Lucius Robinson Paige

Lucius Robinson Paige (1802-1896) was a Universalist minister, biblical scholar, and local historian, born in Hardwick, Massachusetts. Converted from his parents' Calvinism after reading Hosea Ballou's Treatise on Atonement, he studied under Ballou and was ordained at Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1825, later serving at Rockport and, from 1832, at Cambridgeport, where he succeeded Thomas Whittemore. His multi-volume Commentary on the New Testament (1844-1870), interpreting Scripture from a Universalist standpoint, was the principal labor of his scholarly life. He also served as town and later city clerk of Cambridge, spent years in banking, and wrote a substantial History of Cambridge, Massachusetts (1877).

A polemical anthology with a sly method: Paige gathers the concessions of orthodox scholars — men who themselves believed in punishment after death — showing that on passage after disputed passage, the best learning of the church admitted the texts did not teach endless misery. By making Calvinist and Arminian commentators testify for the Universalist reading, Paige built one of the movement's most effective argumentative weapons; ministers kept it within reach for decades.

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The Universalist denomination's own verse-by-verse New Testament commentary. Paige — minister, denominational statesman, and later the learned town historian of Cambridge — works through the text with sober, philological care, giving the Universalist reading of every disputed passage and citing orthodox scholars whose admissions support it. This first volume covers the Gospel of Matthew; the completed series served Universalist ministers as their standard exegetical reference for half a century.

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The Acts volume of Paige's multi-volume commentary (the Matthew volume is also in this collection): the apostolic history expounded verse by verse with his characteristic sobriety, tracing the primitive church's preaching of the restitution of all things through the narrative of its first generation.

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The Corinthians volume of Paige's commentary series, including his extended treatment of 1 Corinthians 15 — the resurrection chapter whose 'as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive' was the Universalists' single most-quoted text. Paige gives the passage the fullest exegesis in the denomination's literature.

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