and that the final 
 perseverance of the saints, though it is the effect 
 of the especial operation of God on their hearts, 
 necessarily implies their own watchful diligence; 
 that they, who are effectually called, do in this life 
 partake of justification, adoption and sanctification, 
 and the several benefits which do either accompany 
 or flow from them ; that the souls of believers are, 
 at their death, made perfect in holiness, and do im- 
 mediately pass into Glory; that their bodies, being 
 still united to Christ, will at the resurrection be 
 raised up to glory, and that the saints will be made 
 perfectly blessed in the full enjoyment of God to 
 all eternity; but that the wicked will awake to 
 shame and everlasting contempt, and, with devils, 
 will be plunged into the lake that burneth with fire 
 and brimstone forever and ever. I, moreover, be- 
 lieve that God, according to the council of His 
 own will, and for His own glory, hath foreordained 
 whatsoever comes to pass, and that all beings, ac- 
 tions and events, both in the natural and the moral 
 world, are under His providential direction; that 
 God's decrees perfectly consist with human liberty, 
 
 61 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 God's universal agency with the agency of man, 
 and man's dependence with his accountability; that 
 man has understanding and corporeal strength to 
 do all that God requires of him, so that nothing but 
 the sinner's aversion to holiness prevents his salva- 
 tion; that it is the prerogative of God to bring good 
 out of evil, and that He will cause the wrath and 
 rage of wicked men and devils to praise Him, and 
 that all the evil which has existed and which will 
 ever exist in the moral system will eventually be 
 made to promote a most important purpose under 
 the wise and perfect administration of that Al- 
 mighty Being, who will cause all things to work for 
 His own glory and thus fulfill all His pleasure. 
 And, furthermore, I do solemnly promise 
 that I will open and explain the Scriptures 
 to my pupils with integrity and faithfulness, that 
 I will maintain and inculcate the Christian Faith, as 
 expressed in the Creed, by me now repeated, to- 
 gether with the other doctrines and duties of our 
 holy religion, so far as may pertain to my office, 
 according to the best light God shall give me, and in 
 opposition not only to Atheists and Infidels, but to 
 Jews, Papists, Mahometans, Arians, Socinians, Sa- 
 bellians, Unitarians and Universalists, and to all 
 heresies and errors, ancient or modern, which may 
 be opposed to the Gospel of Christ, or hazardous to 
 the souls of men; that by my instruction, council 
 and example, I will endeavour to promote true piety 
 and godliness; that I will consult the good of this 
 Institution, and the peace of the Churches of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ on all occasions, and that I will 
 religiously conform to the Constitutions and Laws 
 of this Seminary, and to the Statutes of this Foun- 
 dation. 
 
 "The preceding Creed and Declaration shall be 
 repeated by every Professor on this Foundation at 
 the expiration of every successive period of five 
 years, and no man shall be continued a Professor 
 
 62 
 
THE ANDOVER CREED AND CALVINISM IN 1806 
 
 on said Foundation who shall not continue to ap- 
 prove himself a man of sound and orthodox prin- 
 ciples of divinity according to the aforesaid Creed." 
 
 The wise and learned faculty of the An- 
 dover Theological School, it may be said here, 
 had no trouble with this creed. For three- 
 quarters of a century they came forward 
 every five years and took the required sol- 
 emn pledge. 
 
 In 1886 Prof. Egbert Coffin Smyth, pres- 
 ident of Andover School, was tried and con- 
 demned for heresy by the Board of Visitors 
 of Andover. Professor Smyth appealed to 
 the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, and in 
 1891 that Court reversed the decision of the 
 Board of Visitors, and declared their re- 
 moval of Professor Smyth illegal and invalid. 
 
 Professor Smyth declared that he ac- 
 cepted the Seminary creed "in its historical 
 sense." It was his opinion that "the Semi- 
 nary Creed might be and should be adjusted 
 to a larger knowledge and life than were 
 open to the framers." 
 
 With this opinion Universalists entirely 
 agree, only they have a suspicion that it 
 might be a lot easier to make a new creed 
 than to adjust that old one to any God, or to 
 any world, or to any man, that we know 
 anything about. 
 
 63 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 In addition to the Andover Creed we 
 print, to close this dreary chapter, a state- 
 ment of what Calvinism was in those early- 
 years of the nineteenth century, as seen by 
 that mild and scholarly gentleman, Dr. 
 Channing. As Channing saw it: 
 
 "Calvinism teaches that, in consequence of 
 Adam's sin in eating the forbidden fruit, God brings 
 into life all his posterity with a nature wholly cor- 
 rupt, so that they are utterly indisposed, disabled, 
 and made opposite to all that is spiritually good, 
 and wholly inclined to all evil, and that continually. 
 
 "It teaches that all mankind, having fallen in 
 Adam, are under God's wrath and curse, and so 
 made liable to all miseries in this life, to death 
 itself, and to the pains of hell forever. It teaches 
 that, from this ruined race, God out of His mere 
 good pleasure, has elected a certain number to be 
 saved by Christ, not induced to this choice by any 
 foresight of their faith or good works, but wholly 
 by His free grace and love, and that, having thus 
 predestinated them to eternal life, He renews and 
 sanctifies them by His almighty and special agency, 
 and brings them into a state of grace, from which 
 they cannot fall and perish. It teaches that the 
 rest of mankind He is pleased to pass over, and to 
 ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sins, 
 to the honor of His justice and power. In other 
 words, He leaves the rest to the corruption in which 
 they were born, withholds the grace which is neces- 
 sary to their recovery, and condemns them to most 
 grievous in soul and body without intermission in 
 hell fire forever." 
 
 It was after the boy Channing went to 
 church with his father and heard all this 
 
 64 
 
THE ANDOVER CREED AND CALVINISM IN 1806 
 
 "proved" that he was amazed and shocked, 
 on the way home, to hear his father 
 whistling a light tune. 
 
 So out of all these troubled waters of 
 New England theology emerged in 1790 the 
 Universalist denomination, and thirty-five 
 years later, in 1825, the American Unitarian 
 Association. It was hard, and it is yet hard, 
 for these liberal Christians to stand any- 
 where and at the same time to take no final 
 stand. We shall all learn in due season, how- 
 ever, that true religion is the Way, and not 
 a final stand, nor an immovable position. 
 
 65 
 
VIII. WALTER BALFOUR 
 
 The Andover creed and the statement of 
 Calvinism are printed here in full, because 
 they are the best official statements of the 
 theology our Universalist fathers hadto face. 
 The cultured gentlemen who framed these 
 creeds were usually of the sort who would 
 not needlessly set foot upon a worm, and yet 
 who contemplated with a calmness undis- 
 turbed, and even with positive satisfaction, 
 the spectacle of a God crushing a universe 
 under His heel, for the promotion of His 
 own glory. That Hosea Ballou was an ex- 
 tremist, aflame with zeal against these ideas, 
 is to his eternal credit. These statements, 
 drawn up by quiet scholars in the seclusion 
 of their studies, apparently without taking 
 account in the slightest degree of the real 
 world, and the real human race, sound se- 
 rene, and it is not easy for comfortable cul- 
 ture to-day to realize the terrible intensity 
 with which these ideas were held by the com- 
 mon people, and are still so held in many 
 sections of this world. Those creeds, when 
 held as facts realized, made the universe a 
 chamber of horrors, and a madhouse for 
 countless sensitive people. 
 
 These creeds are excellent illustrations 
 of the futility of attempting to express 
 
 66 
 
WALTER BALFOUR 
 
 finalities in theology, and to fasten these 
 finalities on generations yet unborn. They 
 are amazing also in their attempt to formu- 
 late the substance of the Christian religion 
 without making the slightest reference to 
 the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule, 
 or the law of love to God and to man, or the 
 seeking of the Kingdom of God, all of which 
 Jesus so expressly put first in His teaching. 
 They have no perception of world-wide mis- 
 sions, or of the passion for social justice 
 which are the great keynotes of the Bible. 
 They put everything of importance up in the 
 sky, postponed until after death and judg- 
 ment. Man is an insect contemplating the 
 glory of God, if he does not entirely forget 
 that in his sharp struggle for existence. 
 
 The Andover creed, however, conceded 
 one point of interest, namely, that God in- 
 tended, by the whole scheme, to bring good 
 out of evil. This indirectly happened in the 
 one particular that it gave Walter Balfour 
 to the Universalist Church. Walter Balfour 
 has gone out of fashion among Universalists. 
 It is doubtful whether his name or his books 
 are mentioned any more in our pulpits or our 
 seminaries. Yet this man once filled a very 
 notable place in our ranks as we moved along 
 our way. Dr. Emerson, who shared with Dr. 
 
 67 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 Cantwell the honor of being our greatest 
 editor in days past, in his biography of Eben- 
 ezer Fisher, who was for twenty-one years 
 the head of our oldest theological school, said 
 that it was the study of Balfour's Inquiries 
 that made Universalists of both him and 
 Dr. Fisher. Practically all of our earlier 
 teachers and preachers would have said the 
 same thing. Dr. Emerson declared that it 
 had always seemed to him that no candid 
 person could read Balfour's books and ever 
 again believe that the doctrine of endless hell 
 torments is taught in the Bible. Balfour's 
 books are all out of print long ago, but all 
 the main points for which he contended are 
 incorporated in the new Bible, by which we 
 mean the American Standard version, or 
 such less official versions as those of Moffatt 
 or of Weymouth, who are recognized schol- 
 ars in the Orthodox Church. 
 
 Walter Balfour was born in Scotland 
 about 1776, in the home of a weaver. Dur- 
 ing his childhood he was carefully trained in 
 all the doctrines of the Church of Scotland, 
 and received deep and lasting religious im- 
 pressions into his naturally reverent and de- 
 vout soul. He was one of a dozen or so 
 youngmen who organizedthemselvesto hold 
 a weekly meeting together for prayer and 
 
 68 
 
WALTER BALFOUR 
 
 Bible study. A wealthy man in the town 
 determined to devote a part of his money 
 to educating for the ministry some of these 
 young men. 
 
 Balfour was one chosen for this purpose, 
 and thus obtained an excellent theological 
 education, especially in the Hebrew and 
 Greek original Scriptures. 
 
 He preached in Scotland for several 
 years and then came to America, settling in 
 Charlestown, Mass., which was his home 
 until his death. He was happily married 
 there, and several children were born into 
 the home. 
 
 He preached constantly in the Orthodox 
 churches within his reach, and after a time 
 gathered around him a congregation of his 
 own, meeting regularly for worship in a 
 hall. To add to his slender income as a 
 preacher, he kept a small shop, although it 
 seems as if he must have been a sort of Rob- 
 ert Browning shopman whose soul was in 
 biblical and theological matters far more 
 than in his dry goods and groceries. 
 
 So this quiet, obscure Scotch Calvinist 
 preacher went on his humble way, never 
 doubting in his mind that his Calvinism was 
 God's complete and final word to mankind. 
 He said later that he had met a few Univer- 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 salists, and argued with them, but always 
 knew that he had the best of the argument. 
 Now begins that great storm of controversy, 
 between the Calvinism of New England on 
 the one side and Universalists and Unitari- 
 ans on the other. 
 
 Channing, in 1819, preaches his famous 
 Baltimore Sermon, and Moses Stuart, of 
 Andover fame, begins some replies. 
 
 Of course, the active mind of Walter 
 Balfour was intensely interested in every 
 word of this controversy, and not a doubt 
 entered his mind but that liberalism would 
 be entirely wiped out, when Stuart finished 
 with Channing. A portion, perhaps the 
 major portion, of the whole controversy, 
 hinged on the doctrine of the Trinity, and of 
 the deity of Jesus. Both of these doctrines 
 Channing had emphatically denied, and he 
 had affirmed that the Scriptures nowhere 
 teach men to render spiritual worship to 
 Jesus, as to God. 
 
 Stuart, replying to this assertion of Chan- 
 ning, quotes two passages of the New Testa- 
 ment. The first passage is Philippians 2 :10 : 
 "That in the name of Jesus, every knee 
 should bow, of things in heaven and things 
 on earth, and that every tongue should con- 
 fess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of 
 
 70 
 
WALTER BALFOUR 
 
 God the Father." The second text is Reve- 
 lation 5:13: "And every creature which is 
 in heaven and on the earth, and under the 
 earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that 
 are in them, heard I saying blessing and 
 honor and glory and power be unto him 
 that sitteth upon the throne and unto the 
 Lamb forever." 
 
 Professor Stuart's comment on these 
 texts was that "things in heaven, earth, and 
 under the earth was a common periphrasis 
 of the Hebrew and New Testament writers 
 for the universe." He also said of these 
 texts, "If this be not spiritual worship, and 
 if Christ be not the object of it here, I am 
 unable to produce a case where worship can 
 be called spiritual and divine." Thus a re- 
 markable result of the Calvinist-Liberal con- 
 troversy of that day, that has always inter- 
 ested Universalists, was that it caused a 
 man who every five years all his working life 
 cheerfully signed the Andover creed, to 
 affirm that some day the universe — all ra- 
 tional souls — should render spiritual and 
 divine worship to Christ. 
 
 In his zeal to answer Channing, and to 
 defend the deity of Jesus, Professor Stuart 
 must have lost sight of the fact that he was 
 making a very strong defence of Universal- 
 
 71 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 ism, which was one of the heresies that he 
 had solemnly sworn to oppose. But if this 
 fact escaped Stuart, it did not so easily get 
 by Walter Balfour. He was profoundly dis- 
 turbed and even sorely distressed by Stuart's 
 words. If the universe is some day to render 
 spiritual and divine worship to Christ, what 
 is that but Universalism ? 
 
 In the next few years Walter Balfour 
 wrote to Moses Stuart nine letters, at inter- 
 vals, urging, almost imploring, him to ex- 
 plain why the texts he had used do not teach 
 Universalism. The nine letters are far from 
 being mere repetitions of each other, but con- 
 tain a careful study of the whole Bible, and 
 an examination of the many other texts that 
 appear to teach the same great hope. He en- 
 treats the famous Andover professor to ex- 
 plain these texts in some way, as against 
 the heresy of Universalism he is so solemnly 
 pledged to oppose. The nine letters are not 
 all sent by post to Professor Stuart, although 
 some of them are. They are all printed in 
 the "Universalist Magazine" of Boston, and 
 are all signed "An Inquirer after Truth." It 
 is an interesting fact that all this time no 
 one knew who the Inquirer was except the 
 Inquirer himself. The editors of the "Uni- 
 versalist Magazine" gladly published all the 
 
 72 
 
WALTER BALFOUR 
 
 letters, but they did not know, and could not 
 even guess, who the Inquirer was, although 
 they made a number of cunning efforts to 
 locate him. For a long time Professor Stuart 
 pays no attention to these letters, but finally 
 writes to the Magazine a brief note ex- 
 plaining his silence. 
 
 He explained that a busy teacher can not 
 possibly attempt to reply to anonymous let- 
 ters, and also that the nine fetters are simply 
 an effort to draw him into a newspaper con- 
 troversy with a man whose mind is already 
 made up. The unknown Inquirer now dis- 
 appears for a long time. He is not a man to 
 rush into new opinions without careful study 
 and thought. 
 
 In his nine letters he had examined all the 
 texts which appear to teach Universalism 
 Now he proceeds to study all those texts 
 which were commonly thoughtto teach end- 
 less punishment. In the quiet obscurity of 
 his humble study, unknown to all men, alone 
 with his Bible and with his God, for both of 
 which no man ever had more loving loyalty 
 and reverence, he carries on a long and ex- 
 haustive study of every Hebrew or Greek 
 word or phrase which the King James trans- 
 lators^ 1611, had translated by theEnglish 
 words, hell, endless, damnation, devil, end of 
 
 78 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 world, etc. He became entirely convinced 
 that these modern English words had come 
 to have a meaning which the original words 
 never had, and so did not truly translate the 
 original. 
 
 Balfour became entirely convinced that 
 the Bible, rightly understood, is a Univer- 
 salist book. Now while Walter Balfour was 
 not a man to rush thoughtlessly into new be- 
 liefs, it was also true of him that when he 
 saw the truth, no considerations of worldly 
 prudence, or of personal ease and welfare, 
 could for a moment induce him to remain 
 silent. Having made up his mind fully as 
 to the truth, he no longer conceals himself. 
 He announces to the world his new convic- 
 tions and that the Inquirer after Truth is 
 Walter Balfour. 
 
 Henceforth, to his death, he is a Univer- 
 salist writer and preacher of an intensely 
 doctrinal type, aggressively defending his 
 new-found faith. 
 
 His writings were published in book 
 form, and in the libraries of all the older 
 Universalists could always be found these 
 books, named Balfour's First Inquiry, and 
 Balfour's Second Inquiry. The various an- 
 swers to and criticisms of these books kept 
 Balfour, the rest of his days, in ceaseless 
 doctrinal controversy from which he never 
 
 74 
 
WALTER BALFOUR 
 
 shrank, and of which he did not weary. As 
 remarked, all Balfour's works are long ago 
 out of print. The warfare of the texts, in 
 which he was a master, has receded in its 
 power over the minds of the thoughtful, al- 
 though as a fact it is yet the way most 
 people use the Bible, who use it at all. 
 
 His conviction that the Bible is only one 
 book, teaching only one doctrine, has been 
 set aside by modern scholars. It must be 
 admitted, however, that Walter Balfour had 
 a far more scholarly way of marshalling 
 Bible texts than Murray ever had, or any 
 other exegete of his day knew. His convic- 
 tion that the Bible was one book always 
 teaching one doctrine, was that held by Chan- 
 ning and all other scholars of Balfour's day. 
 Balfour's array of texts did, to a degree un- 
 usual in his day, remember the whole trend 
 of Scripture, and the progressive revelation 
 of God found therein. All the truths which 
 Balfour defended are easily found to-day in 
 other books than those he wrote. Univer- 
 salists of to-day regard the work of Balfour 
 far too lightly. He was, as each man always 
 is, a son of his times, but he was also a man 
 for the ages. To an amazing extent the new 
 translations of the Bible accept and concede 
 the points that Balfour made in his "In- 
 
 75 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 quiries." The Universalist Church would be 
 to-day a much larger body than it is, if it 
 had concentrated on teaching every child 
 born in this world, during the formative 
 years of its life, the substance of Bible in- 
 terpretation which Walter Balfour worked 
 out. Universalists, however, waited for Or- 
 thodox scholars, in the newer and better 
 translations of the Bible, to adopt Balfour's 
 contentions, with never a word of credit to 
 Balfour, while we, too, forgot him. Because 
 the main points for which he contended are 
 accepted by us, and conceded by educated lib- 
 eral people, we think his work is done and his 
 day is past. 
 
 As far as this easy optimism is true — and 
 it is truer now than it was in Balfour's day 
 — we thank God and take courage. Univer- 
 salists have no taste for exalting verbal 
 textual theology above the personal experi- 
 ence of the Living Chri§t, or above applied 
 religion. But let us not forget that, taking 
 the whole world over, the vast majority of 
 children are yet born and reared in a dark- 
 ness unbroken by a ray of Balfour's light 
 and hope. The chances are infinitely greater, 
 even in this day, that a child will hear the old 
 words that Balfour hated, used in all their 
 horrid popular meanings, than they are that 
 
 76 
 
WALTER BALFOUR 
 
 he will be born and reared a child of our cul- 
 tured Liberalism. It is yet true, in many 
 parts of all our great cities and our own 
 country, and of the races of men in Europe 
 and Asia and Africa and the islands of the 
 seas, that the vast majority holds to angry, 
 vengeful gods, to devils and demons, to hells, 
 to hatred of enemies, to militarism and sel- 
 fish greed, to oppression and exploiting the 
 weaker ones. 
 
 Still the world plans wars, and wastes its 
 substance on killing and hating, while the 
 children die, and we sit in our foolish com- 
 placency saying that our Liberal doctrines 
 have won the victory, and that we no longer 
 need a Universalist Church. "I am happy, 
 I am free, what care I for the rest of the 
 world!" 
 
 Those who speak that way to-day are the 
 men and women possessed with devils, albeit 
 respectable and socially recognized devils. 
 Against them the Eternal Christ always 
 speaks his "Woe to you Pharisees and 
 Scribes." 
 
 Walter Balfour, with all his limitations, 
 was yet a great and a brave spirit, moving 
 along the Way. The world never had 
 more need for men of his faith than it has 
 this day. 
 
 77 
 
IX. HELL 
 
 Walter Balfour died on Jan. 3, 1852, as 
 peacefully as if he had never fought a theo- 
 logical battle in his life. 
 
 Moses Stuart died the next day, appar- 
 ently serene in spite of his Andover creed. 
 It is not likely that he has signed that docu- 
 ment every five years since 1852, any more 
 than the rest of the Andover Professors 
 have. Undoubtedly Stuart and Balfour 
 have both long rejoiced that the former de- 
 creases and the latter increases as far as 
 dogmatic theology is concerned. They are 
 both always adjusting their creeds to the 
 larger knowledge and life. 
 
 In 1877, Balfour's body having been in 
 its grave a quarter of a century, Canon 
 Farrar stood in the pulpit of Westminster 
 Abbey and preached a sermon on "Hell, what 
 it is not," and lo, Walter Balfour lives again, 
 reincarnated. In this sermon Farrar spoke 
 a sentence that caught the ear of the world. 
 Here is his sentence: 
 
 "Now I ask you, my brethren, where would be 
 those popular teachings about hell, — the kind of 
 teachings which I have quoted to you and described 
 — if we calmly and deliberately, by substituting the 
 true translations, erased from our English Bibles, 
 as being inadequate or erroneous, or disputed ren- 
 
 78 
 
HELL 
 
 derings, the three words, 'hell,' 'damnation,' and 
 'everlasting?' Yet I say unhesitatingly, I say 
 claiming the fullest right to speak on this point, I 
 say with the calmest and most unflinching sense 
 of responsibility, I say standing here in the sight of 
 my God and my Saviour, and it may be of the angels 
 and spirits of the dead — that not one of these three 
 expressions ought to stand any longer in our Eng- 
 lish Bibles, and that being, in our present accepta- 
 tion of them, in the notion that is which all unedu- 
 cated persons attach to them, simply mistransla- 
 tions, they most unquestionably will not stand un- 
 explained in the revised version of the Bible, if the 
 revisers have understood their duty." 
 
 All this is just what Walter Balfour said 
 twenty-five years before, only he said it 
 in shorter and better English sentences. 
 Universalists waited for a quarter of a cen- 
 tury for a Canon of the Church of England 
 to say, in a way that made the world listen, 
 what their own Balfour said first. 
 
 The revisers to whom Parrar referred 
 were the English and American scholars, 
 then at work together, revising the King 
 James Version of 1611 into the Revised Bible 
 published in 1885; and it is interesting to 
 note what these scholars did on the points 
 Farrar named. The fact is, however, that 
 the Revised Bible of 1885, while an improve- 
 ment on the King James in some ways, was 
 inferior to it in other ways, and has never 
 come into general use. That version of 1885 
 
 79 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 being published, the English scholars dis- 
 banded. 
 
 The American scholars, however, kept 
 together and continued their careful studies. 
 The result was the American Standard Ver- 
 sion of 1901. Although this American Bible 
 is not final or perfect, it is the best existing 
 translation of the original Scriptures into 
 English that has yet been made, with any- 
 large body of scholarship behind it. 
 
 Since 1901 several scholarly Orthodox 
 individuals have translated the original 
 Greek New Testament into our English 
 speech, the most successful perhaps being 
 Moffatt and Weymouth. These translations 
 of the Bible are put into the hands of the 
 students to-day in all liberal Orthodox 
 seminaries, as acceptable. 
 
 This American Standard Version and the 
 translations by Moffatt and Weymouth are 
 what we refer to as the New Bible. 
 
 By the Old Bible we mean the King 
 James version of 1611. The interesting fact 
 is that this New Bible concedes every point 
 that Balfour and Farrar advocated. In the 
 Old Testament of the New Bible, the word 
 "hell" does not once occur. In the New Tes- 
 tament of the American Bible it occurs thir- 
 teen times in the text, but each time in the 
 
 80 
 
HELL 
 
 marginal notes gives the true original word, 
 as Farrar said it should do. In Moffatt and 
 Weymouth, however, the word "hell" is not 
 once used, not even in margins. 
 
 This fact is not known as it should be. 
 There is no Concordance of the New Bible. 
 All existing English Concordances are of the 
 Old Bible. Nearly all the Sunday School 
 lessons, and printed explanations of Scrip- 
 ture for our children, refer only to the Old 
 Bible. The Old Bible is still the text read 
 from most pulpits, and insistently used by 
 revivalists. All the published debates of our 
 fathers are based on the Old Bible. 
 
 Age has endeared it to millions, its words 
 are familiar, its English hard to improve. 
 The result is that the people know little or 
 nothing about the New Bible, if indeed they 
 know much of any. As far as the words and 
 phrases that Balfour and Farrar referred to, 
 the Old Bible still keeps the popular mind in 
 the greatest possible ignorance. Universal- 
 ists should insist on the New Bible, and see to 
 it that every person knows the facts that 
 Balfour stood for. If a preacher prefers the 
 Old Bible for his pulpit services, he should at 
 least, as he reads, translate or use correctly 
 and intelligently the words that Farrar spoke 
 of. The truth is easily accessible and per- 
 fectly simple. 
 
 81 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 The word "hell" in the Old Bible is 
 always a translation of some one of four 
 original words. The four words are "sheol," 
 "hades," "tartarus" and "gehenna." All 
 these are now perfectly good English words. 
 
 Any intelligent person that has access to 
 an unabridged dictionary can find out what 
 these four words mean, as easily as he can 
 find out the meaning of any other English 
 words. The definitions given in the un- 
 abridged dictionary are sometimes such as 
 are made by old school .Orthodoxy, to be sure, 
 but a careful study of all the meanings given 
 makes the matter clear enough. If by the 
 word "hell" we mean a literal lake of mate- 
 rial fire, into which the wicked are cast, and 
 where they are kept alive for endless tor- 
 ture, as the popular mind has always thought 
 of the word, then nothing is clearer than the 
 fact that not one of the four original words 
 ever meant "hell" and that not that word, or 
 any other single English word, can truly 
 translate the original. That is what Balfour 
 and Farrar claimed, and that is what the 
 New Bible concedes. Take a brief glance at 
 the facts about the four original words. The 
 Old Testament word is "sheol." It occurs 
 sixty-four times. In the Old Bible it was 
 translated twenty-nine times by the English 
 
 82 
 
HELL 
 
 word "grave," three times by "pit" and 
 thirty-two times by "hell." In the New Bible 
 sheol is not translated at all, but the original 
 word is printed in the text the whole sixty- 
 four times exactly as Farrar and Balfour 
 said it should be. 
 
 So in the New Bible "hell" does not occur 
 once in the entire Old Testament. It may 
 be still pertinent to ask the question, "If the 
 doctrine of hell is as important as revivalists 
 and preachers of the old type claim that it 
 is, how could God let mankind go in igno- 
 rance of it down to the time of our New 
 Testament?" 
 
 The next word to notice is "hades." 
 This is a Greek word occurring only in the 
 New Testament, and there eleven times. 
 The Old Bible translated this word ten times 
 by "hell" and once by "grave." 
 
 Even the King James translators could 
 not bring themselves to say when they 
 reach 1 Cor. 15:55, "O hell, where is thy 
 victory," so they used the word "grave," and 
 the New Bible does the same, or uses the 
 word "death." In the other ten passages 
 where "hades" is used it is not translated at 
 all, but brought over as an English word, as 
 it should be. Anyone can look up the word 
 "hades" in any good English dictionary and 
 
 83 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 ascertain its meaning. It certainly never 
 meant "hell." 
 
 It may be interesting to note that the 
 Bible never said that the rich man was in 
 "hell," but in "hades," which is a very dif- 
 ferent idea. 
 
 The third word that the Old Bible trans- 
 lated "hell" is "tartarus." The one and only 
 time that word occurs in any Bible is in 
 2 Peter, 2:4. For some unknown reason, 
 when the American Revisers came to this 
 passage, they departed from their excellent 
 plan by which they had brought sheol and 
 hades untranslated over into the English 
 text, and they rendered "tartarus" by "hell." 
 However, they printed in the marginal note 
 the explanation, "or tartarus," so no reader 
 need be perplexed. Moffatt and Weymouth, 
 with more consistency, print the original 
 word in the text, as they should. Any dic- 
 tionary defines this word clearly. Whatever 
 Peter meant by it he certainly did not mean 
 "hell," as he says plainly that it was a dark 
 place where the wicked awaited judgment, 
 and so no finality at all. 
 
 The last of the four words which the 
 Bible translated "hell" is "gehenna." This 
 is a compound of two words, one of which 
 means land or valley, the other word being 
 
 84 
 
HELL 
 
 Hinnom, a family name. Any reader of the 
 Old Testament can learn all it teaches about 
 the Valley of Hinnom, by reading, carefully, 
 Joshua 15 :8 and 2 Kings 23 :10 and Jeremiah 
 7:31, and verses following. The valley was 
 originally beautiful, but, for reasons Jere- 
 miah makes clear, it became an abhorred 
 spot. At the time of Jesus it was the symbol 
 of sin and its consequences. The Jews un- 
 derstood the reference; in addressing the 
 Gentiles the word was probably never used. 
 
 The word "gehenna" occurs twelve 
 times, and in the Old Bible was invariably 
 translated "hell." James used it once, when 
 he said the tongue was an unruly member 
 set on fire of gehenna. The other eleven 
 times — really, counting repetitions in the 
 Gospels, it is only eight times — the word was 
 used by Jesus himself. This fact has made 
 gehenna the most impressive of the four 
 words. 
 
 The word is not found in the Septuagint, 
 nor the Apocrypha, nor in any classical 
 Greek author, and was never used by Paul, 
 nor Peter, nor John, nor, with the exception 
 noted of James, by any New Testament 
 writer. 
 
 One can only wonder, if the fact that 
 Jesus alone used the word seemed as im- 
 
 85 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 pressive to them as it does to us, why it is 
 not used everywhere in the New Testament. 
 The Old Bible always translates the word 
 "hell." The American Bible does the same, 
 but always explains in the marginal note, "or 
 gehenna." Weymouth and Moffatt follow 
 their invariable rule with all the four words, 
 and do not translate at all, but print in the 
 text the originals. Any good English dic- 
 tionary will inform the reader what gehenna 
 means, although Universalists are likely to 
 think that the definitions are sometimes 
 given an unwarranted orthodox slant. 
 
 Here is the conclusion of the whole mat- 
 ter then. The old word "hell" has gone out 
 of the New Bible except that it appears in 
 the American Version thirteen times, where 
 the original word is always given in the 
 marginal note. From Weymouth and 
 Moffatt it has disappeared entirely, and 
 everywhere the original words are printed in 
 the text and left untranslated. 
 
 Modern Universalists and liberals often 
 use the word in a sense of their own, as 
 Sherman's statement that "War is Hell," or 
 Dr. Newton's, when he discourses so truly in 
 his book on "The Mercies of Hell," or Dr. 
 Adams, who insists that he "believes in hells 
 because he has seen so many of them." 
 
 86 
 
HELL 
 
 Probably these genial Liberals are using the 
 word in a sense that fairly well translates 
 the original words. But they are sure 
 always to be misunderstood. It is a serious 
 question if they would not do better to drop 
 a word that has gathered around it such ter- 
 ribly false and wicked popular meanings to 
 a large portion of mankind. 
 
 Has the New Bible, in thus either drop- 
 ping "hell" entirely, or else giving the true 
 word always in the margin, made any dif- 
 ference about the facts of sin and its se- 
 quences? It has made this most vital and 
 important difference: It has added im- 
 mensely to the solemnity and impressiveness 
 of these facts. 
 
 The Old Bible, undeservedly,|butnone the 
 less truly, had come to mean to millions that 
 the sequences of sin could be postponed or 
 even evaded. These sequences were thought 
 by many to be artificial, arbitrary, escapable, 
 revengeful, hateful, cruel, useless, endless 
 and hopeless. Because of these dreadful 
 misapprehensions, the world forgot the im- 
 pressive truth about punishment for sin, or 
 else treated it lightly as a flippant joke or as 
 a profane oath. 
 
 The world has no greater need than that 
 of a real revival of the conviction of the cer- 
 
 87 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 tainty of just retribution for sin. The New 
 Bible, by bringing back the old impressive 
 symbolic words, enables the thoughtful 
 preacher or teacher to drive home to the con- 
 sciences of men the truth about sin and its 
 sequences. 
 
 This truth is that the sequences are re- 
 lated to the sin, as reaping is to sowing. 
 These sequences are not delayed, evaded or 
 forgotten. Our fathers at Winchester de- 
 clared that holiness and happiness are in- 
 separably connected, which in their minds of 
 course implied that sin and unhappiness are 
 also bound together. Cause and effect are 
 the modern account of sin and its results. 
 The old evil word "hell" should be left out 
 of our vocabularies. 
 
 In the popular mind it involves the most 
 dangerous conclusions. Well done, Walter 
 Balfour! Well done, Canon Farrar! Uni- 
 versalists salute you. The New Bible for 
 the New Age admits your noble contention 
 that the word "hell" has outlived its useful- 
 ness if it ever had any, and should now be 
 forever dismissed from buman speech. 
 
 88 
 
X. DAMNATION 
 
 What a profane word to print as the 
 heading of a chapter in a modern book. For 
 a long time mothers have washed out the 
 children's mouths with soap to punish them 
 for uttering this word, and to make them re- 
 member never to do it again. The angry 
 child, however, who had never heard of any 
 Bible but the old King J^mes version, might 
 truthfully have made what would seem like 
 a good defence by affirming that he was only 
 using a good Bible word, which the minis- 
 ters use often. So things reached that 
 strange pass where the Bible and the preach- 
 ers taught the children to say a word which 
 fathers and mothers punished them for 
 using. In King James's time the word had 
 not taken on such an ugly meaning and was 
 not counted as profane.^ It still has its uses 
 in books on law. 
 
 Damnation is one of the three words 
 which Farrar said would not longer be in 
 our English Bible if the revisers understood 
 their duty, and that was what Balfour said. 
 Balfour, in his First and Second Inquiries, 
 had given all who would read him a complete 
 account of the word "hell," and also of this 
 word "damnation," as used in the Bible. 
 
 89 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 Let us see how it is in the New Bible with 
 these bad words "damned," "damnable" 
 and "damnation." 
 
 The plain truth is that even in the Old 
 Bible, while the originals of these words 
 occur about 214 times, they were invariably 
 translated correctly by the words "judge" or 
 "condemn," with the strange exception of 
 only fifteen texts. Just why the scholars of 
 1611 translated the original words correctly 
 about two hundred times, and then went out 
 of their way to translate them fifteen times 
 by "damn" or its cognate words, is a mystery. 
 Of course, it is to be remembered always, as 
 has been said, that the words did not have 
 the ugly sound to their ears that they have 
 taken on in our day. 
 
 The interesting fact is that Balfour and 
 Farrar have come to have their way abso- 
 lutely here, and the words do not even once 
 occur in the New Bible. 
 
 Countless people and families to-day have 
 never known the Bible, or if they ever read 
 it, have dismissed it from their lives. This 
 is an irreparable loss both for individual 
 character and for family life. Before they 
 dismiss or ignore this best and greatest re- 
 ligious literature, they should at least hear it 
 rightly read. Any teacher or preacher who 
 
 90 
 
DAMNATION 
 
 to-day reads in public the Old Bible, and 
 speaks aloud the word which heads this chap- 
 ter, is not only false to the real Bible, but 
 misses and obscures its most impressive 
 meanings. 
 
 The Bible, rightly translated, is im- 
 mensely more useful than any version can 
 possibly be where we hold to the words be- 
 cause they are good English or familiar to 
 our ears, when such words do not truly say 
 what the original writers meant to say. 
 
 It takes only a page to look at the whole 
 fifteen times that the Old Bible said 
 "damned," "damnation," or "damnable," 
 and to see clearly how much more impressive 
 the true translations, "judge" or "con- 
 demn," are. 
 
 The writer of 2 Peter did not say "dam- 
 nable heresies," or "their damnation slum- 
 bereth not," but he did say "destructive 
 heresies," or fatal divisions, and "their 
 condemnation slumbereth not." It is far 
 more useful for all of us to be taught that 
 moral and ethical heresies are destructive, 
 and that judgment for them slumbereth 
 not, that it is not postponed, than it is to try 
 to scare us with a pagan idea of a lake of 
 fire in some future existence. 
 
 In Matt. 23:14 and Mark 12:40, and 
 
 91 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 Luke 20 :47, the words "greater damnation," 
 which do not translate to us what Jesus said, 
 are far less impressive than the "greater 
 condemnation" or "severer punishment," 
 which give us his true meaning. 
 
 The "damnation of hell" which the Old 
 Bible prints in Matt. 23 :33, is far less force- 
 ful than "the judgment of gehenna," which 
 is what Jesus said. Some Jews may have 
 understood Jesus to mean, by gehenna, lit- 
 eral material fire in a future world. It is 
 certain, however, that many did not so un- 
 derstand him, and it is certain that to-day 
 the material figure of gehenna, used as a 
 symbol of the spiritual law of the awful and 
 certain sequences of sin in the soul, finds an 
 assent in the minds of the thoughtful, who 
 cannot for a moment accept the word as the 
 name of a material place in a future world 
 of spirits. 
 
 In Mark 3:29, the Old Bible said that 
 some were "in danger of eternal damnation," 
 but surely it is truer to the meaning of Jesus 
 to say, with Weymouth, that some are 
 guilty of the sin of the ages. 
 
 A "resurrection to judgment" is far truer 
 than a "resurrection to damnation" can be, 
 as the Old Bible printed it in John 5 :29. 
 
 In Romans, third chapter, and also in 
 
 92 
 
DAMNATION 
 
 chapter thirteen, the Old Bible said of some 
 that their damnation was just, or that they 
 should receive damnation. Surely the New 
 Bible is better here when it says condemna- 
 tion or judgment. 
 
 It is, indeed, a fearsome thing to say that 
 a person who partakes of the communion 
 incorrectly eats and drinks damnation, as the 
 Old Bible does say in 1 Cor. 11 :29. But it is 
 always true that any person who enters into 
 that or any other service with low and im- 
 proper motives, is "judged" for it, as the 
 New Bible declares. It sounds harsh to hear 
 Paul, in 1 Tim. 5:12, saying what the Old 
 Bible puts in his mouth, that young women 
 who marry again will be damned, and then 
 a few verses further on advising them to 
 marry. But it is true, proved by all human 
 experience, that either men or women who 
 marry unadvisedly or lightly, for improper 
 motives, are "condemned." 
 
 It is hard to believe that all those un- 
 believers that the Old Bible tells us of in the 
 doubtful passage, Mark 16:16, shall be 
 damned, because they cannot do the miracles 
 listed in the following verses. 
 
 But it is amply proved that all who will 
 not believe the truth are condemned, and 
 "this is their condemnation, that Light has 
 
 93 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 come into the world, and they loved dark- 
 ness rather than light, because their deeds 
 are evil." 
 
 So it is in every case where the Old Bible 
 used the dreadful words that have come to 
 sound so profane to modern ears. The New 
 Bible omits them every one and prints the 
 true English translations. In so doing the 
 New Bible gains immeasurably in impres- 
 siveness and in its power to awaken care- 
 less and sinful men to a conviction of their 
 profound spiritual peril. 
 
 No person with a grain of intelligence 
 will find in this fact that the New Bible omits 
 "damned" and its cognates ground for saying 
 that it makes light of sin. The true words, 
 which the New Bible uses, are vastly more 
 searching and more solemn. 
 
 Nothing is gained, much is lost, by keep- 
 ing the old false words before the people. 
 Now is the judgment of this world. To-day 
 all human motives must be put beside the 
 motives of Jesus. If they are of his Way, 
 they stand approved ; if they are of any other 
 way, their judgment, or condemnation, 
 begins at once, and never ceases until the 
 wrong motives are destroyed and the right 
 motives accepted. 
 
 94 
 
DAMNATION 
 
 Balfour and Farrar were right about the 
 words this chapter deals with. They were 
 men of the Way. 
 
 95 
 
XL ENDLESS TORMENT 
 
 The third word that Canon Farrar in his 
 great sermon, with great solemnity, de- 
 clared should be expunged from our English 
 Bible, is the word "everlasting." Presum- 
 ably he meant that that word should not be 
 applied to sin and to its punishments as 
 necessarily meaning endless. 
 
 That was what Walter Balfour affirmed. 
 But that the word should never be used in the 
 Bible, in any connection, is not a contention 
 that Universalists usually make, and can 
 hardly be a point that Farrar would defend. 
 
 Universalists may be mildly interested in 
 the fact that the word "endless" was never 
 used but twice in any English Bible, and in 
 neither case was it applied to punishment. 
 In Timothy we read of "endless genealogies" 
 and in Hebrews the beautiful words, "the 
 power of an endless life," and these are the 
 only times when the Bible calls anything 
 endless. 
 
 As to "everlasting," while it was many 
 times applied to life and to salvation, it is 
 worth noting that the Bible never once spoke 
 of everlasting death, or everlasting hell. Had 
 Balfour and Farrar had our New Bible they 
 might have truly affirmed that the phrase 
 
 96 
 
ENDLESS TORMENT 
 
 "everlasting punishment" never once 
 occurs. The fact is that the New Bible 
 almost uniformly substitutes the word "eter- 
 nal" for the older word "everlasting." 
 
 Nothing more clearly shows the useless- 
 ness of any modern concordance to a reader 
 of the New Bible than does a study of this 
 word "everlasting." According to any con- 
 cordance you will find this word twenty-six 
 times in the New Testament. But the truth 
 is that in the New Testament of the New 
 Bible you will find the word "everlasting" 
 only once, this single example being in 
 Jude 6. 
 
 Jude thought that the fallen angels were 
 kept in "everlasting" bonds unto the judg- 
 ment of the great day. Apparently the ever- 
 lasting bonds were not in his mind endless, 
 as the great day was the limit of them. Uni- 
 versalists have never claimed him as one of 
 them, with any great confidence. But, on 
 the other hand, when we read Jude as Wey- 
 mouth translates him, we find him affirming 
 "the fire of the ages" as all Universalists 
 do. That such fires may go out after they 
 have performed their office Jude does not 
 deny. 
 
 Excepting Jude, the New Testament of 
 the New Bible always uses the word "eter- 
 
 97 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 nal." The words mean the same but the uni- 
 form translation is an improvement. 
 
 Take, for instance, the text in Matt. 25, 
 about which so much controversy has waged. 
 In the Old Bible it read, "These shall go away 
 into everlasting punishment, but the right- 
 eous into eternal life." The American ver- 
 sion prints, "These shall go away into eter- 
 nal punishment, but the righteous into eter- 
 nal life," which is a better version than the 
 old. 
 
 But the truest version of all is that of 
 Weymouth, "These shall go away into the 
 punishment of the ages, and the righteous 
 into the life of the ages." 
 
 This last translation is the one for which 
 Balfour contended, all his life, and Uni- 
 versalists think that it truly renders the 
 original. 
 
 The "punishment of the ages" is a far 
 more searching and expressive phrase than 
 is "endless" or "everlasting" or "eternal" 
 punishment, with the popular meanings 
 these words have come to have. 
 
 The mind of the original writer is the 
 best mind to look for when you read the 
 Bible. 
 
 That sin leads individuals, and groups of 
 individuals we call society, into the"punish- 
 
 98 
 
ENDLESS TORMENT 
 
 ment of the ages," is exactly what all honest 
 observers know and believe, and the words 
 are none too strong to express the facts. 
 
 The "time" words of the Bible are com- 
 monly the word "aion," or some form of that 
 word. The Old Testament Hebrew word is 
 a different one, but as in the Septuagint that 
 word was almost uniformly translated by 
 some form of aion, we may say that, for the 
 purposes of the English reader, that word is 
 the Bible "time" word. 
 
 Now "aion" and "aionian" are no 
 longer simply Greek words, from a dead 
 language. With a slight change in spelling 
 they have become perfectly good English 
 words, which anybody can find, any time, in 
 any good English dictionary. 
 
 For instance, referring to the Century 
 Dictionary, one will find the spelling "eon" 
 and "eonian," and every intelligent speaker 
 of English knows what these words mean. 
 Eon means "an age, a long period of exist- 
 ence, a lifetime, a long space of time, eter- 
 nity, a secular period either definite, or lim- 
 ited to the duration of something, as a dis- 
 pensation, or the universe, used as equiva- 
 lent to an age, era, or cycle, and sometimes 
 to eternity," so reads the Century Diction- 
 ary. The adjective form of the word is 
 
 99 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 eonian, and the meaning given is ' 'lasting for 
 an age, perpetual, eternal, lasting for eons 
 or ages, everlasting." As an example of the 
 usage of these words, Whittier's poem, "An- 
 drew Rykman's Prayer," is quoted : 
 
 "Some sweet morning yet, in God's 
 
 Dim, aeonian periods, 
 Joyful, I shall wake to see 
 
 Those I love, who rest in Thee." 
 
 These words had all /these varied meaningsin 
 Bible times precisely as they have to-day. 
 They have as many shades of meaning as 
 most other English words have. They may 
 take on the meaning of endlessness; they 
 more commonly mean a limited period of 
 time. 
 
 In Isaiah 63 :12, the name of God is called 
 eonian, and in Deuteronomy 15 :17 the same 
 word is applied to the life of a slave. No 
 one can affirm that the Bible teaches, or that 
 the church fathers taught, "endless" punish- 
 ment, simply because they call such punish- 
 ment eonian. The word is applied to many 
 things that end. Every intelligent reader 
 judges the time length meant by noting the 
 object to which the words are applied. The 
 eonian God, or Christ, or the Way of Life, 
 mean endless, not simply on account of the 
 adjective used, but also because our minds 
 
 100 
 
ENDLESS TORMENT 
 
 cannot think of them as ending. On the 
 other hand, hills are not endless, although 
 the Bible calls them eonian, because every- 
 body knows that erosive forces are constantly 
 levelling the hills. Eternal or eonian punish- 
 ment can only be thought of as endless by 
 assuming that it has no purpose. If the pun- 
 ishments of God have a loving and healing 
 purpose, they must continue until that pur- 
 pose is accomplished, and then must cease. 
 
 That eons pass without this gracious pur- 
 pose being accomplished, we must, alas, a I 
 rnit, but that God is endlessly defeated Uni- 
 versalists will not admit. 
 
 Farrar declared that he often heard the 
 same old argument that Balfour and Ballou 
 were always meeting, namely, that since both 
 heaven and hell, reward and punishment, are 
 described by the same word, eonian, they 
 must last the same length of time. They say 
 that if eonian punishment is not endless then 
 eonian life is not either. This strikes the 
 Universalist as about as convincing an ar- 
 gument as it would be to assert that when a 
 hat and a monument are both called "high" 
 they must therefore be the same height. 
 Will any reader of the last verses of Romans, 
 when he reads times that are past called 
 eternal, and in the next verse finds God 
 
 101 
 
 S 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 called eternal, desire to argue that they must 
 last the same length of time, because they 
 are described by the same adjective? 
 
 Farrar challenged his critics, who in- 
 sisted that the same word must always mean 
 the same thing, to apply that opinion, if they 
 dared to, to the text, "As in Adam all die, 
 even so in Christ shall all be made alive." 
 
 Thus we see that the New Bible, rightly 
 translating original words, never teaches 
 endless, nor everlasting, nor eternal tor- 
 ment or punishment. It does always 
 teach the infinitely more impressive 
 truth of "the punishment of the ages." 
 
 The fine phrase "eternal life" occurs 
 forty-two times in the American Bible, but 
 the term eternal death never occurred even 
 once in any Bible. Always do Weymouth 
 and Moifatt translate the terms "the life of 
 the ages" and "the punishment of the ages." 
 In both of these every rational being must 
 always solemnly believe. 
 
 Surprisingly, therefore, most gratify- 
 ingly, does the New Bible recognize and en- 
 dorse the main ideas that Walter Balfour 
 lived teaching, and died believing, many 
 years ago. 
 
 102 
 
XII. THE END OF THE WORLD 
 
 One of our newer American poets has 
 woven into his verse the idea, common in 
 some quarters, that this world is soon to 
 come to an end, "some say by ice, and some 
 by fire." 
 
 Some scientific writers think that they 
 have observed a certain indifference to all 
 attempts to better this human race, arising 
 from the belief that the world is cooling and 
 that in three or four thousand years more it 
 will be too cold to admit of human life, and 
 that that time is too short to accomplish any- 
 thing in the slow evolution of mankind, and 
 so efforts for betterment are useless and 
 hopeless. 
 
 Often this indifference sinks into despair, 
 or into absolute brute selfishness, many ask- 
 ing, "What's the use?" This conclusion may 
 or may not be scientific, but it is always easy 
 for indolent and selfish spirits. Only the 
 noble resist it. 
 
 Professor Chamberlain, of the University 
 of Chicago, has recently sharply rebuked 
 these people, by emphasizing his own convic- 
 tion that this earth will be here, and be hab- 
 itable by man, not simply thousands, but eons 
 of years yet to be. To him there is no scien- 
 tific basis whatever for expecting an imme- 
 diate end of the world. 
 
 103 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 However, this expectation of the end of 
 the world has come far more from theologi- 
 cal teachings than it has from any scientific 
 knowledge, as far as the popular mind is 
 concerned. 
 
 The King James Bible teaches the end of 
 the world in seven different passages, and re- 
 fers to the "last day," the "great day" and 
 "the end" many times more. It is true that, 
 all their lives, Balfour and Ballou and our 
 spiritual fathers contended that these texts 
 did not refer to the material planet, earth, at 
 all, but to the end of an age, and undoubtedly 
 they convinced a few that this is the truth. 
 
 But as long as "the end of the world" 
 stood there in the Bible seven times recur- 
 ring, and preachers, even Universalist 
 preachers, read it just as that old Bible had 
 it, because it was good English, or sacred, so 
 long the millions believed it literally, and 
 accused these fathers of ours of wresting 
 scripture to their own destruction, when they 
 questioned this popular meaning. 
 
 Does not Jesus say in Matthew, thirteenth 
 chapter, and in other places, that "the har- 
 vest is the end of the world," and "so shall 
 it be at the end of the world ? " Paul says,in 
 1 Cor. 10:11, that certain things are written 
 for admonition to those "upon whom the end 
 
 104 
 
THB END OP THE WORLD 
 
 of the world has come," and Heb. 9 :26 affirms 
 that Christ hath now appeared once, "in the 
 end of the world," to put away sin. 
 
 As long as men read the Old Bible, simply 
 because it is venerable and sacred, and be- 
 cause its English is hardi to improve, so long 
 will the common man either expect the end ;of 
 the world, or else throw his Bible into the 
 junk heap. 
 
 Turning now to the American Standard 
 Bible, we find a peculiar fact. In the pas- 
 sages just quoted from Corinthians and from 
 Hebrews, we find these^revisers saying "the 
 end of the ages," which is exactly what our 
 fathers, for a century and more, have said 
 that it should be. But when these same re- 
 visers come to the same words in the Gospels, 
 they print the old translation, "the end of 
 the world," although in each case they do 
 print in a marginal note, "or the consumma- 
 tion of the age." They were scared lest the 
 end of the world would come, if they departed 
 from the old false words, "the end of the 
 world," in the text, although with much fear 
 and trembling they did admit the truth in a 
 margin. They moved a little, however, and 
 Universalists are thankful for even small 
 concessions. 
 
 Weymouth, however, invariably — there 
 
 105 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 is no exception — prints "the close of the 
 age," ending the Gospel of Matthew with t the 
 beautiful words, "And remember, I am with 
 you always, day by day, until the close of 
 the age." 
 
 It is therefore now conceded that the 
 Bible really never once speaks of this planet 
 earth as ending, but that seven times it uses 
 the phrase "the consummation of the age," 
 or better, in Weymouth, "the close of the 
 age." 
 
 If the Universalists had really concen- 
 trated on their special job, instead of wait- 
 ing for Weymouth and other Orthodox 
 scholars to attend to it for them,bythistime 
 every child born would have known before 
 he got out of the "teen" age that the words 
 "hell," "damnation," "endless torment," and 
 "end of the world," are not one of them 
 properly in the Bible. The Bible, rightly 
 translated, teaches none of the horrifying 
 falsehoods that have made this world a cham- 
 ber of horrors instead of our Father's House, 
 and the insane asylum of the universe in- 
 stead of God's beautiful home for His ra- 
 tional children, which He designed it to be. 
 
 What is meant by "the close of the age" 
 which the Bible teaches?. Many devout Jews 
 at the time of Jesus, and 'for some time before 
 
 106 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 
 
 and after his day, lived in expectation of a 
 Messiah. Such Jews divided time into three 
 divisions. The time before this Messiah was 
 the present age, the time when he arrived 
 was the close of the age^nd the time follow- 
 ing his coming was the "new" or the "Mes- 
 sianic" or the "Christ" age. 
 
 Running through the Bible are such 
 phrases as that day, last day, last days, last 
 time, last times, great day, day of wrath, day 
 of the Lord, and so on. 
 
 To the popular mind, knowing only the 
 Old Bible, and the common way of present- 
 ing that from the pulpit and in the Sunday 
 Schools, these expressions have all come to 
 mean the day one dies and goes up into the 
 sky to there stand before the judgment seat 
 of Christ, from which they will be sent to 
 an endless material heaven or hell. But 
 these words as used in the Bible never 
 meant these things at all. 
 
 The "day" was not when you died and 
 went up into the sky, but it always meant the 
 day when Jesus came to you as the Christ, 
 or the Messiah. Nowhere in the Bible is this 
 day far postponed. That present age, in 
 which the Jews — God's chosen people they 
 are certain — are oppressed, is very soon to 
 end, and a new heavenly age, a Messianic, or 
 Christ, age is to be ushered in. That gen- 
 
 107 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 eration shall not pass until it comes, some 
 s:anding there shall see it come. 
 
 That expectation took many forms. The 
 Psalmist exultingly sang, "For he cometh, 
 he cometh, to judge the earth." In Daniel 
 God and His Angels are to suddenly appear 
 in three and a half years from the writer's 
 time, to destroy that present bad world 
 order, or age, under which Jews are suffer- 
 ing, and set up the new age, in which they 
 should gloriously rule the world from Jeru- 
 salem. Haggai thinks that Zerubbabel is this 
 Messiah. Many thought Judas Maccabeus 
 was the one. Devout Jews looked for the 
 Day, with a confidence surpassing the zeal 
 with which the Germans exulted in that feel- 
 ing, previous to 1918, and not a few of them 
 in their secret souls still exult in it. Often 
 the Jews looked for "The Day" in the same 
 militaristic spirit that too much animated 
 Germany. Sometimes they thought it was 
 ethical, and would come when they repented 
 of their sins. Sometimes it seemed to them 
 to be ritualistic, delayed until they rebuilt 
 the Temple and established the ritual ser- 
 vice, under a holy priesthood. Sometimes it 
 was truly a spiritual expectation, as in the 
 words, "Remember I am with you day by 
 day, 
 
 108 
 
 >> 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 
 
 Sometimes they expected a fighter, a 
 lineal son of David, and sometimes they 
 thought the Messiah would be a supernat- 
 ural man let down from heaven into their 
 midst. But whichever of these many forms 
 the Messianic expectation took, it never 
 meant dying and going up into the sky, as 
 it has so strangely come to mean with many 
 preachers and teachers to-day. 
 
 In the Gospels, the end of the age is con- 
 nected with the destruction of Jerusalem and 
 the Temple, and the attending awful calam- 
 ities that came on the Jewish people then. 
 
 The New Testament exhortation is to 
 watch for this day, which comes like a thief 
 in the night. Be prepared for that coming, 
 as wise virgins take oil in their lamps when 
 the bridegroom comes to the wedding feast. 
 
 In most of its shapes there was not an 
 atom of Universalism, nor of the religion of 
 Jesus, in these Messianic expectations. When 
 the Messiah came he was to torment and 
 destroy and take vengeance on the enemies 
 of God's elect. Not much is said about for- 
 giving these enemies, or loving those who 
 did them such sore evils. Knowing human 
 nature, it would have been a miracle if they 
 had expected that, and yet that miracle did 
 happen, and we know of scores of martyrs 
 
 109 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 whosuffered horribly and died with the won- 
 derful words of Jesus on their lips, "Father, 
 forgive them." But in some of its forms the 
 expectation of the end of that old world, or 
 age, or eon, was a crude and unholy appeal to 
 militarism and brute force, and revengeful 
 destruction. 
 
 Let us hope and believe, however, that 
 there was always a true elect, of the quiet 
 and devout, who saw the vision of the end of 
 that age of hate and war, and the coming in 
 of the Christ age of justice and of love. But 
 whether the expected end of the world and 
 the coming of the Day was held crudely and 
 materially, or thoughtfully and spiritually, 
 all alike understood that it was not an event 
 to be long deferred. No one thought of it 
 as meaning to die and to go up into the sky 
 to meet Christ on a heavenly judgment seat, 
 The expectation was rather of a Christ and 
 from which souls are sent to heaven or hell, 
 all his holy angels coming to this earth, in 
 the generation then present, and establishing 
 his judgment seat here. No stranger per- 
 version of a great literature has been known 
 tv»an is this popular view that the Bible 
 teaches the end of this planet earth and a 
 transfer of all human and divine activities to 
 the skies. 
 
 no 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 
 
 The end of the world never meant the 
 end of this planet earth. To the Jew it 
 meant the end of the eon that saw him op- 
 pressed by foreign nations, and the coming 
 of the eon that made his people first on earth 
 and his city the center of the universe. 
 
 To some of the reporters of Jesus, the 
 end of the world meant the end of the eon 
 of Scribes and Pharisees, against whom 
 Jesus pronounced those awful woes in the 
 twenty-third chapter of Matthew, and the 
 destruction of their city and temple, and the 
 coming of the eon of Christ. In the book of 
 Revelation it meant the end of all who per- 
 secuted the Christians, and the setting up of 
 a Christian world. 
 
 The concept is often held in a material 
 ^elfish way as expecting a physical Christ, 
 to give material bliss to his friends and de- 
 struction of endless torture to his enemies. 
 
 The "end of the eon" concept also easily 
 lends itself to the finest expression of the 
 noblest human hopes. The soul of mankind 
 has always dreamed, and it yet dreams, of 
 the end of the wicked brute eons, and the 
 coming of the real Christ day. No well 
 taught man thinks of this as deferred until 
 death, or as happening in the sky. They 
 
 in 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 pray, 'Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done 
 on earth." 
 
 Tennyson was strictly in the spirit of this 
 best meaning of the Bible, when he wrote : 
 
 "Ring out old shapes of foul disease, 
 Ring out the narrowing lust of gold, 
 Ring out the thousand years of old. 
 Ring in the thousand years of peace. 
 
 "Ring in the valiant man and free, 
 The larger heart, the kindlier hand. 
 Ring out the darkness of the land, 
 Ring in the Christ that is to be." 
 
 Our Universalist fathers were given to 
 this fine poetic spiritualizing of the Bible 
 references to the end of the world. They 
 probably at times read these spiritual 
 meanings into words that the writer intend- 
 ed to have literal meanings^ 
 
 The end of the world was the end of all 
 sin, of all that was against God's will, and 
 the coming in of the age of the rule of Jesus 
 in every human soul. This was what Bal- 
 four and Ballou saw as they blazed their 
 pioneer path, which path shall yet widen 
 into the King's Highway. 
 
 Their mistakes, if they made them, were 
 generally somehow mistakes in the right 
 direction. 
 
 112 
 
XIII. THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS 
 
 As we have seen, the thoughtful reader 
 of the Bible finds himself in an atmosphere 
 of keen expectation and belief that an old eon 
 is closing; that the last days are here; that 
 Messiah or Christ is at the door; that the 
 new and glorious eon is even now to be 
 ushered in. The main question is, in the 
 New Testament, "Is Jesus this expected Mes- 
 siah or Christ ?" To believe in Jesus means 
 to believe that he is this Messiah, and to 
 believe this, saves. 
 
 The New Testament makers had much 
 difficulty in making the career of Jesus fit 
 any expectation they had ever had of what 
 the Messiah would be and do. 
 
 How could a teacher who was poor, who 
 was a servant of all, for peace and love and 
 forgiveness of enemies, and especially how 
 could one who was crucified, be the Christ? 
 No Messianic expectation had ever taken that 
 shape. They are sorely perplexed for a time. 
 
 This perplexity is seen almost at the be- 
 ginning of Jesus' career, when John sends 
 to ask him if he is really the Christ or are 
 they to look for another, and a closing word 
 is a despairing cry, "we were hoping that it 
 was he who was about to ransom Israel/' 
 
 113 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 But to the ordinary reader, almost with- 
 out any break, this perplexity and despair 
 changes to certainty. In some way, not 
 made very clear to us, they came to believe 
 that Jesus was the Messiah or Christ; that it 
 was necessary that he should suffer and die 
 and pass into the heavens ; but his stay there 
 is to be very brief, he is very soon to return 
 down from these heavens, with a shout, with 
 a trumpet, with all his holy angels with him, 
 and set up his judgment seat of power and 
 glory here in the earth. 
 
 This expectation is known as the doctrine 
 of the second coming of Jesus and it surely 
 was the expectation of all the New Testa- 
 ment writers, and in some form is the ex- 
 pectation of all Christians. 
 
 There are sharp differences of opinion as 
 to the time and the mannerof this comingof 
 Jesus and the setting up of his kingdom, but 
 the conviction that the Person of Jesus 
 comes, that he is a living and moving Pres- 
 ence in this world, and that he is evermore 
 to be such a living Presence until the king- 
 doms of this world become his kingdoms, 
 these convictions are the very soul of Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 This topic, which has filled volumes, can 
 hardly be condensed into a short chapter in 
 
 114 
 
THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS 
 
 a small book, but perhaps opinions of it can 
 be itemized. 
 
 The second coming of Jesus and the set- 
 ting up of his kingdom are usually con- 
 nected events; both these events are con- 
 nected with the destruction of Jerusalem and 
 the Temple, which occurred in the year 70 
 A. D. ; that generation to which Jesus spoke 
 was to see this. 
 
 Human opinions about the second com- 
 ing are that it is to be a visible, material, 
 physical, spectacular coming, yet to be, but 
 impending; or that Jesus and his disciples 
 were wholly mistaken and that there never 
 was and never will be any such coming as 
 they expected; or that Jesus meant a spir- 
 itual, personal coming or Presence, which 
 began then, is always going on, and will go 
 on to the end, when he shall deliver up the 
 kingdom to the Father, and God shall be all 
 in all. 
 
 Whichever of these views you take, you 
 can find some Bible texts to support you, and 
 some good people who agree with you. 
 
 The only view of the second coming of 
 Jesus that history shows has begun to hap- 
 pen, and that is forever happening and will 
 continue to happen until it accomplishes its 
 purpose, is the last view named above. 
 
 115 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 This view is that the second coming of 
 Jesus is his spiritual Presence, the Personal 
 Christ, with us always, even to the end. This 
 is the view that Universalists have always 
 held, and do hold yet. 
 
 It is an interesting study, to try to deter- 
 mine whether we to-day can count on this 
 idea of the second coming of Christ as spir- 
 itual, with the entire confidence that our 
 fathers taught, as Bible teaching. 
 
 Ballou and Balfour and Channing agreed 
 with the Orthodoxy of their day that there 
 could be no mistakes in the Bible. All the 
 language of Daniel and Revelation, and the 
 apocalyptic chapters of the Gospels, which 
 sometimes sounds to us so material, was 
 never mistaken, but is always to be inter- 
 preted as spiritual metaphor. To affirm, for 
 instance, that Paul was mistaken in 1 Thess. 
 4:16, when he declaredthat,beforehedied, 
 the Lord Himself was to come down out of 
 the heavens, with a shout and with a loud 
 trumpet, was blasphemy. Mistakes do not 
 occur in the Bible. Paul was not mistaken ; 
 he meant a spiritual Presence and Voice, 
 and so did all New Testament writers. 
 They made no mistakes. 
 
 Professor Burton expresses the best 
 
 116 
 
THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS 
 
 modern opinion which sets aside the view 
 of our fathers, as follows : 
 
 "The facts of history have shown that Paul was 
 in error in his teachings in 1 Thessalonians, about 
 the Lord coming in the clouds of heaven. It is a 
 palpable infidelity to truth to affirm that this teach- 
 ing is true ; it is a double error to transfer it to the 
 present time and to reaffirm it for our own day." 
 
 Modern scholarship, therefore, seems to 
 affirm that the writers of our New Testa- 
 ment expected an immediate second coming 
 of Jesus, as visible and material, and that 
 they were in error in this expectation. It 
 never happened that way, and it never will. 
 
 Much more important, however, than 
 what the writers of our New Testament, the 
 reporters of Jesus, thought, is the question of 
 what Jesus himself thought. 
 
 That Jesus was over the heads of his age, 
 and that his reporters, who wrote our New 
 Testament, were sometimes in error about 
 him, we may believe, although our fathers 
 strenuously denied it, but that Jesus himself 
 was mistaken about his kingdom, and about 
 the method and manner of his coming, is a 
 disturbing thought to most Universalists. 
 
 It is the opinion of considerable modern 
 Liberal Orthodox theology, however, that 
 Jesus was as much mistaken himself about 
 
 117 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 his second coming and the manner and 
 method of setting up his kingdom, as the 
 writers of the New Testament were. 
 
 If this be proved truth Universalists 
 must accept it, as nothing has authority over 
 us but truth, but it will require a rewriting 
 of theology from the ground up. Of course, 
 if Jesus was mistaken upon this very central 
 fact of his mission, he ceases to be the sec- 
 ond person of the Trinity, the very God. 
 This will not be disturbing to most Univer- 
 salists, who are commonly Unitarians on 
 this point. But it will disturb some Univer- 
 salists, who confidently affirm that "Jesus 
 Christ is God with us." In spite of protests 
 to the contrary, made by the Orthodox Lib- 
 eral scholars who support the view, the proof 
 that Jesus was mistaken about his coming 
 and his kingdom, will mean the re-writing 
 of our hymn books and liturgies. 
 
 A gentle and good teacher, but one who 
 was mistaken about his main point, is a far 
 cry from the Eternal Christ. 
 
 Devout Universalists will feel, as Dr. 
 Gordon expressed himself in a recent utter- 
 ance, to the effect that for a long time Ortho- 
 dox theology buried Jesus and that now 
 Higher Criticism is trying to do the same 
 thing. 
 
 118 
 
THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS 
 
 As a fact, however, who knows enough 
 about the actual words of Jesus to affirm that 
 he was mistaken about his kingdom and 
 about his coming? 
 
 Jesus never wrote a word, and never 
 asked any one else to do so. All we know 
 is what his reporters have handed to us, in 
 reports written from fifty to a hundred 
 years after his birth. We know that the 
 age and the reporters were possessed with a 
 belief in a crude, material, visible Messianic 
 kingdom. Was Jesus over the heads of these 
 reporters, or was he one with them in their 
 crude expectations of the Messiah and his 
 kingdom? The feeling of a thoughtful 
 reader must be that, while no man can be 
 sure that he has one word that Jesus actually 
 spoke, nevertheless he has in the New Tes- 
 tament a clear picture of a Person that has 
 moved the ages. 
 
 Careful scholars have found the layers, 
 in these reports of Jesus, from his earliest 
 teachings, rising to the latest parts of the 
 New Testament. Could a mistaken gentle- 
 man have inspired this New Testament 
 record, and grip the spirits of millions, as 
 Jesus has? 
 
 John said the Messiah was coming with 
 sifting fan and burning fire, and when Jesus 
 
 119 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 did not resort to these John sent and asked 
 him if he really was the Christ. Who was 
 mistaken, John or Jesus? A bit later the 
 reporters say that Jesus said that no braver 
 man than John had been born, but yet a child 
 in his kingdom understood it better than 
 John did. 
 
 The reporters say that Jesus fled into the 
 wilderness forty days, to struggle with the 
 Messianic idea. He decided, in those days, 
 not to be a profiteering Christ, changing 
 stones to bread, nor a spectacular Messiah, 
 leaping off the temple, nor a military Christ, 
 conquering all the world and its kingdoms 
 by arms. He must then have decided to be 
 the Spiritual Messiah. When did he drop 
 'lis high decision and revert to the common 
 Messianic crudities? 
 
 The reporters tell us that Jesus told them 
 that his kingdom was like a seed, like yeast 
 at work, like the growing corn, like the tree, 
 and that those who loved, and those who 
 served, were first in this kingdom. These 
 are surely not the words of a mistaken 
 teacher. When, then, did Jesus begin to 
 make his mistakes? 
 
 Well, the answer is offered to us that he 
 began to make his mistakes when he spoke 
 the "Little Apocalypse" found in Mark thir- 
 
 120 
 
THE SECOND COMING OP JESUS 
 
 teenth, and in Matthew twenty-fourth and 
 fifth, and in a few passages in Luke, but 
 hardly at all in John. Shall the weird ma- 
 terial utterances of these apocalypses out- 
 weigh all the sober, solemn words about his 
 kingdom and his Presence with us always, 
 found elsewhere in the records of his re- 
 porters? 
 
 Some of the language of his reporters in 
 the New Testament is plainly based on their 
 total misunderstanding of the intense meta- 
 phors which Jesus may likely have used in 
 the very language of the prophets of his 
 race. It was the perpetual plaint of the 
 Master that even those who had been so 
 long with him did not understand him. On 
 those Scribes and Pharisees who by religious 
 inheritance should have been the first to 
 understand and receive him, he pronounced 
 the most terrific woes that ever fell from lips 
 of flesh, because they would not enter his 
 kingdom themselves nor allow others to en- 
 ter. It could not have been a crude mate- 
 rialistic kingdom of force and militarism 
 he invited them to enter — into such a king- 
 dom they might indeed have been persuaded 
 — but the Spiritual Kingdom, led by the true 
 Christ or God, that they could not even see, 
 much less enter. Jesus mistaken ! Why, his 
 
 121 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 fine spiritual teachings, even as his reporters 
 caught them, have hardly yet been seriously 
 tried out. The test of the truth that Jesus 
 incarnated and expressed God is not specu- 
 lation as to whether he actually spoke this 
 word or that word as reported. The test is 
 rather to try to be such a Person as he was 
 and is, and see if it works. Let the Chris- 
 tain world bring the Presence, the Person of 
 Christ into its affairs, and if after fair trial 
 he fails to function, then indeed he was mis- 
 taken. He will not fail. We are mistaken; 
 Jesus the Christ was not mistaken. He is 
 always coming in his glory, and shall so come 
 until he delivers up the kingdom to the 
 Father, and God is all in all. 
 
 Our fathers did not speak finalities. 
 Modern Christian scholarship can set them 
 right on many points. But their conviction 
 that Jesus Christ was not mistaken about his 
 mission, and his kingdom, and his Person — 
 a Presence with us forever — Universalists 
 still maintain. 
 
 122 
 
XIV. THE WAY OF THE AGES 
 
 Any Universalist may write the closing 
 chapter of this book. In sober truth each 
 Universalist is writing it, perhaps not in let- 
 ters, but in the exhibition he makes of him- 
 self to those who are of the Way. One of the 
 beautiful prayers of the Bible is, "Search 
 me, God, and know my heart, try me and 
 know my thoughts, and see if there be any 
 wicked way in me, and lead me in the way 
 everlasting." 
 
 This Way everlasting is the Way of the 
 Ages when properly translated. It appears 
 that there are always two ways open to our 
 feet. One is the way of the wicked, the other 
 is the Way of the Ages. 
 
 The Psalmist declares that the way of the 
 wicked shall perish. That is a fine discrimi- 
 nation, which all good Universalists think 
 the Psalmist made intelligently and thought- 
 fully. He did not say that the wicked should 
 perish, but that their way should. Let us 
 hope that he is right, and that the "Great 
 Physician' ' does not kill his patients in his 
 efforts to cure them. The Way of the Ages 
 means a way that lasts forever, but the 
 glorious thing about it is not the time that it 
 lasts. The glorious thing about it is a certain 
 
 123 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 quality it possesses, that is it grows better all 
 the way. Most things we hold grow worse. 
 The tooth of time gnaws them. But this 
 Way of the Ages is always a better way than 
 it ever was before. The path of the just is 
 like a shining light that shines more and 
 more. 
 
 One of the names given the early Church 
 was The Way, Paul declaring that in his day 
 there was no small stir concerning the Way. 
 That was encouraging. The only hopeless 
 time and place is that in which there is no 
 stir about the Way, and no interest in it. 
 Jesus never said anything better to us than, 
 "I am the Way." The Universalist Church 
 to-day, like all churches, has a great passion 
 for applied Christianity. That is the Way 
 of the Ages. "Do these sayings of mine," 
 said Jesus. 
 
 This book has dealt largely with theology, 
 and Universalists are at times impatient with 
 theology. That is good. It would be worth 
 while to write a book that would give Uni- 
 versalists enough theology to last them some 
 little time, so that they could turn their at- 
 tention to action, doing things. 
 
 Theology is an attempt to make a map 
 of a country, but a map is of no use to folks 
 who are not going anywhere. To love ap- 
 
 124 
 
THE WAY OF THE AGES 
 
 plied Christianity is indeed a fine thing, but 
 a true theology is needed to help by intelli- 
 gently defining to us what Christianity really 
 is. Men can hardly love God, if God is really 
 like that old Andover Creed description. It 
 is not really much use to try to serve man if 
 man is like that description given in Chan- 
 ning's description of Calvinism quoted 
 earlier. Theology should not make the uni- 
 verse an insane asylum, and God hateful, and 
 then tell us that we ought not to be inter- 
 ested further in theology. 
 
 The fact is that we cannot drop the sub- 
 ject at that point. We move amendments. 
 Somehow even when the best amendments 
 are adopted, still we must talk theology, for 
 every minute there is a baby born, and some- 
 body ought to tell it true ideas of God, and 
 of itself, and of its fellow babies. 
 
 The passion for applied Christianity, ab- 
 solutely indispensable as it is, is, however, 
 more a recognition of endless problems than 
 it is a solution of any problem. The ques- 
 tion presents countless phases, and men 
 sharply differ as to Christianity and its ap- 
 plication. 
 
 There is a conspicuous group urging us 
 all to quit what they call our little futile 
 spasms for reforms, and to^prepare for a 
 
 125 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 second coming of Jesus materially and vis- 
 ibly in the clouds, to destroy this lost and 
 wicked world and burn it up. It is long since 
 hopelessly beyond mending, these tell us, the 
 only remedy is a universal bonfire, to get rid 
 of the rubbish. To this group this idea is 
 applied Christianity, and one of them has 
 just given the Baptist Home Mission Society 
 $1,500,000 to invest forever, the income to 
 be used to hire preachers to affirm and apply 
 that gospel. Evidently some war lord, or 
 profiteer, is willing to invest that large sum 
 to induce preachers to fix their attention on 
 this program of a second coming of Christ, 
 thinking that it will leave him to continue 
 his nefarious piracies unwatched and un- 
 rebuked. 
 
 To another group applied Christianity is 
 of the mystic and quietist type, worship, de- 
 votion, meditation, and soul union with the 
 ineffable. Some want the healing cults or 
 applied psychology. Some want political 
 action, often of the most radical type. 
 
 Some Christian people are sure that ap- 
 plied Christianity is to keep a big army and 
 navy ; others see only satanism in this. Some 
 like prohibition and some refuse it. So the 
 countless aspects and phases of the problem 
 occur and recur. Christians may never 
 
 126 
 
THE WAY OF THE AGES 
 
 agree on what applied Christianity really is. 
 Perhaps it is well that they do not agree, 
 since there must be endless fields that need 
 workers, and each type of mind should have 
 the field that its faculties fit it to cultivate. 
 
 Maybe the great thing, after all, is that 
 every Christian be in the Way of human ser- 
 vice, according to his own best vision. 
 
 A great need of to-day is some reorgan- 
 izing of the Christian forces of the world. 
 In many communities the spectacle of many 
 weak but warring sects, each supporting its 
 own against all the others, is a crime. An 
 increasing number of communities are seeing 
 this, and some very hopeful movements exist 
 looking to the cure of these painful distract- 
 ing divisions. All good Universalists are 
 interested in the advance of the community 
 feeling, and of fraternal interests. 
 
 But, after all, denominations correspond 
 to companies in an army. It is not likely 
 that the efficiency of any army would be in- 
 creased by abolishing the regiments that 
 compose it. Rightly functioning, the divi- 
 sions greatly add to efficiency. The evil 
 arises when they shoot into each other, in- 
 stead of at a common enemy. 
 
 Denominations, in growing communities, 
 are not an evil, unless mistaken men make 
 
 127 
 
WHICH WAY 
 
 them so. They allow for certain very whole- 
 some expressions of varying points of view. 
 Modern attempts at creedless creeds, or 
 vague and indefinite groupings, in an effort 
 to make a world faith to abolish all faiths, 
 are not ideal ways to reorganize human so- 
 ciety. Chesterton thought that he had ob- 
 served "that- evQry sectarian was more sec- 
 tarian in his unsectarianism than he was in 
 his sect." So far most efforts to abolish 
 sects have simply resulted in one more sect, 
 more sectarian than any was that it tried to 
 displace. 
 
 There is gain in cultivating likeness, but 
 unlikeness is far more interesting. God 
 made all men of one blood, but yet found a 
 way to prevent any two of them from being 
 alike. The unity of mankind should be 
 looked for in "Which Way," and not in mo- 
 notonous uniformity. 
 
 There is a fellowship of the spirit, 
 fathoms deeper than differences of opinion. 
 It is the fellowship of those who love the 
 Way of the Ages. 
 
 128 
 
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