John Murray on Moorfields: where?

I have a goal to publish a first, complete, if graphically unsophisticated edition of the John Murray autobiography — The Life of Murray — in the EPUB format before General Assembly: the first such edition of this important Universalist work, and the first edition of The Life of Murray of any kind in decades.

I can see the appeal, if you can get past Murray’s florid style. He was a young man, very strictly brought up, who sees the work of God through different phases of his life and changes of religious opinion. (I’m particularly pleased by his somewhat cutting take on John Wesley, who as personally appointed the teen-aged Murray as a class leader.) He’s just breaking into adulthood in my editing, and is living far beyond his means in London.

I can especially understand his failures, borne out of curiosity and desire to spread his wings after a repressive childhood. What I don’t understand is the interconnections of the family relations; also, a map would help. He talks much about “the tabernacle” on Moorfields.

This one I do know. This was George Whitfield’s Tabernacle. Murray would have known the newly constructed brick building — far nicer than — but not actually that far from — the little chapel he would later preach in as a new Universalist.

 

By Scott Wells

Scott Wells, 46, is a Universalist Christian minister doing Universalist theology and church administration hacks in Washington, D.C.

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