James Relly

James Relly (c. 1722-1778) was a Welsh preacher, born at Jeffreyston in Pembrokeshire, who began his career as an evangelist under George Whitefield. He broke with Whitefield after concluding that the union between Christ and humanity implied the final salvation of all people, a doctrine he set out in Union (1759) and preached in London meeting houses until his death in 1778. He also wrote hymns for his congregation, published in Christian Hymns, Poems, and Spiritual Songs. His most consequential convert was John Murray, who emigrated to America in 1770 and became the principal founder of organized Universalism there.

A late sermon by James Relly, preached at his chapel in Crosby-Square, Bishopsgate, and published at the desire of the congregation: the liberty wherewith Christ makes free, expounded by the theologian of union in the decade before his death. With Union, Salvation Compleated, and the Epistles — all in this collection — it rounds out the surviving body of Relly's published work, from the congregation John Murray knew before he sailed for America. The scan is from the British Library's copy.

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The hymnbook of Rellyan Universalism, composed by James Relly with his brother John. The hymns sing the doctrines of 'Union' — Christ and humanity bound in one — and were carried to America, where John Murray's congregations used them in worship; the Gloucester church sang from this book at its founding. Among the earliest hymnody of the Universalist movement on either side of the Atlantic.

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A series of pastoral letters in which Relly unfolds his doctrine of universal salvation for a society of his adherents. Where 'Union' makes the theological argument, the Epistles show Relly the pastor — applying the 'great salvation' to conscience, doubt, suffering, and Christian living. Together the two books preserve the Rellyan Universalism that John Murray preached, largely unchanged, for his whole American ministry.

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Relly's treatise on the covenant of grace, arguing that salvation was finished and made certain in Christ for all whom he represents — the doctrine of union that John Murray carried to America. This 1779 London printing binds it with several of Relly's shorter treatises (Trial of Spirits, The Salt of the Sacrifice, The Sadducee Detected, and The Life of Christ), making the volume a small collected Relly. With Union and the Epistles, also in this collection, it completes the core of his theological writing.

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The American edition of the Relly brothers' hymnbook (London, 1776; the first edition is also in this collection), printed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for the use of John Murray's American followers. Its very existence is evidence of how the Rellyan congregations worshipped in the new republic — singing the doctrines of union with Christ a decade before the denomination organized.

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The seed from which American Universalism grew. James Relly, a Welsh evangelist who had preached alongside George Whitefield, here argues that believers are so completely united with Christ that his death was truly theirs — and that this union embraces all humanity, making final condemnation impossible. It was this book, and Relly's London preaching, that converted the young John Murray from Methodism to Universalism before he carried the message to America. The PDF is the 1812 New-York edition, printed for the Society of United Christian Friends — the Rellyan congregation in New York — and scanned by Google Books; the British Library microfilm item catalogued as the 1759 edition proved to contain a different work entirely and was replaced.

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