Charles Hamilton Pridgeon

Charles Hamilton Pridgeon (1863-1932) was an American evangelical minister and educator who founded the Pittsburgh Bible Institute and served as its president. In Is Hell Eternal; or, Will God's Plan Fail? (1920), he argued from a conservative evangelical standpoint that punishment after death is purifying and limited in duration, and that God's plan of salvation will not finally fail. The book, which reached a third edition in 1931, remains the work for which he is chiefly remembered.

The wider hope in an unexpected quarter: Pridgeon was a Pittsburgh evangelical — founder of a faith missions institute, premillennial, biblicist — who concluded from scripture itself that the ages of punishment end in universal restoration. His book fathered the small 'Pridgeonite' restorationist stream in twentieth-century evangelicalism, showing the old doctrine seeding itself far outside liberal religion.

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