A Series of Letters, Addressed to Rev. Hosea Ballou, of Boston; Being a Vindication of the Doctrine of a Future Retribution, Against the Principal Arguments Used by Him, Mr. Balfour, and Others.

v, 307 pp. 12mo. A collection of religious expositions focusing on the topic of future retribution, a subject about which the author and Rev. Ballou disagreed. In other words, a philosophical exploration of the concepts of Heaven and Hell, or divine judgment of human souls in the afterlife. More information on Hosea Ballou: "(30 Apr. 1771-7 June 1852), theologian and clergyman, was born in Richmond, New Hampshire, the son of Maturin Ballou, a farmer and unpaid Baptist minister, and Lydia Harris, who came from a Rhode Island Quaker family and died when her son was two years old. Growing up in extreme poverty, Ballou had less than three years of formal schooling. A few months before his nineteenth birthday, he came forward in a revival meeting and joined his father's church. But before the year was over Ballou's interest in religion had led him to become a Universalist. Moving in with an older brother who was already a Universalist minister, Ballou prepared himself to teach and preach by attending first a community school and then a nearby academy. Despite the fact that his friends, after hearing his first sermon, delivered in 1791, doubted his "talent for such labor," Ballou preached wherever he found an open door. The next year he determined to make the ministry his career even though he had to support himself by teaching. In 1793 he went to the first of the nearly fifty New England Universalist conventions he would attend, and by the next year's session he had so impressed his colleagues that they spontaneously ordained him. In 1796 Ballou moved to Dana, Massachusetts, and in September of that year he married Ruth Washburn; they had nine children. In addition to ministering to churches primarily in Massachusetts and Vermont (where he and his family moved in 1803), Ballou participated wholeheartedly in Universalist doctrinal controversies. His theology and original thinking shaped Universalist doctrine, particularly in three areas: its transition from a trinitarian to a unitarian belief in the nature of God, its belief that all sins would be punished on earth, and its new perspective on the doctrine of the atonement. Fitting these ideas together, Ballou gave Universalist theology more coherence. Ballou early published two works, Notes on the Parables (1804), in which he stressed that one should not attempt to gain eternal life through legal righteousness, and A Treatise on Atonement (1805), his most influential work. In Treatise, he rethought the theology that John Murray, the chief founder of American Universalism, had derived from the English preacher James Relly. Rejecting the doctrine of vicarious atonement (or substitutionary sacrifice, in which Christ suffered on the cross to atone for the sins of humanity), Ballou insisted that "every sinner must bear the penalty of his own disobedience" (Allen and Eddy, p. 435) and that Christ suffered to show human beings the way to God's love. Yet Ballou believed that rather than "a wrathful deity seeking justice," God was "full of infinite love" given to all, "not reserved for a select few" (Miller, vol. 1, p. 104). John Coleman Adams, who wrote the introduction to Treatise's fourteenth edition in 1902, called it "one of the great books on American theology" and "the first American book to anticipate all the essential points of... liberal theology" (Miller, vol. 2, p. 865). Ballou was unable to find scriptural justification for the doctrine of the Trinity, so he rejected it and embraced unitarianism. Christ, he insisted, was not co-equal with God but was God's representative to the world. Ballou spiced his reasoning with a little humor, declaring, "If the Godhead consists of three distinct persons, and each of those persons is infinite, the whole Godhead amounts to the amazing sum of infinity, multiplied by three!" (Miller, vol. 1, p. 105). By 1805 Ballou's acceptance of unitarianism, like his view of the atonement, had "pervaded the Universalist ministry, with but few exceptions" (