Ballou and Easter

So I’m preparing this Sunday’s sermon, in which I’m going to start with Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement and explore the implications of Ballou’s Universalism for our understanding of Easter. I left my copy of the Treatise at the office, it’s too late to go get it, and I figure I’ll just find the text on the Web.

I try Project Gutenberg, but they only have some essays by Ballou and a link to a Wikipedia entry. No links at Wikipedia. I search using Google and Clusty — nothing.

This lack of Ballou’s Treatise strikes me as a serious hole in the World Wide Web. It’s arguably the most important English-language text on Universalism. Anyone out there with the time and expertise to scan, edit, and post this text to the Web?

Update: Astute reader M. found part of chapter 3 of the Treatise here.

Update: A follow-up entry on Ballou’s Treatise here.

6 thoughts on “Ballou and Easter

  1. Scott Wells

    Can’t agree with the “most important” assessment. “Life of Murray” probably had more real influence. Plus, have you thought about typing them out. I have — did a lot of that sort of thing in the 90s — and I cringe at the effort.

  2. Administrator

    Scott — OK, the Life of Murray was at least equally important (but I think the Treatise may be more important now). And yes, I have thought about typing them out — that’s why I was hoping there’s someone else who has the time to scan, use OCR, edit, format, etc.

  3. Scott Wells

    This project is exactly why I stopped trying with OCR. It takes old editions and gives you typographic oatmeal. After endless corrections (as an almost-touch typist) I was getting better results them out typing. Not a hopeful situation.

    PDFs of the book pages would get the text online, but the result would invisible to searches, and really not much better than the photocopies I keep in a filing cabinet.

    Perhaps it can be the project of a wiki transcription project — adopt a few pages to transcribe each. The product would be a public domain text file.

    I have a copy of the 1811 “pirate edition” which modern readers might find more interesting. But I’ve found there are few takers for what comes across as an escoteric project.

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  5. Shawn Anthony

    Dan, All – You may consider a fund raising drive to gather enough capital to purchase “Omnipage”. Scanning each page would still be necessary, but it would be a lot less taxing than page by page typing for a year or more. Just a suggestion!

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