Woodbury Melcher Fernald

Woodbury Melcher Fernald (1813-1873) was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and was ordained there as a Universalist minister in 1836. He held pastorates at Cabotville (now Chicopee), at Newburyport—where he published Universalism Against Partialism (1840)—and at Stoneham, Massachusetts. After moving to Boston in 1854 he became absorbed in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and was eventually ordained a minister of the Swedenborgian New Church, compiling a compendium of Swedenborg's theological writings and publishing God in His Providence (1859), which argued for universal restoration on Swedenborgian principles. He died in Boston in December 1873.

A course of lectures delivered at Newburyport, Massachusetts, framing the controversy as the Universalists loved to frame it: not Universalism against Christianity, but Universalism against 'partialism' — the doctrine that God's saving love is partial to a few. Fernald canvasses the scriptural, rational, and moral arguments with the aggressive confidence of the movement's 1840s heyday.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)