UNIVERSALISTS. - A Protestant sect derived from Congregationalism or Brownism.
The Brownists taught that each local church is independent, whence the name "Independents" sometimes given to the Congregationalists. The Universalists around 1750 broke away from Congregationalism in England, whence in 1770 they passed to America. Only in 1870 did they adopt a plan of organization and an administrative manual. The Universalists carry on religious activity in Japan. Their number, in 1930, amounted in the United States to 48,649 members, divided into 580 communities; they had 3 academies, 3 colleges, 3 theological seminaries and a publishing house in Boston: Universalist Publishing House, with a weekly: The Universalist Leader.
The Universalists have drawn from Congregationalism the idea that each community or parish is independent; from Unitarianism they have accepted the denial of the dogma of the Trinity and of the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Their characteristic, however, is "universalism": all created spirits, men or demons, will in the end be led back to unity, that is, gathered together in the kingdom of God. There are no perpetually reprobate. All God's creatures have a right to his mercy; it would be unjust of God to suppose the contrary. Universalism therefore denies the dogma of predestination, both in the erroneous conception of Luther and of Calvin and in the Catholic formulation. The ideological origin of universalism can be traced back to Arminianism, which was rejected at the Synod of Dordrecht in 1618. Arminius, however, and after him Amyraut, admitted only a theoretical universalism. What characterizes universalism properly so called is that the dualism between the elect and the non-elect is only temporary and passing, that this dualism is destined to disappear in the progressive and certain realization of universal salvation. Each soul has its personal value, its inestimable price that the entire universe could not compensate (Mt. 16, 26). For these reasons, the Universalists hold that the education and purification of humanity through Grace takes place in the future life, so that those who seem today rejected will tomorrow be first and the first last. Accordingly hell is only a kind of purgatory, from which one day one may come out to obtain among the elect a place perhaps higher than that assigned to the just and the believers of the present life. This doctrine is extended to imperfect Christians, to children who die without Baptism, to pagans of any race, and is applied even to demons. This erroneous conception (v. INFERNO) has spread in numerous Protestant sects and pleases the majority of unbelievers. Among the better-known thinkers who have adopted universalism, Schleiermacher, M. Schweitzer at Zurich and Scholten at Leiden should be cited. The more or less rationalist Protestant theologians of the end of the 19th century were almost all favorable to this thesis, which has lost ground in the neo-Calvinism of the 20th century.
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Leone Cristiani