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.