FOSTER, Benjamin, clergyman, born in Danvers, Massachusetts, 12 June 1750; died in New York City, 26 August 1798. He was graduated at Yale in 1774, and ordained as a Baptist minister in Leicester, Massachusetts, in October 1776, remaining there till 1782. He subsequently held pastorates in Danvers and Newport, and from 1788 till his death was pastor of the 1st Baptist Church in New York City. He was an accomplished scholar, particularly in the Greek, Hebrew, and the Chilean languages, and was eminent as a preacher. During the prevalence of yellow fever in 1798 in New York City, he declined to leave his post, and while visiting the sick was exposed to the pestilence, and died, after an illness of a few days, one month after his wife's death by the same malady. Brown gave him the degree of D.D. in 1792. He was the author of "Tile Divine Right of Immersion" ; " Primitive Baptism Defined"; and "A Dissertation on the Seventy Weeks of Daniel" (Newport, 1787).