William Dodd

William Dodd (1729-1777) was an English Anglican clergyman and man of letters, born at Bourne in Lincolnshire. A fashionable and popular London preacher, he was appointed a royal chaplain in 1763, but his extravagant style of living left him deeply in debt. Convicted of forgery, he was hanged at Tyburn in 1777 despite a large public campaign for a pardon in which Samuel Johnson took part. His treatise The Restoration of All Things, defending the eventual recovery of the whole creation, was published after his death.

Universalism from inside seventeenth-century Puritanism. Jeremiah White had been a chaplain to Oliver Cromwell; his vindication of 'the goodness and grace of God to be manifested at last in the recovery of his whole creation out of their fall' circulated in manuscript and was published after his death. Its republication in 1779 fed the English universalist revival of Relly's and Winchester's generation, and it gave the movement a pedigree reaching back to the Commonwealth.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)