Otis Ainsworth Skinner

Otis Ainsworth Skinner (1807-1861) was a Universalist minister born in Royalton, Vermont, who entered the ministry in the mid-1820s and held pastorates in Baltimore, Haverhill, Boston, and New York City. He edited several denominational periodicals, including the Universalist Miscellany, and published doctrinal defenses such as Universalism Illustrated and Defended (1839). He led the subscription campaign that raised the funds needed to charter Tufts College in 1852, and from 1857 to 1859 was president of Lombard University in Galesburg, Illinois. He died at Naperville, Illinois, in 1861 while serving a congregation at Joliet.

An epistolary duel over Universalism between Otis A. Skinner, one of the denomination's ablest young controversialists, and the Rev. Joseph M'Kee, an orthodox opponent. The letters range over the standard battleground — the meaning of the biblical threatenings, the justice of endless punishment, the extent of the atonement — and show the controversy as it was actually conducted: courteous in form, unsparing in substance, and aimed at the reading public as much as at the opponent.

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A complete system of Universalist doctrine and practice from the young Otis Skinner, published the same decade as his debate with M'Kee (also in this collection). Arranged as a course of doctrinal and practical discourses, it aimed to show inquirers not just that Universalism was defensible but that it formed a whole, livable religion — one of the better one-volume statements from the movement's expansive 1830s.

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Skinner's pulpit case for Universalism, delivered in Boston and published the same year as his letters on the revivals. Where his Universalism Illustrated and Defended (also in this collection) is a systematic treatise, these are preached sermons — the doctrine argued with a congregation in front of it.

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Letters to three Boston revival ministers — Stow, Neale, and Cushman — on the theology and machinery of modern revivalism. Where Streeter's Latest News (also in this collection) answered the revivals with satire, Skinner answers with argument: the terror-driven conversion methods of the anxious seat measured against the gospel of a Father's unchanging love.

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A farewell sermon by Otis A. Skinner — Boston pastor, controversialist (his epistolary debate with Joseph M'Kee is in this collection), and later a principal fund-raiser for Tufts College — taking stock of where Universalism stood at mid-century: its gains against orthodoxy, its duties to education and organization, and its prospects for the half-century ahead. No digitized copy has been located on the Internet Archive; the scan is held by HathiTrust (see the catalog record linked in this book's metadata).

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Reflections and prayers for domestic devotion — a home liturgy from the busy Boston pastor and Tufts fundraiser. It joins Rayner's manual, the Book of Prayer, and Hanson's Manna in this collection's shelf of Universalist household worship, the quiet genre that sustained the faith between Sundays.

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