John Murray (minister)

John Murray (December 10, 1741 – September 3, 1815) was one of the founders of the Universalist denomination in the United States, a pioneer minister and an inspirational figure.

John Murray

Early life

He was born in Alton, Hampshire (fifteen miles northeast of Winchester), in England on December 10, 1741. His father was an Anglican and his mother a Presbyterian, both strict Calvinists, and his home life was attended by religious severity. In 1751 the family settled near Cork, Ireland. In 1760 Murray returned to England and joined George Whitefield's congregation; but embracing, somewhat later, the Universalistic teachings of Welsh minister James Relly he was excommunicated. In 1770 he emigrated to "lose himself in America", and preached, as a Universalist minister, his first sermon in Good Luck, now Lacey Township, New Jersey, September 30, 1770, residing there with his patron and friend Thomas Potter until 1774, itinerating from Virginia to New Hampshire. Today the Potter farm is the site of the Murray Grove Retreat and Renewal Center .

Mature life

In 1774, he settled at Gloucester, Massachusetts and established a congregation there out of a Rellyite study group. There he met his second wife, the author and philosopher Judith Sargent Murray. He was suspected of being a British spy, but in 1775 was appointed chaplain of the Rhode Island Brigade before Boston by General George Washington despite petitions for his dismissal by other chaplains over his rejection of belief in hell.[1] He participated in the first general Universalist Convention at Oxford, Massachusetts, September, 1785. On October 23, 1793, he became pastor of the Universalist society of Boston, and faithfully served it until October 19, 1809, when paralysis stopped his work. He was a man of great courage and eloquence, and in the defense of his views endured much detestation and abuse. In regard to Jesus, he taught that in him God became the Son; for "God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, are no more than different exhibitions of the self-same existent, omnipresent Being." He taught that all men would ultimately be saved through the sacrifice of Christ, the basis for this being the union of all men in Christ, just as they were united with Adam, and therefore partaking of the benefits of his sacrifice. He was also a writer of hymns and a compiler of hymnals.

Murray suffered a debilitating stroke on October 19, 1809, which compelled him to give up preaching and died in Boston, Massachusetts on September 3, 1815. His wife, Judith Sargent Murray, collected and finished his autobiography to publish posthumously.

Writings

Sources are his own Letters and Sketches of Sermons, 3 volumes, Boston, 1812; Autobiography, continued by his wife, (also known as Life of Murray), Boston, 1816, centenary ed., 1870. Additional information and detailed writings from the letters of his wife Judith Sargent Murray were published in 1998 (edited by Bonnie Hurd Smith), in the book "From Gloucester to Philadelphia in 1790" with "Observations, anecdotes and thoughts from the 18th century letters of Judith Sargent Murray". This publication describes the life of the Murray family as they traveled in 1790, with the majority of time in Philadelphia.

gollark: Well, yes, but they're byte sequences.
gollark: I mean, it's better than C and stuff, and I wouldn't mind writing simple apps in it.
gollark: Speaking specifically about the error handling, it may be "simple", but it's only "simple" in the sense of "the compiler writers do less work". It's very easy to mess it up by forgetting the useless boilerplate line somewhere, or something like that.
gollark: Speaking more generally than the type system, Go is just really... anti-abstraction... with, well, the gimped type system, lack of much metaprogramming support, and weird special cases, and poor error handling.
gollark: - They may be working on them, but they initially claimed that they weren't necessary and they don't exist now. Also, I don't trust them to not do them wrong.- Ooookay then- Well, generics, for one: they *kind of exist* in that you can have generic maps, channels, slices, and arrays, but not anything else. Also this (https://fasterthanli.me/blog/2020/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride/), which is mostly about the file handling not being good since it tries to map on concepts which don't fit. Also channels having weird special syntax. Also `for` and `range` and `new` and `make` basically just being magic stuff which do whatever the compiler writers wanted with no consistency- see above- Because there's no generic number/comparable thing type. You would need to use `interface{}` or write a new function (with identical code) for every type you wanted to compare- You can change a signature somewhere and won't be alerted, but something else will break because the interface is no longer implemented- They are byte sequences. https://blog.golang.org/strings.- It's not. You need to put `if err != nil { return err }` everywhere.

References

Initial text from Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religion

  1. Boller, Paul (1963). George Washington and Religion. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press. ISBN 978-0-87074-021-3.

Further Reading

Bressler, Ann Lee. The Universalist Movement in America, 1770-1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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