A Discourse Had by the Late Reverend and Learned Mr. Ebenezer Pemberton, Previous to the Ordination of the Reverend Mr. Joseph Sewall

Benjamin Franklin was twelve years old in 1718, the year he was bound to his older brother James to learn the printing trade. James had come home from London the year before with a press and a font of type. This sermon came off that press in the year Benjamin began work in the shop.

Ebenezer Pemberton (1671-1717) was minister of the Old South Church in Boston from 1700. On 16 September 1713 he ordained his young colleague Joseph Sewall, and the discourse he gave on that occasion argues that ordination by a presbytery of ministers is valid. It reached the press after Pemberton's death, which is why the title calls him the late Reverend.

The imprint reads "Printed by J. Franklin, for S. Gerrish," and adds that it was sold at Gerrish's shop near the Old Meeting-House. Samuel Gerrish was a Boston bookseller, and the sermon was printed on his account. That was how most colonial printing was done: the printer set and pulled the sheets, and the bookseller paid for them and sold them.

This is certainly one of the first one or two pieces Benjamin ever worked on, and it is the only one known in private hands. No one can say which pages he set or pulled. The shop was small, and a boy of twelve bound to it would have begun with the plain work of the trade. A sermon of fifteen pages is exactly the kind of job on which a compositor is made. In his Autobiography Franklin recalls that he soon made himself a useful hand to his brother. The indenture ran until he was twenty-one, and he broke it five years later.

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