A discourse on natural religion: delivered in the chapel of the University in Cambridge, September 3r, 1795, at the lecture founded by the Honourable Paul Dudley, Esqr

The hand-sewn notebook contains a manuscript draft of the Dudleian lecture delivered by Thomas Barnard on September 3, 1795 at Harvard College. The sermon begins with the Biblical text Acts 14-57. The copy includes a small number of edits and struck-out words. The covers are no longer with the item.

By Thomas Barnard D.D. minister of the North Church in Salem.

Title transcribed from title page.

Received from President Quincy on March 8, 1843.

Thomas Barnard (1747/8-1814), a minister in Salem, Mass., was born on February 4, 1747/8 in Newbury, Mass. He received an AB from Harvard in 1766 and an AM in 1769, and received Doctorates in Divinity from both the University of Edinburgh and Brown University in 1794. He was ordained as a minister of the North Church of Salem on January 13, 1773. Barnard died on October 1, 1814.

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.

A printed version of the lecture published by Samuel Hall in 1795 is available in the Harvard University Archives (HUC 5340.95.2).