A proof of Jesus Christ's being the ancient promised Messiah: a sermon preached in the Chapel of Harvard College at Cambridge in New England, June 23, 1756

The hand-sewn notebook contains a 24-page manuscript draft of the second Dudleian lecture, delivered by John Barnard on June 23, 1756. The copy includes a small number of edits and struck-out words adopted in the printed version published by J. Draper of Boston in 1756. The sermon begins with the Biblical text Mark 14:61, 62. The covers are no longer with the item.

By John Barnard, A.M. Pastor of the First Church of Christ in Marblehead.

John Barnard (1681-1770), minister of Marblehead, Mass., was born in Boston on November 6, 1681 and received an AB from Harvard in 1700 and an AM in 1703. Barnard was ordained the minister of Marblehead on July 18, 1716. He published several sermons and traveled to Boston to give sermons into his eighties. After the Harvard Hall Fire of 1764, Barnard donated a number of personal volumes to help replenish the College Library. He died on January 24, 1770.

Harvard’s annual Dudleian lecture is funded by a bequest from the 1750 will of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts Paul Dudley (1675-1750/1). Dudley specified that the topics of the annual sermon were to rotate among four themes: natural religion, revealed religion, the "Romish church," and the validity of the ordination of ministers. The first lecture was given in 1755, and the series continued uninterrupted until 1857, when the fund was suspended to allow for accumulation. The lecture series began again in 1888. In 1911, the Trustees voted to discontinue the third lecture topic, and the series continued rotating among the three topics until 1956, when another lecture topic, "Catholicism and Protestantism," was voted into the rotation. The Dudleian lecture is the oldest endowed lecture at Harvard University.

A printed version of the lecture published by J. Draper in 1756 is available in the Harvard University Archives (HUC 5340.56.2).