1870.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Southern District of New York.
TO
D.D. WHEDON, D.D.,
MY EARLIEST LITERARY FRIEND, WHOSE VIGOROUS WRITINGS HAVE
STIMULATED MY INQUIRIES, WHOSE COUNSELS HAVE GUIDED
MY STUDIES, AND WHOSE KIND AND GENEROUS WORDS
HAVE ENCOURAGED ME TO PERSEVERANCE
AMID NUMEROUS DIFFICULTIES,
I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME AS A TOKEN OF MY MORE THAN
ORDINARY AFFECTION
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE.
In preparing the present volume, the writer has been actuated by a conscientious desire to deepen and vivify our faith in the Christian system of truth, by showing that it does not rest solely on a special class of facts, but upon all the facts of nature and humanity; that its authority does not repose alone on the peculiar and supernatural events which transpired in Palestine, but also on the still broader foundations of the ideas and laws of the reason, and the common wants and instinctive yearnings of the human heart. It is his conviction that the course and constitution of nature, the whole current of history, and the entire development of human thought in the ages anterior to the advent of the Redeemer centre in, and can only be interpreted by, the purpose of redemption.