Menzies Rayner

Menzies Rayner (1770-1850), born at Hempstead on Long Island, New York, passed through three ministries in turn: he began as a Methodist itinerant ordained by Bishop Francis Asbury, then spent about thirty years as a Protestant Episcopal clergyman serving parishes in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and in Hartford, Huntington, and New Hartford, Connecticut. Convinced of universal salvation through his own study of scripture, he honorably withdrew from the Episcopal Church and from 1828 served Universalist societies in Hartford, Connecticut; Portland, Maine; and Troy and Lansingburgh, New York, before settling in New York City in 1840. Known in the denomination as "Father Rayner," he compiled The Universalist Manual (1839), one of the movement's early books of prayers and services. He died in New York on November 22, 1850, one day short of his eightieth birthday.

The former Episcopal priest turned Universalist (his Universalist Manual, in three printings, is also in this collection) turns his liturgical churchman's eye on the revival system — the protracted meetings, anxious benches, and engineered terrors of the Second Great Awakening — in six critical lectures. It belongs beside Streeter's satire and Skinner's letters in this collection's anti-revival literature. No digitized copy has been located on the Internet Archive; the PDF scan comes from Google Books, and the HathiTrust catalog record is also linked in this book's metadata.

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

A book of prayers and religious exercises 'adapted to the use both of public and private devotion, in churches, Sunday schools, and families' — one of the earliest Universalist liturgical manuals. Rayner, a former Episcopal priest who came over to Universalism, brought his old church's instinct for common prayer with him, and his manual gave Universalist worship a liturgical option two decades before the Gospel Liturgy. This collection holds the 1839, 1840, and 1848 printings.

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

A second-year printing of Menzies Rayner's book of prayers and devotional exercises (see the 1839 edition in this collection for a full account).

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

A later printing of Menzies Rayner's book of prayers and devotional exercises (see the 1839 edition in this collection for a full account), issued by Bulkeley of Boston nearly a decade after first publication.

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