Russell Streeter

Russell Streeter (1791-1880) was a Universalist minister and editor born in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, and raised a Baptist before reading Hosea Ballou's Treatise on Atonement in his youth converted him to Universalism. He served the First Universalist Society in Portland, Maine, and from 1822 edited the Christian Intelligencer, one of the denomination's early newspapers. A brother of the Boston minister Sebastian Streeter, with whom he compiled a widely used hymnbook in 1829, he was known for pointed polemics against Calvinist revivalism such as Latest News from Three Worlds (1832).

The most notorious satire the controversy produced. Streeter attended a four-day revival at Woodstock, Vermont, and published this mock 'report' of its proceedings — the calculated terrors, the anxious seats, the theology of the pit — as intelligence fresh from heaven, earth, and hell. Savage, funny, and much denounced, it shows the Universalist counterattack on revival religion at its sharpest edge, and preserves an eyewitness picture of a Second Great Awakening revival in full cry.

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The salvation of all mankind argued in dialogue form for household reading, from the author of the satirical Latest News from Three Worlds (also in this collection). Streeter casts the case as fireside conversations, meeting the standard objections in plain speech — the gentler face of one of the movement's sharpest controversialists.

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