WHY STUDY UNIVERSALIST HISTORY		by David S. Lawyer, 1993
Whether we like it or not, Throop church is the heir to the
largest ex-Universalist Church west of the Mississippi.  it was at one
time the flagship Universalist Church in the Pacific Coast region of the US.
It's financial contribution to the California organization of universalist
churches was often about equal to that of all the other Universalist
churches in the state combined.

Since universalists built this church and we inherited it from them, we are
under some moral obligation to try to understand what the universalist were
like and what they would have liked the church to become.  We don't have to
necessarily carry on the they would have wished, but it still needs to be
taken into account.

Universalists, like UUs today, did not all hold the same views.  Much of
the written history erroneously tends to imply that universalism was a
successful, cohesive movement.  It was initially a success, but after the
Civil War it entered into a prolonged period of stagnation and decline.
The religion that once (erroneously) claimed to be the 6th largest in the
U.S. merged with the Unitarians in 1961.  At that time it was outnumbered
by the Unitarians by about 3 to 1.  The resulting UU religion today is only
about the 50th largest religion in the US today.  So it's important to
study the history so we can speculate on what went wrong and why.
Understanding this better may help us avoid making similar mistakes again.