Stillman, Samuel. A Discourse, Preached in Boston, before the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society, May 25, 1803, being their First Anniversary. Boston: Printed by Manning & Loring, No. 2, Cornhill, 1803. First Edition. [10505]
Plain blue wrapper, front detached, untrimmed pamphlet, 9 1/2 x 5 3/4 inches, ink number at top of title page. Decorative head and tail pieces, 22 clean pp. Good. Pamphlet.
A sermon on Romans 10, part of verses 14 and 15. "And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach except they be sent?"
An appeal for missionaries and for the support of the same. He describes western Massachusetts as destitute of the gospel, and relates the experience of a missionary there "who was out fifteen weeks on the western mission last year...That he preached in forty-one towns in which there was no stated ministry of any denomination; and in thirteen towns in which a missionary never had been. In one part of the wilderness the people had not heard a sermon for fourteen years." He speaks favorably of revivals, and while noting their excesses, commends them.
Starr, A Baptist Bibliography, no. S9182.
Samuel Stillman (1737-1807), b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; d. Boston, Massachusetts. He was the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Boston for forty-two years, from 1765 to 1807. He was an active, amiable, and honest pastor and citizen, a trustee for the founding of Brown University, a delegate from Boston to the 1779 Convention for the Massachusetts constitution and to the 1788 convention for the adoption of the United States Constitution. "As a popular preacher, I greatly doubt whether there was his superior in New England; certainly no other clergyman of his day was so much sought after by distinguished strangers who visited Boston. Among his admirers were the elder President Adams, General Knox, and Governor Hancock, the latter of whom, in the decline of his life, was, for a season, a member of his congregation. His doctrine was highly evangelical; and sometimes his rebukes of the general inattention to religion were most pointed and scathing. I remember, on one occasion, a distinguished stranger went to hear him preach, when he so strikingly exhibited the depths of depravity in the human heart, that the gentleman, on retiring, remarked to his friend that the Doctor had really made them all out a set of scoundrels, but had done it so gracefully and eloquently that he did not feel disposed to complain." - James Loring in Sprague's Annals of the American Pulpit, volume 6, p. 75.
