Fifty Notable Years: Views of the Ministry of Christian Universalism During the Last Half-Century; with Biographical SketchesAdams, John G. (John Greenleaf)
Religion
Fifty Notable Years: Views of the Ministry of Christian Universalism During the Last Half-Century; with Biographical Sketches
Adams, John G. (John Greenleaf)
Universalism; Universalist Church -- Biography; Universalists -- Biography; Universalists -- United States -- History
A highly-esteemed minister of our faith, and a vigorous and stirring
advocate of Christian reform, was Rev. ELHANAN W. REYNOLDS. Although
his career as minister and author was not long, the most valuable
years of his life were given to the work of promulgating the Gospel.
He was settled as pastor in Java, Sherman, Buffalo, Jamestown,
Watertown, and Lockport, N. Y.; in Norwich, Conn.; and Lynn, Mass. He
was a highly acceptable preacher, and wielded a fruitful and facile
pen. His little volume, "The Records of Bubbleton Parish," is one of
much interest in showing as it does the trials of Christian ministers
and parishes because of the discordant elements in them, and in the
vividness with which some of the characters in the particular parish
at Bubbleton are drawn. But his best work, and one that evinces
unmistakably the strong qualities of the writer's intellect and the
soundness of his orthodoxy in morals, is his volume entitled "The True
Story of the Barons of the South; or, the Rationale of the American
Conflict," issued in 1862. It is a compact but lively presentation of
the origin and growth of American slavery, from its inception with the
Virginian colonists to the breaking out of the war of the Rebellion.
It is an unequivocal statement of facts, and an irresistible appeal to
Americans for the overthrow of the gigantic abomination of slavery,
and the defence and maintenance of that freedom signified in the
immortal Declaration sent out by our Revolutionary fathers from this
nation, to all the other nations of the earth. It is one of the
trumpet-calls to duty among the many that gave inspiration and life to
that desperate strife which sent American slavery to "the receptacle
of things lost on earth." Mr. Reynolds is worthy of honorable
remembrance as one of the heroes of that strife. A discriminating
writer has said of him: "As a preacher he was strong and often
brilliant; as a scholar his explorations were extensive, and his
acquisitions the gold refined from innumerable heaps of dross,
patiently searched out; and as a writer he was master of a style which
would have been his passport to the first literary circles of
America." He died at Milwaukee, Wis., August 31, 1868, aged
thirty-nine years.
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