[YP0534]

So, it's taken me nearly a year but I've gotten back around to my review of Sunday/Sabbath School literature produced from around the middle of the 19th century through around WWI.

An interesting wrinkle I came across was how the temperance movement articulated with the Sunday/Sabbath School system.

But my main focus has been on proving up my theory that much of Lee's teaching actually originated from that body of work, in accordance with a previous discovery I wrote about where a note on "carob pods" was not lifted without attribution from the original author's primary work but rather from the secondary source of the Sunday School Lesson volume.

It's a large project the way I'm going about it and may or may not yield any results in the long run but just out of curiosity I reviewed several of the works I'm in the process of doing some indexing of and discovered that, gasp, Lee's reference to the very phrase "divine economy" in the very sense he meant it (on the over-arching side vs. the dispensing side) has precedent in these works. "Economy" was apparently a somewhat familiar term of art for Bible scholars of the era referring to a dispensation or the dispensations of the ages. Thus, "God's economy" in the sense of God's entire plan in His universal administration is simply not something that could be attributed to Lee as his invention.

Some have quibbled about the term "economy" being somewhat inadequate to communicate the thought in modern English, and rightly so. But the fault is not so much in Lee inventing something new but in clinging to something old. In other words, it's barely a step out of King James English to refer to "God's economy" even though some might feel that term is best capable of conveying the thought in its being somewhat emptied of meaning through the process of obsolescence. A matter of opinion, to be sure, and a matter for linguists rather than churchmen.