David Holmes
David Holmes (1810-1873) was a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church who served appointments in the Oneida Conference of upstate New York, including a term as presiding elder of the Cayuga District. He appears in Universalist literature as the orthodox disputant in a multi-day public debate with John M. Austin, Universalist pastor at Auburn, held at Genoa, New York, from late December 1847 to early January 1848 and published the following year. He was afterward transferred to Methodist conferences in southern Illinois and northwest Indiana.
In the collection (1 work)
A debate on the doctrines of atonement, universal salvation, and endless punishment (1848)
A full transcript of a formal oral debate between John Mather Austin, Universalist minister at Auburn, New York, and David Holmes, a Methodist minister — days of alternating speeches before a public audience, taken down and published for readers to judge. Such staged debates were a central institution of antebellum religious life, and this one preserves the arguments, the rhetorical tactics, and the sheer stamina the genre demanded on both sides.
(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)