1738 JOHN HANCOCK. The Founding Father's Personal Copy of a Formational Work on Religious and Political Toleration.

An important artifact connecting two important voices for religious and political liberty and toleration in the emerging American documentary landscape.  The author of our work, Edward Wigglesworth the Elder [1693-1765], was the first Professor of Divinity ever commissioned in the American Colonies. He held the newly minted Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard and was a critical voice in the emerging religious and theological landscape. And that irenic voice was needed. There were radical tendencies on every side. Strains of Presbyterianism wanted to revisit the "Solemn League and Covenant," enforcing the narrowest interpretations of the Westminster Confession of Faith as the law of the land. Congregational Revivalists were equally assertive in wanting to undo the damage inflicted by the Halfway Covenant, etc., The Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics, not to mention Deists, sat with a bit of trembling on the sideline to see what liberty or persecution would come their way as the foundat