Abel Charles Thomas
Abel Charles Thomas (1807-1880) was an American Universalist minister, editor, and denominational historian, born into a Pennsylvania Quaker family; his grandfather had been a noted Quaker preacher. His principal pastorate was the First Universalist Church on Lombard Street in Philadelphia, which he served in the 1830s and again from 1848 until his retirement in 1863, with intervening ministries in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York. While in Lowell he helped found the Lowell Offering (1840), a magazine written by the women workers of the textile mills. He also compiled the widely reprinted Gospel Liturgy (1857), published an autobiography (1852), and wrote a centennial history of Universalism in Philadelphia and New York (1872).
Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography
In the collection (9 works)
Nine Sermons on Important Doctrinal and Practical Subjects (1835) with Hosea Ballou
In 1834 the aging Ballou traveled to Philadelphia and preached a celebrated series of sermons to overflowing houses; these nine discourses were taken down as delivered and published the next year. Coming a generation after the Treatise on Atonement, they show the patriarch of Universalism restating his gospel in its settled, mature form — plain argument, homely illustration, and relentless insistence on the impartial goodness of God.
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Autobiography of Rev. Abel C. Thomas (1852)
Recollections of persons, incidents, and places from a ministry spent in Philadelphia, New York, and Lowell. In Lowell, Thomas organized improvement circles among the young women of the cotton mills, from which grew the famous Lowell Offering, the first magazine written entirely by factory operatives. Genial and anecdotal, his autobiography catches the texture of antebellum Universalist life — debates, conventions, editorial wars, and friendships — as no formal history does.
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A Discussion of the Conjoint Question: Ely vs. Thomas (1857) with Ezra Stiles Ely
The most celebrated written debate in Universalist history. Ezra Stiles Ely, a leading Presbyterian of Philadelphia, and Abel C. Thomas, the young Universalist pastor there, exchanged letters on the conjoint question: is endless punishment taught in the Bible, or is the salvation of all? Conducted with unusual civility and real learning on both sides, the correspondence was reprinted for decades as the fairest single-volume presentation of both cases.
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The Gospel Liturgy (1857) with Universalist Church of America
The Universalist General Convention's official prayer book, compiled by Abel C. Thomas and adopted in 1857: orders of morning and evening service, responsive readings, chants, and offices for baptism, communion, marriage, and burial. It gave the liturgically minded minority of Universalist congregations a common use for half a century, and its successive printings (this collection holds six, from 1857 to 1887) trace the book's life across publishers from Philadelphia to the Universalist Publishing House.
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The Gospel Liturgy (1863) with Universalist General Convention
A wartime printing of the 1857 Universalist prayer book (see the 1857 edition for a full account), issued by H. Lyon.
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The Gospel Liturgy (1866) with Universalist General Convention
A postwar printing of the 1857 Universalist prayer book (see the 1857 edition for a full account), issued by H. Lyon.
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The Gospel Liturgy (1871) with Universalist General Convention
The 1857 Universalist prayer book (see the 1857 edition for a full account) as issued by the Universalist Publishing House in Boston, which had by then become the denomination's central press.
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A Century of Universalism in Philadelphia and New York (1872)
A regional history by a veteran pastor of both cities. Philadelphia was the site of Elhanan Winchester's congregation and of the 1790 convention that gave American Universalism its first common profession, and New York grew into one of the denomination's great centers; Thomas tells the story of both, together with sketches of Universalism in Reading, Hightstown, Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Rich in local detail, anecdote, and biography found in no other source.
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The Gospel Liturgy (1887) with Universalist General Convention
A late printing of the 1857 Universalist prayer book (see the 1857 edition for a full account), issued by the Woman's Centenary Association — the denomination's women's missionary organization, which kept the old liturgy in print for the churches still using it.
(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)