This message comes from RW Bill Thomas, LMPS, FGCR, Trustee, Chancellor Robert R Livingston Masonic Library in New York:
TWO past Prestonian Lecturers will be presenting in the Grand Lodge of New York Building on Monday, September 14, at 7:30 pm
Maimonides-Marshall Lodge
10th floor Colonial Room
Worshipfuls Trevor Stewart and Gordon Davie will deliver lectures. Both are Past Prestonians; both are past masters of Quatuor Coronati Lodge, which is the premier lodge of Masonic research in the world. We are most fortunate to have these two highly-decorated Masons with us.
Please wear your regalia and dark business suit.
BACKGROUND
The Prestonian Lecture is the only lecture held officially under the United Grand Lodge of England. With the exception of the years during the Second World War (1940-1946) regular appointments have been made annually from 1924 until the present day.
William Preston (1772-1818), a Scots-born printer, was a very active freemason in London from the middle of the 18th to the beginning of the 19th centuries. With the assistance of other Brethren he developed an elaborate system of Masonic instruction by means of catechetical lectures which was practiced in association with the Lodge of Antiquity (now no. 1) of which he was Master (1774). At his death, he bequeathed to the Grand Lodge the sum of £300, the interest from which was to be held in trust to be applied ‘to some well-informed Mason to deliver annually a Lecture on the First, Second or Third Degree of the Order of Masonry according to the system practiced in the Lodge of Antiquity’ during Preston’s Mastership.
With occasional intermissions, lectures on his method were accordingly delivered from 1820 until 1862, when the lectureship was allowed to lapse. In 1924 it was revived, with certain modifications to the originals scheme, to allow the lecturer (chosen annually by the Trustees) to deliver a lecture on a subject of his own selection.