Elhanan Winchester

Elhanan Winchester (1751-1797) was one of the founders of organized Universalism in America and its most successful eighteenth-century evangelist. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, he began as a Baptist preacher, serving congregations in New England and South Carolina, and adopted the doctrine of universal restoration around 1780 while pastor of a large Baptist church in Philadelphia, where he then led the city's first Universalist congregation. During an extended stay in London from 1787 to 1794 he ministered to a Universalist congregation and published The Universal Restoration, Exhibited in Four Dialogues (1788), which became one of the movement's most influential books; he also wrote lectures on biblical prophecy and a reply to Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. He died in Hartford, Connecticut.

A discourse delivered at the chapel in Glass-House-Yard, London, on 10 August 1788, during Winchester's English sojourn: drawing chiefly on Paul's writings, he argues that the apostle taught both particular and general redemption — Christ died for the elect in particular and for all in general — turning the Calvinist's own proof-texts toward the Universal Restoration. The PDF scan comes from Google Books (linked in this book's metadata).

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Winchester's antislavery sermon — first delivered in Virginia in 1774, here in its 1788 London printing — attacking the slave trade as chief among the sins that bring judgment on nations. An early witness that the universalist gospel and antislavery conviction traveled together, as they would later in Adin Ballou. Scanned from the British Library's copy.

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Winchester was famous in London not only as a Universalist but as an expositor of prophecy, and these lectures — delivered at Borough Road, Southwark, to large audiences — were his most ambitious performance in that line. Volume I opens his survey of the prophecies yet unfulfilled: the return of the Jews, the millennium, and the ultimate triumph of Christ's kingdom, all framed within his conviction that the divine plan ends in universal restoration. A window on the millenarian side of early Universalism.

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The second volume carries Winchester's prophetic survey to its conclusion — the new heavens and new earth, the destruction of death, and the final reconciliation of all things, in which his restorationist reading of prophecy and his universalism become one argument. Readers who know Winchester only from the Dialogues will find here the apocalyptic imagination that made him one of the most popular preachers of his generation on either side of the Atlantic.

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A London sermon of Winchester's English sojourn: the preaching of the cross, foolishness to such as perish but the power of God to the saved, turned toward the universal scope of the atonement. Scanned from the British Library's copy.

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The sermon Winchester preached in the University hall at Philadelphia in January 1782 to the society that stood by him after his expulsion from First Baptist for embracing the Universal Restoration — the founding document of his Philadelphia congregation. This is the 1793 London printing, scanned from the British Library's copy.

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Winchester's long poem on the career of Christ from his birth to the end of the mediatorial kingdom, when God shall be all in all — the Universal Restoration cast as epic verse. It rounds out the collection's holdings of his London years.

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Winchester reads the trumpets of the Apocalypse against the events of his own revolutionary decade: the first and second woes past, the third at hand. A compact specimen of the prophetic interpretation worked out at length in his Course of Lectures on the Prophecies, also in this collection.

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When Paine's Age of Reason appeared, the answer that reached many ordinary readers came not from an orthodox divine but from the Universalist Elhanan Winchester, then preaching in London. In ten letters he defends the Bible's inspiration and credibility against Paine's mockery — while conceding that the vindictive God Paine rejected deserved rejection, and offering in its place the God of universal restoration. The exchange shows early Universalism defining itself against deism on one side as firmly as against Calvinism on the other. British Library scan.

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A posthumous gathering of sermons by 'the late Elhanan Winchester, preacher of the universal restoration,' published two years after his death — the final item in his English bibliography. Scanned from the British Library's copy.

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Elhanan Winchester was a celebrated Baptist revivalist who shocked his Philadelphia congregation by embracing the doctrine of universal restoration. Cast as four friendly dialogues between a minister and his skeptical friend, this book answers, one by one, the scriptural objections commonly raised against universal salvation. Winchester's position — that punishment after death is real and serious, but corrective and finite, ending in the restoration of all — became the 'Restorationist' pole of early Universalism, in contrast to Ballou's belief that suffering ends at death.

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