George Washington Quinby

George Washington Quinby (1810-1884) was an American Universalist minister, editor, and author who held the degree of Doctor of Divinity. Early in his career he was active in Maine, where he compiled Fifteen Sermons from Fifteen Universalist Clergymen of Maine (1845); by the 1850s he was based in Cincinnati, where he published The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor-house (1856), a plea for the abolition of capital punishment and for humane treatment of prisoners and the poor, drawn from his own visits to jails and prisons. He later worked in Augusta, Maine, where he edited a religious newspaper and wrote Heaven Our Home, a book of consolation on the resurrection and the future life that was reprinted repeatedly, including after his death.

'A plea for humanity' from the author of Heaven Our Home (also in this collection): an indictment of the gallows, the prison, and the poor-house as institutions organized on vengeance rather than restoration. Quinby's case against capital punishment runs directly out of his theology — a God who reforms rather than damns is a poor patron for a state that hangs — and the book is a prime document of Universalism's social-reform conscience before the social gospel had a name.

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A book of comfort rather than controversy. Quinby writes for the bereaved, portraying heaven as a home — a place of continued growth, useful activity, and the recognition and reunion of friends — and grounding that hope in the Universalist conviction that no member of the human family is finally missing from it. An example of the consolatory literature that carried Universalist ideas into households untouched by theological debate.

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