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ought to make in receiving the common traditions, are either on the point of giving up all independent thought on such matters and unintelligently acquiescing in the habits of those aronnd them, or are always in bondage to the fear of transgressing the legitimate boundaries of Freedom and of Reverence. Such persons, it is thought, have great claims upon the aid of any of their brethren who, though wanting in many of those endowments and acquisitions with which these are blessed, yet have what they have not-either the leisure or the faculty for such investigations: and it is for the sake of such persons-persons in a state of doubt and difficulty, dissatisfied with the old solution of scriptural problems but not knowing of the new that these Pages will be written. All others are here distinctly forewarned that they will very probably meet in them with the discussion of subjects which it will require a very large measure of calmness and of courage for them to engage in, and that there is no prospect of anything but discomfort to them, if they are at present quite satisfied with the opinions more generally received among the religious of our time and country.

Doubtless to any serious and sensitive mind it is a very grave thing to do, thus to enter into investigations which must almost unavoidably trouble any weak brethren into whose hands they may possibly fall: to the present writer it is one so grave as to be excitingly solemn, and nothing could encourage or enable him to undertake it but the belief that it is his duty to impart some of the best fruits which he has been, or may be, enabled to obtain from investigations which he has been permitted peculiar opportunities to pursue, and the consciousness that he has no inducement of any kind for forming any partial or unjust judgement. To do so is truly for him no act of intellectual, or other, self-indulgence, but rather one of considerable self-denial: and it is meant purely as an offering of Christian charity to some few who, amid many other greater gifts, may lack that one with which he has been favoured-the opportunity of unembarrassed and unbiassed contemplation. And after all it may not unfairly be said, that tenderness to the weak, B 2