So I’m preparing this Sunday’s sermon, in which I’m going to start with Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement and explore the implications of Ballou’s Universalism for our understanding of Easter. I left my copy of the Treatise at the office, it’s too late to go get it, and I figure I’ll just find the text on the Web.
I try Project Gutenberg, but they only have some essays by Ballou and a link to a Wikipedia entry. No links at Wikipedia. I search using Google and Clusty — nothing.
This lack of Ballou’s Treatise strikes me as a serious hole in the World Wide Web. It’s arguably the most important English-language text on Universalism. Anyone out there with the time and expertise to scan, edit, and post this text to the Web?
Update: Astute reader M. found part of chapter 3 of the Treatise here.
Update: A follow-up entry on Ballou’s Treatise here.
Can’t agree with the “most important” assessment. “Life of Murray” probably had more real influence. Plus, have you thought about typing them out. I have — did a lot of that sort of thing in the 90s — and I cringe at the effort.
Scott — OK, the Life of Murray was at least equally important (but I think the Treatise may be more important now). And yes, I have thought about typing them out — that’s why I was hoping there’s someone else who has the time to scan, use OCR, edit, format, etc.
This project is exactly why I stopped trying with OCR. It takes old editions and gives you typographic oatmeal. After endless corrections (as an almost-touch typist) I was getting better results them out typing. Not a hopeful situation.
PDFs of the book pages would get the text online, but the result would invisible to searches, and really not much better than the photocopies I keep in a filing cabinet.
Perhaps it can be the project of a wiki transcription project — adopt a few pages to transcribe each. The product would be a public domain text file.
I have a copy of the 1811 “pirate edition” which modern readers might find more interesting. But I’ve found there are few takers for what comes across as an escoteric project.
Scott: New entry on this topic here.
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Dan, All – You may consider a fund raising drive to gather enough capital to purchase “Omnipage”. Scanning each page would still be necessary, but it would be a lot less taxing than page by page typing for a year or more. Just a suggestion!