1850-1877: Religion: Publications

Felix Adler, Creed and Deed; A Series of Discourses (New York: Putnam, 1877)—a discussion of the basis of the Ethical Culture Movement, that morals arose from human situations, not divine commands, and are more important than right belief in evaluating a person;

Henry Ward Beecher, The Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1855)—a hymnbook for the Plymouth Congregation, a nominally Congregational church in Brooklyn, New York;

Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell, The Sexes Throughout Nature (New York: Putnam, 1875)—argues that the physical world provides no evidence for denying women an education or holding them in a subordinate role in society;

William G. Brownlow, The Great Iron Wheel Examined; or, Its False Spokes Extracted (Nashville, Tenn., 1856)—a Methodist defense against Baptist charges that Methodism is not the true church;

Horace Bushnell, Christ in Theology (Hartford, Conn.: Brown & Parsons, 1851)—advances the thesis that language used in religious discourse is, because it came from an infinite deity to finite humanity, necessarily imprecise, more given to suggestion than to exact description;

Bushnell, Christian Nurture (New York: Scribner, 1861)—contradicts the traditional emphasis on conversion experience with a thesis that it is possible for individuals, properly introduced to Christianity from infancy, never to know a period when they did not consider themselves Christians;

Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, as Together Constituting the One System of God (New York: Scribner, 1858)—argues for continuity between the physical world and the unseen one, meaning that God could communicate with humanity through the natural world or through other means;

Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and A Voice to Mankind, eleventh edition (New York: S. S. Lyon & W. Fishbough, 1852)—Davis’s first book describing his experiences in communicating with the supernatural world;

David Einhorn, Protest Against a Conference of Rabbis in Which, On Motion of the Rev. Dr. Isaac M. Wise of Cincinnati, The Following Platform Was Accepted: “That the Talmud Is Acknowledged by All Israelites as the Legal Commentary of the Bible” (Baltimore, 1855)—a tract detailing the controversy between Wise and Einhorn. Wise defends Jewish traditions so long as there is no modern reason to drop them while Einhorn judges all traditions by modern light, and desires to create a Judiasm based on nineteenth-century understanding of the faith;

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1850)—among these essays is one on Emanuel Swedenborg, a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Swedish bishop who became the center of a modern spiritual movement;

Charles Grandison Finney, Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney. Written by Himself (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1876)—the autobiography of the famous and influential northern antebellum revivalist;

Octavius Brooks Frothingham, The Religion of Humanity (New York: D. G. Francis, 1873)—argues for basing religion on reasonable doctrinal positions and on the importance of individual work to improve the world;

James Gibbons, The Faith of Our Fathers, sixth revised edition (Baltimore: J. Murphy, 1877)—a popular introduction to Catholicism;

James R. Graves, The Great Iron Wheel; or, Republicanism Backward and Christianity Reversed. In a Series of Letters Addressed to J. Soule, Senior Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, Tenn.: Graves 6c Marks, 1855)—the editor of the Tennessee Baptist argues that the Baptist, not the Methodist faith is the true church;

Isaac Thomas Hecker, Questions of the Soul (New York: Appleton, 1855)—takes the common questions people have regarding religion (life after death, the importance of an ethical life, how to know the true faith, and so forth) and provides Catholic answers;

Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? Darwinism and Its Relation to the Truths of Natural and Revealed Religion (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1874)—points out that natural selection contradicts the doctrine of an omniscient, omnipotent Creator and rejects Darwinism as a Christian explanation for creation;

Levi Silliman Ives, The Trials of a Mind in Its Progress to Catholicism; A Letter to His Old Friends (Boston: P. Donahoe, 1854)—Ives had been an Episcopal bishop before his conversion to Catholicism, and he felt he owed an explanation to his friends and family;

Charles Porterfield Krauth, The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology as Represented in the Augsberg Confession, and in the History and Literature of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1871)—Lutheranism has a different basis from the Reformed Protestantism prevalent in the antebellum United States. Krauth critiques Calvinism as radicalism and presents Lutheranism as best preserving early Christian doctrine;

Isaac Leeser, Catechism for Jewish Children Designed as a Religious Manual for House and School, third edition (Philadelphia, 1856)—an introduction to Reform Judaism;

James M. Pendleton, An Old Landmark Re-Set (Nashville, Tenn.: South Western Publishing House, 1855)—the landmark in the title refers to the birth of the Baptist denomination, which the author pushes back to the earliest Christian days, thus allowing him to claim that the Baptist Church is the true church;

Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 4 volumes (Edinburgh: T. &c T. Clark, 1869-1885)—a continuation of the author’s previous work on the apostolic church, bringing the story through the Middle Ages to the Reformation;

Samuel Simon Schmucker, The American Lutheran Church, Historically, Doctrinally and Practically Delineated, In Several Occasional Discourses (Springfield, Ohio: Harbaugh & Butler, 1851)—an introduction to Lutheranism with an emphasis on its compatibility with assimilation to American life;

Isaac Mayer Wise, The Cosmic God: A Fundamental Philosophy in Popular Lectures (Cincinnati: Office of the American Israelite & Deborah, 1876)—a Reconstruction-era statement of a philosophy Wise studied in his youth, the European Romantic theology that God was not confined to the supernatural, but also spoke to the human heart through the natural world.