The hand-sewn notebook contains a manuscript draft of the Dudleian lecture delivered by William Gordon on September 5, 1781 at Harvard College. The sermon begins with the Biblical text Matt. 26:26. The lecture was not printed.

• by William Gordon.

William Gordon (1728-1807), a minister and historian, was born in Hitchin, England in 1728. He immigrated to Massachusetts in 1770 where he served as a pastor in Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, Mass. In 1786 Gordon returned to England to publish The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States. Gordon died on October 19, 1807.|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.