Sprague, William Buell. A Sermon, preached January 3, 1821, at the Interment of the Reverend Joseph Lathrop, D.D. Senior Pastor of the First Church in West-Springfield. Hartford: Printed by S. Lincoln, 1821. First Edition. [10509]
Trimmed pamphlet, no wrapper, remnant of small paper label on front, 8 1/8 x 5 1/8 inches, 33 clean pp. Good. Pamphlet.
The text is 2 Kings 2:12, "And he saw him no more: and he took his own clothes and rent them into two pieces." After describing just reasons for grief, Dr. Sprague gives a review of the life of Dr. Lathrop.
Joseph Lathrop, D.D. (1731-1820), b. Norwich, Connecticut; a fifth-generation American at the time of his birth, being a descendant of Rev. John Lothropp, who came to the colonies in 1634 and settled at Barnstable, Mass. DAB neglects our subject, but Sprague has a glowing 13-page article preserving Dr. Lathrop’s memory in his Annals. Sprague, in fact, was ordained in Lathrop’s church at West Springfield in 1819, afterwards serving as a colleague pastor in the congregation.
“It is fair to assign to Dr. Lathrop as a preacher a place among the most distinguished Divines of New England. In his views of religious truth perhaps he may be said to have held a middle ground between Arminianism and high Calvinism, ranking just about with the school of Doddridge; and there was nothing against which he guarded more in his theological inquiries than the tendency to extremes.” - Sprague
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. (10509) $30.00
