The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (Vol. 2 of 2)Barton, William E. (William Eleazar)
History
The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (Vol. 2 of 2)
Barton, William E. (William Eleazar)
American National Red Cross -- Biography; Barton, Clara, 1821-1912; Nurses -- United States -- Biography
The two ministers whom she selected to have charge of her funeral in
the old home in Oxford were both Congregationalists. The Reverend
Percy H. Epler was chosen for his long friendship, and the Reverend
William E. Barton for that and for his kinship. She did not choose, but
would have been happy to have chosen, had her plans been worked out in
detail, the Reverend Doctor Tyler, an aged minister of the Universalist
faith, to have a share in the services. Happily, he was present, and
did participate. He had baptized and buried whole generations of the
Oxford Bartons, and it was a benediction to have him standing, like a
patriarch, above her coffin, and speaking words of comfort and hope.
Her choice of Congregational ministers to perform this service did
not imply a lack of honor for the church of her childhood. Yet, in
some respects, her associations in later years were more intimate with
Congregationalists than with Universalists.
I have no reason to suppose that she talked with any one more freely
than she talked with me about her religion, or about her relations to
the Universalist Church. I think I can represent her views essentially
as they were.
She continued to believe all that was essential in the faith which she
had been taught in the church of Hosea Ballou. She trusted in a God
whom she believed too great and good to make an eternal hell necessary
to his government. If God was infinite and also desired the salvation
of all men, if He was not willing that any should perish, but that all
should come unto Him and live; if Christ tasted death for every man;
then, as it seemed to her, ultimately, sin must be eliminated from
the moral universe and with sin must go punishment. She believed, not
only with Ballou, but with Beecher, that God will not punish after
punishment ceases to do good. That sin brings punishment she believed
and knew, but that sin and punishment must go on eternally seemed
to her to imply either that God was not wholly good or not wholly
Sovereign.
Her Universalism was essentially Calvinistic; it was based on the
sovereignty of God. She believed that God was great enough to
“treasure up his bright designs,
And work his sovereign will.”
She believed in the divinity of Christ. She was not a Unitarian. But
she held to Christ’s divinity as a divinity of preëminence and not
of exclusion. She believed that Jesus became the Son of God by moral
processes which are essentially within the reach of men, “that He might
be the first-born among many brethren.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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