Back in 2005, on the 200th anniversary of the publication of Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement, I decided to put the entire text of the Treatise online. Although I thought it would take me about a year to complete this project, it proved more time-consuming and more difficult than that. But, after spending twenty or so hours on it over the long weekend, I’m finally done, the full text is now online, and you can find it here.
A note on the text: I broke up Ballou’s incredibly long paragraphs to make the text easier to read. I also inserted breaks in the text where I feel one section of a chapter ends and another begins. I updated punctuation to more closely match today’s punctuation conventions. In a very few instances, I made brief editorial changes in order to make the text more readable (e.g., changing the old-fashioned word “graffed” to “grafted”).
The online edition draws primarily from the text of the 1832 edition, which represents Ballou’s final rewriting of the book, with some minor changes. I used the chapter divisions of the 1882 edition, although I altered some of the chapter titles from that edition to conform more closely to Ballou’s own words.
I indented most quotations from the Bible to make it easier to follow Ballou’s arguments from scripture. I supplied Bible citations where Ballou did not. Ballou often misquoted the Bible slightly — no doubt he wrote down many of these passages from memory, and sometimes he would get a word or two wrong — but I have generally not corrected his misquotations.
A job well done! Thanks for doing this, dan!