Thomas Jefferson Sawyer

Thomas Jefferson Sawyer (1804-1899) was an American Universalist minister and educator, born in Reading, Vermont, and a graduate of Middlebury College. He served the Orchard Street Universalist Society in New York City, headed the Clinton Liberal Institute, and campaigned persistently for denominational schools, playing a central role in the founding of Tufts College, where he became the divinity school's first professor of theology in 1869 and later dean. He founded the Christian Messenger in 1831, prompted the organization of the Universalist Historical Society in 1834, and published extensively in defense of Universalist doctrine.

Thomas Jefferson Sawyer's memoir of Stephen Rensselaer Smith, the pioneer of Universalism in central New York, whose Historical Sketches are also in this collection. One held author remembered by another: a primary source for the denomination's expansion beyond New England.

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Sawyer takes on the most famous preacher in America: a review of Henry Ward Beecher's Christology, pressing the question whether evangelical devotion had quietly substituted the Son for the Father as the object of Christian worship. A sharp specimen of Universalist theological criticism aimed not at a country debater but at the pulpit celebrity of the age.

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A formal written debate on the question 'Do the scriptures teach the final salvation of all men?' with Thomas J. Sawyer taking the affirmative. Sawyer was the denomination's most learned champion, and this exchange — published in Cincinnati for western readers — shows the mid-century debate genre in its mature, courteous, heavily exegetical form.

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The first serious work of historical scholarship produced by the American Universalist movement. Hosea Ballou 2d — grand-nephew of the theologian and later the first president of Tufts College — traces the doctrine of universal salvation from the apostles through the church fathers to the Fifth General Council of 553, with an appendix carrying the story to the Reformation. Its careful use of patristic sources won respect well beyond the denomination, and it remained the standard treatment for decades.

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An anthology with a polemical twist. Sawyer — long-time New York pastor, a founder of the theological school at Canton, and professor of theology at Tufts — declines to argue against the doctrine of endless punishment himself; instead he assembles pages of quotations from its own defenders, from the church fathers to nineteenth-century divines, describing the torments of the damned in their own words. The intended effect is that the doctrine, once plainly stated, refutes itself before a modern conscience. Published by the Universalist Publishing House.

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