This quotation from Elbridge Gerry Brooks’s Our New Departure (page 14) sticks with me. Again, this has an echo of familiarity.
Has not our effort been to convince the head that ‘orthodoxy’ is not true, and that God is good, and that all men are to be saved, rather than so to present the fact of God’s persistent and pleading love, and of the ultimate repentance and obedience of all, as to convict the heart of sin, to quicken the conscience to a sense of guilt, and to bring the people, in penitence and a confession of personal need and obligation, to their knees? In a word, has not our labor been theological more than experimental, aiming to make Christian Universalists, and to build and consolidate a Universalist denomination, rather than to make Universalist Christians, compacted and consecrated in the Universalist Church?
The deepest and most interior meanings of Christ’s work have never been wholly overlooked among us; but, as the rule, we have given more attention to the fact that he is to save, than to the question, How ?