John Greenleaf Adams

John Greenleaf Adams (1810-1887) was an American Universalist minister, editor, and hymn writer, born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Ordained in 1833, he served congregations across New England, including Claremont, New Hampshire; Malden, Worcester, Lowell, and Melrose, Massachusetts; and Providence, Rhode Island, and was active in Sunday school work and reform causes such as antislavery. With Edwin H. Chapin he compiled Hymns for Christian Devotion (1846), long a standard hymnal of the denomination, and he later edited The Gospel Psalmist (1861); his other books include the historical survey Fifty Notable Years (1882) and a memoir of Thomas Whittemore.

A collection of 'happy death scenes' — deathbed testimonies of believers dying in peace — compiled by the future hymnal editor to answer a standing orthodox taunt: that Universalists could not die well. Deathbed literature was a battleground genre of the era, and this is the Universalist entry.

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The first edition of the hymnal that defined mid-century Universalist worship, edited by John G. Adams and Edwin H. Chapin (see the 1865 printing in this collection for a full account of the book). Comparing this first issue with the later printings shows the denomination's standard hymnody essentially fixed for a generation from the moment of publication.

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A complete hymn-and-tune book 'for public, social, and private devotion,' compiled for Universalist congregations on the eve of the Civil War. Adams — the denomination's most industrious hymnal editor — gathered standard psalmody alongside hymns by Universalist writers, with the music printed above the words in the manner of the New England singing tradition. A window on how the denomination actually sounded on a Sunday morning.

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A tune-book companion to the words-only Hymns for Christian Devotion: tunes arranged for congregational use, compiled by Benjamin F. Tweed with J. G. Adams and J. S. Barry. Congregations that owned the hymnal bought the supplement to sing it — a two-volume system that this collection can now reassemble.

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The standard hymnal of mid-nineteenth-century Universalism, edited jointly by Adams and the orator Chapin and 'especially adapted to the Universalist denomination.' Over a thousand hymns organized by doctrine and occasion, purged of the imagery of wrath and reprobation and rich in the themes of divine fatherhood and universal hope. For a generation this was the book in the pew racks of Universalist churches across the country.

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Not every service happened in the sanctuary: the vestry — the plain room below or behind it — hosted the prayer meetings, conference meetings, and social worship of the week. Adams compiled this collection of hymns and tunes 'for all occasions of social worship' to serve exactly those gatherings, and it is a window on the informal, participatory side of Universalist congregational life.

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A later Universalist Publishing House printing of Adams and Ball's hymn-and-tune book of 1861 (see the 1861 edition in this collection for a full account), issued in the years just before Church Harmonies replaced it as the congregational standard.

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The life of Universalism's great editor-organizer. Whittemore — author of the Plain Guide and the Modern History, both in this collection — edited the Trumpet for four decades, sat in the Massachusetts legislature, presided over a railroad and a bank, wrote hymn tunes, and fought the denomination's battles in print with relish. Adams, a fellow minister and hymnal editor who knew him well, portrays the most energetic and combative public man the movement produced.

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Part memoir, part collective portrait: Adams, a Universalist minister for half a century, surveys the denomination's ministry from the 1830s to the 1880s with biographical sketches of the preachers he had known — famous and obscure alike. Written from personal acquaintance, it preserves faces, voices, and pulpit styles that formal histories leave out, and is a principal source for the lives of dozens of nineteenth-century Universalist clergy.

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