Sermon at the annual Dudleian lecture at Harvard College in Cambridge, May 14th, 1760

The hand-sewn notebook contains a 41-page manuscript draft of the Dudleian lecture delivered by Samuel Wigglesworth on May 14, 1760 at Harvard College. The sermon begins with the Biblical text I Cor. 1:21. The copy includes a small number of edits and struck-out words. The covers are no longer with the item.

Samuel Wigglesworth (1688/9-1768), minister of Ipswich Hamlet, Mass., was born on February 4, 1688/9 in Malden, Mass. He received an AB from Harvard in 1707 and an AM in 1711. Wigglesworth practiced medicine until October 12, 1714 when he was ordained the minister of Ipswich Hamlet. He published a number of his sermons and in 1733 delivered the Election Sermon to the Massachusetts General Court. Wigglesworth died on September 3, 1768.

Harvard’s oldest endowed lecture, the 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.