Barnard, Thomas, 1716-1776

Thomas Barnard (1716-1776), minister of West Newbury and Salem, Mass., was born August 17, 1716. He received an AB from Harvard in 1732 and an AM in 1735. He was ordained the pastor of the Second Parish of Newbury on January 31, 1738/9 and resigned on March 6, 1749/50. He became a lawyer and was for a short time in 1755 a member of the House of Representatives until he resigned to be ordained as minister of the First Church of Salem on September 17, 1755. Barnard died on August 5, 1776.

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.