Sprague, William B. A Discourse on True Magnanimity, addressed particularly to Young Men, and delivered in the Second Presbyterian Church in Albany, February 25, 1844. Albany: Erastus H. Pease, 1844. First Edition. [9348]
Yellow waxed paper wrapper, 9 x 5 1/2 inches, 56 pp., small hole in the margin of the last leaf. Good. Pamphlet.
A sermon on the text Genesis 14:5, in which Joseph comforts his brothers who sold him into slavery. The author seeks to persuade young men that being magnanimous towards others is the mark of a real man, and of a real Christian. He attacks dueling, which may pass for the satisfaction of honor, but makes a man a murderer, the opposite of honorable.
William Buell Sprague (1795-1876), born in Andover, Connecticut; graduated at Yale in 1815, and afterwards studied at Princeton for two years. He was ordained in the Congregational Church at West Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1819 and was pastor there for ten years. In 1829 he accepted a call to the Second Presbyterian Church in Albany and served in that congregation as pastor for forty years.
“He has been well and truly described as an ‘illustrious man; a cultivated, elegant, voluminous, useful and popular preacher; an indefatigable and successful pastor; an unselfish and devoted friend; loving, genial, pure, and noble; an Israelite, indeed, in whom there was no guile; one of the most childlike, unsophisticated, and charitable of men.’ While he never relaxed his pulpit and pastoral duties, his added literary labors were prodigious, and their fruits exceedingly great.” – M’Clintock & Strong.
