I regard this as wholly correct. She read “Science and Health” and endeavored to use the “absent treatment” of the Schoppes. The first night it seemed to do good, and the next night the effect was gone. Her effort to obtain whatever was good in Christian Science was sincere; but her experiments did not make her a Christian Scientist.
She employed physicians till the day of her death, and took medicine. But she believed that spiritual things are the real things, and that man is more than body.
The two ministers whom she selected to have charge of her funeral in the old home in Oxford were both Congregationalists. The Reverend Percy H. Epler was chosen for his long friendship, and the Reverend William E. Barton for that and for his kinship. She did not choose, but would have been happy to have chosen, had her plans been worked out in detail, the Reverend Doctor Tyler, an aged minister of the Universalist faith, to have a share in the services. Happily, he was present, and did participate. He had baptized and buried whole generations of the Oxford Bartons, and it was a benediction to have him standing, like a patriarch, above her coffin, and speaking words of comfort and hope.
Her choice of Congregational ministers to perform this service did not imply a lack of honor for the church of her childhood. Yet, in some respects, her associations in later years were more intimate with Congregationalists than with Universalists.
I have no reason to suppose that she talked with any one more freely than she talked with me about her religion, or about her relations to the Universalist Church. I think I can represent her views essentially as they were.
She continued to believe all that was essential in the faith which she had been taught in the church of Hosea Ballou. She trusted in a God whom she believed too great and good to make an eternal hell necessary to his government. If God was infinite and also desired the salvation of all men, if He was not willing that any should perish, but that all should come unto Him and live; if Christ tasted death for every man; then, as it seemed to her, ultimately, sin must be eliminated from the moral universe and with sin must go punishment. She believed, not only with Ballou, but with Beecher, that God will not punish after punishment ceases to do good. That sin brings punishment she believed and knew, but that sin and punishment must go on eternally seemed to her to imply either that God was not wholly good or not wholly Sovereign.
Her Universalism was essentially Calvinistic; it was based on the sovereignty of God. She believed that God was great enough to
“treasure up his bright designs,
And work his sovereign will.”
She believed in the divinity of Christ. She was not a Unitarian. But she held to Christ’s divinity as a divinity of preëminence and not of exclusion. She believed that Jesus became the Son of God by moral processes which are essentially within the reach of men, “that He might be the first-born among many brethren.”
I think I can give a truthful impression about her feeling with regard to Universalism as an independent ecclesiastical organization. She talked freely with me about this, and expressed the definite wish that the Universalist Church and the Congregational Church might everywhere be reunited. She had something of the same feeling with regard to the Unitarian churches. She loved the memory of Theodore Parker, whom she sometimes felt she recognized as guiding her long years after his death. She honored him, and other of the Unitarian men of his generation. She felt that both Unitarianism and Universalism had been necessary protests against the immoral orthodoxy of the time of their origin.