Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814-1880) was a Universalist minister and one of the most popular American pulpit orators and lyceum lecturers of the mid-nineteenth century. Born in Union Village, New York, he held pastorates in Richmond, Virginia, in Charlestown and Boston, Massachusetts, and from 1848 until his death at the Fourth Universalist Society in New York City, later known as the Church of the Divine Paternity. A supporter of temperance, peace, and other reform causes, he published many volumes of sermons and lectures on religious and social themes, including Humanity in the City and Discourses on the Beatitudes.

Six lectures to young men from Chapin's first settlement, in Richmond, Virginia — the Universalist entry in the crowded young-men's-lecture genre, alongside Austin's Voice to Youth (also in this collection). Industry, integrity, self-culture, and religion, urged by a lecturer barely older than his audience who would become the most famous platform voice his denomination ever had.

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Chapin's first collected volume of sermons, published from his Richmond, Virginia pastorate when he was twenty-six. The great themes and cadences of the later New York volumes are already audible; this is where the most celebrated pulpit career in Universalist history found its printed voice.

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A small devotional book of meditations for the communion service, from Chapin's Boston years before New York made him famous. Where his later volumes thunder, this one is quiet: preparation, self-examination, and the communion of the soul with God, in prose already showing the cadences that would fill the largest church in America.

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The companion volume to Chapin's 'Moral Aspects of City Life,' and perhaps the finest fruit of his Sunday-evening lectures to the crowds of young men adrift in antebellum New York. Where the earlier series anatomized the city's temptations, this one finds religious meaning in its human spectacle — the faces in the street, the strife of classes, the poor, the toiling masses — arguing that the city is not a moral wilderness but the very field where Christian brotherhood must be proved. Urban social preaching a generation before the social gospel had a name.

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Lectures on the temptations, miseries, and duties of the modern city, delivered when New York's explosive growth was a new and alarming fact. Chapin surveys wealth and poverty, amusement, crime, and philanthropy, insisting that the Christian's business is not to flee the city but to redeem it. An early specimen of the socially engaged preaching for which he and his congregation were famous.

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Chapin preaching through the Beatitudes at the height of his New York powers — the blessings of the poor in spirit, the mourners, the merciful, and the peacemakers expounded as the constitution of the Christian character. A companion series to his Discourses on the Lord's Prayer (also in this collection).

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An address on the Victorian question of 'manliness,' answered from the pulpit: that the truest manhood is not force or success but the Christian character — courage joined to gentleness, strength to self-sacrifice. Chapin at his most quotable on the platform where he rivaled any lecturer of the day.

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A substantial collection from Chapin's own pulpit — the Broadway church of the Fourth Universalist Society, then among the most crowded in New York. These are the full Sunday sermons, doctrinal and practical, that the extracts in Living Words (also in this collection) were mined from, and the best single volume for hearing Chapin at length.

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Chapin's book of consolation, written for mourners. Through a series of meditations on sorrow, bereavement, and the ministry of suffering, he offers the grieving a God who is a father rather than a judge, and a future in which nothing loved is finally lost. Books 'for the sorrowing' were a staple of Victorian religious publishing, and this was among the most reprinted Universalist examples of the genre.

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A pocket anthology of Chapin at his most quotable: brief passages — 'jewels five words long' — gathered from his sermons and lectures, with an admiring introductory letter by Thomas Starr King. Nineteenth-century readers loved books of pulpit 'gems,' and this one shows why Chapin's eloquence was thought worth excerpting: page after page of compact, aphoristic paragraphs on faith, duty, sorrow, and hope, detached from their occasions and meant for daily reading.

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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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Chapin at his devotional best: a series of sermons from his New York pulpit taking the Lord's Prayer petition by petition. The great orator dwells on the prayer's opening — 'Our Father' — as the charter of human brotherhood and divine care that Universalism built its theology upon. A good introduction to the preaching that filled his church for thirty years.

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Select sermons from the Broadway pulpit, issued by the Cincinnati house of Williamson & Cantwell — evidence of Chapin's national audience. The themes are his mature staples: providence in history and in the individual life, read through the confident faith of post-war liberal religion.

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Discourses from Chapin's last decade at the Church of the Divine Paternity, gathered as his health began to fail: the mature voice of the denomination's greatest preacher. One of the two late collections completing this library's Chapin shelf.

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The posthumous collection of Chapin's sermons, published the year after his death — the close of the pulpit career this collection traces from Duties of Young Men (1840) onward.

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