1745 May 23 (Thursday). Mr. Breck and Mr. Smith came up from Marlborough. They din’d with me and after Dinner Mr. Breck preach’d my Lecture from 1 Pet. 3.15, a useful Sermon. May God Succeed it, and bless the Preacher. Not many North Side People at Lecture. N.B. Ebenezer Ball, in a Consumption brought low, was pray’d for. N.B. One Mr. Town of Oxford labouring under a Diabetes, and much enfeebled, was carry’d along in an Horse litter, some Framingham people assisting. Mr. Breck and Mr. Smith return’d to Marlborough. The former carrying off the works of the Author of the Whole Duty of Man,[1] for which he is to bring me all he has of Dr. Owen.[2]
[1]Richard Allestree, D.D. (1619-1681), the royalist divine, is generally held to have been the author of The Whole Duty of Man, which was first published in 1658 and went through more than thirty editions. The work Parkman refers to may have been his Forty Sermons whereof Twenty-one are now First Published (2 vols.; London, 1684).
[2]Over eighty works of John Owen (1616-1683), the English divine, were published. One had recently been published in America: Eshcol: a Cluster of the Fruit of Canaan Brought to the Borders (Boston, 1744).