Joseph Stevens Buckminster was a popular young Boston preacher of "liberal" Christianity when he died, following an epileptic seizure, at the age of twenty-eight. In the seven years that he practiced his vocation Buckminster had accomplished much. He had served as preacher to the Brattle Street Church, the most fashionable congregation in affluent Boston, and written about 250 sermons and some thirty published essays and reviews; he had traveled for a year in Europe, where he collected a library of some 3,000 volumes; he had delivered the 1809 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, had belonged to the Anthology Society and contributed frequently to its journal, and in 1807 had been one of the founders of the Boston Athenaeum. At the time of his death he was preparing for a new position as the first Dexter lecturer in biblical criticism at Harvard. As a result of these activities, Buckminster is remembered primarily...