Sermon at the annual Dudleian lecture, May 13th, 1772

The hand-sewn notebook contains a 108-page manuscript draft of the Dudleian lecture delivered by Benjamin Stevens on May 13, 1772 at Harvard College. The sermon begins with the Biblical text Heb. 1:1, 2. The copy includes a small number of edits and struck-out words. The cover page is no longer attached.

Received March 8, 1843 from President Quincy.

Benjamin Stevens (1721-1791), a minister in Kittery Point, Mass., was born in Charlestown, Mass. on May 4, 1721. He received an AB from Harvard in 1740 and an AM in 1743. Stevens was ordained a minister of the First Congregational Church of Kittery Point on May 1, 1751 and served there until his death on May 18, 1791.

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.