Adams traces universal salvation from Origen in the third century down through Chevalier Ramsay, a figure the archive already profiles, to Dr. Chauncy of Boston. That line puts it squarely in the reservoir, a doctrine the prisca-theologia carriers held, and it reached the frontier through Elhanan Winchester and the world the Smith family lived in, one of the clearest currents feeding early Mormon thought.
In Hannah Adams
In Adams’s own words, from the 1817 Dictionary. Each passage is quoted verbatim under its own entry.
Universalists. The sentiment which has procured its professors this appellation was embraced by Origen in the third century, and in more modern times by Chevalier Ramsay, Mr. Jeremiah White, Dr. Cheyne, Dr. Hartley, and Dr. Newton, bishop of Bristol, and many others.
The plan of Universal salvation, as exhibited by a late learned divine (Dr. Chauncy of Boston, in America) in his work entitled The Salvation of All Men, holds that the scheme of revelation has the happiness of all mankind lying at bottom, as its great and ultimate end; that it gradually tends to this end, and will not fail of its accomplishment when fully completed.
Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions (Boston, 1817), entry “Universalists.”