William Stevens Balch

William Stevens Balch (1806-1887) was an American Universalist minister, born in Andover, Vermont. Over a long career he served congregations in Albany, Watertown, Claremont, Providence, and New York City, where he led the Bleecker Street church for nearly two decades, before later pastorates in Illinois and Iowa; he also trained some thirty ministerial students in his own household. He helped found the theological school at Canton, New York, later part of St. Lawrence University, published one of the denomination's first Sunday school manuals, and supported democratic reforms, including expanded voting rights in Rhode Island, where he served in the state legislature.

Organization, lessons, and hymns for the Universalist Sunday school, by one of the denomination's most energetic organizers. Balch's manual shows the machinery being built: how a movement born in controversy set about catechizing its second generation.

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