December 27. I have resolved that the fragments which originally constituted this journal shall not be destroyed. I have employed the interval since the last date in adapting and disguising them for publication. How far an embroidery of fiction has been necessary in attaining this object, is a matter of no consequence to any one; since the book aspires to none of the appropriate attractions of either a novel or a history. No doubt a much stronger interest, of a certain kind, might have been secured by a free employment of fictitious embellishment, or even by a more liberal indulgence in biographical details. But I have been content, for a special object, to do what some tell us is to be done with the Bible,—to separate, from the mass of incident which might have varied or adorned the narrative the exclusively "Religious Element." If the discussions in the preceding pages shall in any instance convince the youthful reader of the precarious nature of those modern book-revelations which are somewhat inconsistently given us in books which tell us that all book-revelations of religious truth are superfluous or even impossible; if they shall convince him how easily an impartial doubter can retort with interest the deistical arguments against Christianity, or how little merely insoluble objections can avail against any thing; if they shall convince him that the differences with which the assailants of the Bible taunt its advocates are neither so numerous nor half so appalling as those which divide its enemies; or, lastly, if they shall, par avarice, in any degree protect those who, like Harrington D——, are being made, or are in danger of being made, sceptical as to all religious truth, by the religious distractions of the present day,—I shall be well content to bear the charge of having spoiled a Fiction, or even of having mutilated a Biography.