pers to
the first. The new papers were more aggressive than the earlier ones,
and for that reason found a heartier welcome in some quarters, and met
with a sharper antagonism in others. It amuses me to look back on some
of the attacks they called forth. Opinions which do not excite the
faintest show of temper at this time from those who do not accept them
were treated as if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It
required the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.

How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time when
I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom Jones,"
and glance at the title-page. There was one of those little engravings
opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I remember it,
and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this patiently." How
many times, when, after rough usage from ill-mannered critics, my own
vocabulary of vituperation was simmering in such a lively way that it
threatened to boil and lift its lid and so boil over, those words have
calmed the small internal effervescence! There is very little in
them and very little of them; and so there is not much in a linchpin
considered by itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming off and
prevents what might be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such
papers as these to the readers of to-day is that their heresies
have become so familiar among intelligent people that they have too
commonplace an aspect. All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief
bear so differently from the way in which they presented themselves when
these papers were written that it is hard to recognize that we and our
fellow-passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.

But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in
these papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable dogmas
or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher treatments,
that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne, and the reader
may nod over pages which, when they were first written, would have waked
him into a paroxysm of protest and denunciation.

November, 1882.

PREFACE TO THE