ear in later
chapters.

* * * * *

Close as might seem to be the kindred between Unitarianism and
Universalism, coeval as they are in their origin as organized sects,
they are curiously diverse in their origin. Each of them, at the present
day, holds the characteristic tenet of the other; in general, Unitarians
are Universalists, and Universalists are Unitarians.[225:1] But in the
beginning Unitarianism was a bold reactionary protest against leading
doctrines of the prevailing Calvinism of New England, notably against
the doctrines of the Trinity, of expiatory atonement, and of human
depravity; and it was still more a protest against the intolerant and
intolerable dogmatism of the sanhedrim of Jonathan Edwards's successors,
in their cock-sure expositions of the methods of the divine government
and the psychology of conversion. Universalism, on the other hand, in
its first setting forth in America, planted itself on the leading
"evangelical" doctrines, which its leaders had earnestly preached, and
made them the major premisses of its argument. Justification and
salvation, said John Murray, one of Whitefield's Calvinistic Methodist
preachers, are the lot of those for whom Christ died. But Christ died
for the elect, said his Calvinistic brethren. Nay, verily, said Murray
(in this following one of his colleagues, James Relly); what saith the
Scripture? "Christ died for _all_." It was the pinch of this argument
which brought New England theologians, beginning with Smalley and the
second Edwards, to the acceptance of the rectoral theory of the
atonement, and so prepared the way for much disputation among the
doctors of the next century.[225:2]

Mr. Murray arrived in America in 1770, and after much going to and fro
organized, in 1779, at Gloucester, Mass., the first congregation in
America on distinctly Universalist principles. But other men, along
other lines of thought, had been working their way to somewhat similar
conclusions. In 1785 Elhanan Winchester, a thoroughly Calvinistic
Baptist minister in Philadelphia, led forth his excommunicated brethren,
one hundred strong, and organized them into a "Society of Universal
Baptists," holding to the universal _restoration_ of mankind to holiness
and happiness. The two differing schools fraternized in a convention of
Universalist churches at Philadelphia in 1794, at which articles of
belief and a plan of organization were set forth, understood to