The New Massachusetts Universalist Convention

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[Fall 1999]

The Ten Commandments Revisited

--Patrick O'Neill, Senior Minister,
First Unitarian Society of Wilmington, Delaware

My friend Heather Clayton is a fourth-generation UU.  Her great-grandmother was Julia Pope Ames Fuller, a Universalist born in 1865 in Machias, Maine.  A few years ago, among the family treasures, Heather found this list of the Ten Commandments as her great-grandmother first learned them in Universalist Sunday school.

1. Worship One God, Who only is good.
2. Bow to no idols of stone or of wood.
3. Speak not of God in careless ways.
4. Try to make Sunday the best of days.
5. Father and Mother, love and obey.
6. Hate not God's children, hurt not nor slay.
7. Pure be in thought and in word and in deed.
8. Keep you life free from stealing and greed.
9. Speak the truth always, never tell lies.
10. And look not on others with envious eyes.

You can tell a lot about our Universalist forebears from this list.  The imperious, forbidding tone of the Voice on Mount Sinai is absent here.  Instead, there is a simpler, gentler intonation expressing a theology of common sense conduct and harmonious living.  Amidst the harsher Calvinistic overtones of 19th century American Protestantism, this Universalist gentleness was a breath of fresh air.  It is a lovely part of our UU heritage that I hope we never lose.  Pass it on...

[Fall 1999]

Dead 100 Years But Evangelizing Still

In Weymouth's North Cemetery the imposing granite monument to Elias S. Beals (1814-1897), merchant and founder of that town's Third Universalist Church, is topped with a large ball bearing the words God's Love Is Universal.

Whenever I pass by the monument I am reminded that Universalism was more of a lay-led movement than Unitarianism was, that it was more evangelical, and that its appeal was more--well--universal. People across a wide range of social classes got the message, and responded to it. And I think: this is what Universalism has to offer the UU movement today. It's well and good to "affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person," but there's something about the traditional version that goes deeper into the heart: God's love is universal.