ABSTRACT
Abiel Holmes was a Congregational clergyman and historian, and the grandfather of the US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. A graduate of Yale College in 1783, Holmes was recruited to be the minister at the Congregational Church in Midway, Georgia. He served there until 1791, when he became the minister of First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1798 Holmes served as the Corresponding Secretary of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Holmes's theological conflict with his church was in the future in 1820, though in the second Discourse he draws attention to the overlap of Reformed orthodox tenets in New England with those of Swiss Protestants of the sixteenth century. And he urges his listeners to heed the Bible's teaching that ancient Hebrews and Christians were to pass stories of God's provision down through the generations. Whether they would carry Christian faith with them, much less Calvinist discipline, was uncertain.
