The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

VI. Significance and Result of the Battle of Pens

Here within the compass of approximately sixty-five years some seventy books and five magazines were published advocating the position of Universalism. At the same time nearly the same number of books exposed the fallacies of the Universalists and championed the majority eternal-torment-for-the-wicked position. And there were at least ten discussions and debates between representatives of the two views. CFF2 281.1

1. BELATED APPEARANCE OF CONDITIONALIST VIEW

But this sustained conflict led gradually to the development of a third group, addressing themselves belatedly to a restudy of the whole question of the Biblical evidence on the fate of the wicked, and beyond that to the basic nature of man. As a result first one here and then another there, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, began to set forth the dormant Conditionalist view—that instead of being either tortured forever more or after purification being all restored, the incorrigibly wicked will be ultimately and utterly destroyed, body and soul, and so cease to be. CFF2 281.2

And, since such souls can be destroyed, therefore the human soul is but mortal, or subject to death. And these positions, it was felt, were clearly attested and founded upon Holy Writ. This group was persuaded that the soul does not at death go immediately to the felicities of Heaven or the pangs of Hell—or to the purifying fires of Purgatory—but rests in unconscious sleep, awaiting the call of the resurrection, the righteous then coming forth unto life eternal and the wicked to receive sentence and to be visited with executive judgment. The end would be total destruction. CFF2 281.3

That, in others words, was Conditionalism, lost and eclipsed throughout the Dark Ages, slowly affirmed again in pre-Reformation times, and brought out into the open by representative men in the Old World at the very outset of the Reformation in Germany and England. And now it had belatedly reappeared in the New World. Thus the third of the three schools in the theological trilemma was again in evidence in the New World. Yet Conditionalism had been preserved and transmitted from Early Church times by the Old World Medieval Waldenses in Italy, in African Ethiopia, and on the Indian Malabar coast. But in most countries it was a recovery, a new espousal, occurring from Reformation times onward. However, in America there was a definite time lag. CFF2 281.4

2. COMES TO FORE IN EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

As already observed, there were growing numbers of scholarly adherents, especially in Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as seen in Part I, but Conditionalism belatedly came to the fore in North America about the beginning of the nineteenth century under such men as Protestant Episcopal bishop William White, of Boston (1800); Elias Smith, of Portsmouth (1805); John Sellon, of Canandaigua, New York (1828); Aaron Bancroft, of Worcester, Massachusetts (1828); Walter Balfour, of Charlestown, Massachusetts (1839); Sylvanus Cobb, of Boston, Massachusetts (1833); Henry Grew, of Rhode Island and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1835); George Storrs, of Albany, New York (1841); Calvin French, of Boston (1842); Jacob Blain, of Buffalo, New York (1844); and John H. Pearce, of North Carolina (1844). CFF2 282.1

Then came a veritable galaxy of books, pamphlets, and periodical articles—and entire periodicals, together with symposiums—setting forth with increasing clarity and persuasiveness the case for Conditionalism. It did not at first compare with the volume of brilliant writings in Britain and on the Continent. But the strangle hold of Immortal-Soulism and its Eternal Torment corollary was broken. Then certain religious bodies began to espouse it. Thus again the three schools of theological trilemma were vying for the minds and hearts of men here in America by the mid-nineteenth century. And the same development was taking place in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Holland—and even out in India, Africa, Australia, and China. A new day had dawned. CFF2 282.2