HELL IN NEW ENGLAND by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 20, 1877

HELL IN NEW ENGLAND

By Editor

SEVERAL days ago a Congregationalist council refused to install Rev. Edward Merriam over a church in Springfield, of which he had been invited to become the pastor. His character was above reproach. He had been settled over a church in Connecticut, where he was universally respected and beloved. His learning and talents entitled him to respect and made his services desirable. His views were entirely orthodox according to the Congregational standard, in all points but one. They were lamentably unsound on the doctrine of hell. He maintained that the Scriptures do not teach the eternity of punishment, though they do teach the future punishment of the impenitent wicked. He was unwilling to teach and defend a doctrine that is not explicitly stated in the Scriptures, especially when it conflicted with his reason and conscience. The council divided, but the majority voted not to install him.

This matter lies outside the domain of secular journalism, and we should not allude to it but for the stir it has made in New England. It is the livest topic that has turned up there since the election. It is surprising what an interest the New England mind takes in hell. All the papers are discussing it. . . . And this discussion brings out the significant fact that popular sympathy is entirely on the side of the minister. The New England mind seems to have gone sadly back on the faith of its pious Puritan progenitors. . . And, strange to say, a great many of the New England ministers appear to sympathize with the popular feeling, and quietly drop hell out of their preaching. This probably accounts for the coldness in the New England preaching, which President McCosh lamented so pathetically at Edinburgh. Most of the young ministers, we are told, not only have no hell in their theology, or at most a sort of purgatorial Turkish bath, which the wicked go through on their way to Paradise, but they even spell devil without a “d”; and Henry Ward Beecher boldly tells the elders that they must decide whether to keep their oldest standards or their newest minds, for the nineteenth century intellect will not wear seventeenth century shackles.

—New York Weekly Express.