TO BENJAMIN PARSONS SYMONS, D.D. VICE-CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, These Volumes ARE INSCRIBED AS A PUBLIC MARK OF HIS RESPECT AND REGARD BY THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. ONLY a few words are necessary, by way of introduction, to the following dis courses. 1. They are sermons, not essays. They deal and reason with living men, not abstractions, and creatures of the closet. They therefore take, as they naturally arise, the objections to divine things, and to the truths of the Gospel, which, even in the least instructed of our congregations, form a sort of floating, undigested theory of unbelief. No addresses, whose object is to persuade, can be really efficient which do not deal with them; but fall dead and pointless. They are above or below the mark. Moreover, only a large pastoral experi ence, and actual contact with men's souls, can give us a knowledge of those practical workings of the human heart which determine the relation of the Gospel to the intellect. The will shapes the thoughts. 2. The topics of which these discourses treat, though not numerous, yet touch the innermost depths and mysteries of revelation and of the human spirit! To shun them, as is usually the practice in ordinary congregations, is only to consult our own indolence, and to refuse a mighty instrument which God himself has provided for elevating the feelings and enlarging the minds of them that hear us! It is to feed them, not on the inexhaustible richness of the living word, but on a scanty and starveling diet, ill fitted to nourish and sustain a soul which has any depth or capacity of thought and feeling! Nor indeed can the full power of a living faith be duly exhibited, save in workings as large, and free, and diversified as the glorious sphere in which Al |