The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

VIII. Wellcome-Publisher of Conditionalist Literature

ISAAC C. WELLCOME (1818-1895), publisher and Advent Christian historian, was a voracious reader when he was a lad. His father had been a zealous Universalist, but Isaac early became skeptical, feasted on infidel books, and denied any god but nature. However, astonished at the transformation wrought in some of his companions by conversion, he again turned to the Bible for light. But his father’s Universalist books, easily available, led him first to profess Universalism for about four years-particularly because of their arguments on the immortality of the soul. But in 1840 he was soundly converted and joined the Methodist Church, in which he was an active member for five years. (Pictured on page 650.) CFF2 660.2

Then, becoming fully convinced of the imminence of Christ’s premillennial return, he ran into grave difficulties, receiving denunciations and threats of dismissal. So he became persuaded that he must separate from the Methodist Church, which he did in 1844. He then became skeptical over the popular teaching of the soul going to Heaven or Hell immediately at death. Taking his Bible and concordance, he checked on every passage “on life, death, soul, body, spirit, heaven, hell, punishment, judgment, eternal life, destruction, perish, and their equivalents.” He then records that he CFF2 660.3

“was obliged, against his previous views, to accept the clear, unequivocal, and universal testimony of the Scriptures that man is wholly mortal; that death suspends all power of action and thought of body and soul; that the spirit is not an entity, but the principle of life; that man is wholly dependent on Christ’s death for a resurrection, and on the return of Christ and ‘the first resurrection’ for eternal life; that the wicked will rise in the second resurrection and receive the wages due them, which is to ‘utterly perish’ in ‘the second death.’” ¹⁴ CFF2 660.4

Ordained in 1850, he traveled and preached. Then he began to write and publish. In 1872 he and his co-workers organized the Scriptural Publication Society and Home and Foreign Tract Mission. Elder Wellcome served as manager until his death in 1895. In 1874 he published his History of the Second Advent Message. In 1884 he brought out J. H. Pettingell’s The Unspeakable Gift, and other works. CFF2 661.1

“It was estimated that from 1872 to 1895 he had published ten million tracts, over one hundred fifty thousand books and pamphlets and about two hundred thousand copies of the Berean Quarterly, which was the organ of the Scriptural Publication Society.” ¹⁵ CFF2 661.2