life, and under its
disturbing circumstances, there is little likelihood of accomplishing in
practice all that the swift mind sees it easy to dream in theory: and if
other and wiser pens are at all helped in the good aim to justify the
ways of God with man, and to clear the course of truth, by some of the
notions broadcast in this treatise, its errand will be well fulfilled.

2. Whether or not the leading idea, so propounded, is new, or is new in
its application as an auxiliary to Christian evidences, the writer is
unaware: to his own mind it has occurred quite spontaneously and on a
sudden; neither has he scrupled to place it before others with whatever
ill advantage of celerity, because it seemed to his own musings to shed
a flood of light upon deep truths, which may not prove unwelcome nor
unuseful to the doubting minds of many. It is true that in this, as in
most other human efforts, the realization of idea in concrete falls far
short of its abstract conception in the mind: there, all was clear,
quick, and easy; here, the necessity of words, and the constraints of an
unwilling perseverance, clog alike the wings of fancy and the feet of
sober argument: insomuch that the difference is felt to be quite
humiliating between the thoughts as they were thought, and the thoughts
as they are written. Minerva, springing from the head of Jove, is not
more unlike the heavily-treading Vulcan.

3. Necessarily, that the argument be (so to speak) complete, and on the
wise principle that no fortresses be left untaken in the rear, it must
be the writer's fate to attempt a demonstration of the anterior
probability of truths, which a child of reason can not only now never
doubt as fact, but never could have thought improbable. Instance the
first effort, showing it to have been expectable that there should, in
any conceived beginning, have existed a Something, a Great Spirit, whom
we call God. To have to argue of the mighty Maker, that HE was an
antecedent probability, would appear a most needless attempt; if it did
not occur as the first link in a chain of arguments less open to
objection by the thoughtless. With our little light to try to prove _a
priori_ the dazzling mystery of a Divine Tri-unity, might (unreasonably
viewed) be assailed as a presumptuous and harmful thing; but it is our
wise prerogative, if and when we can, to "Prove all things." Moreover,
we live in a world wherein Truth's greatest enemy is the man who shrinks
from