15)

The province of the following work accordingly is, the examination of this
neglected branch in the analysis of unbelief. While admitting most fully
and unhesitatingly the operation of emotional causes, and the absolute
necessity, scientific as well as practical, of allowing for their
operation, it is proposed to analyse the forms of doubt or unbelief in
reference mainly to the intellectual element which has entered into them,
and the discovery of the intellectual causes which have produced or
modified them. Thus the history, while not ceasing to belong to church
history, becomes also a chapter in the history of philosophy, a page in
the history of the human mind.

The enumeration of the causes into which the intellectual elements of
doubt are resolvable, is furnished in the text of the first Lecture.(16)
If the nature of some of them be obscure, and the reader be unaccustomed
to the philosophical study necessary for fully understanding them;
information must be sought in the books to which references are elsewhere
given, as the subject is too large to be developed in the limited space of
this Preface.

The work however professes to be not merely a narrative, but a "critical
history." The idea of criticism in a history imparts to it an ethical
aspect. For criticism does not rest content with ideas, viewed as facts,
but as realities. It seeks to pass above the relative, and attain the
absolute; to determine either what is right or what is true. It may make
this determination by means of two different standards. It may be either
independent or dogmatic;--independent if it enters upon a new field
candidly and without prepossessions, and rests content with the inferences
which the study suggests;--dogmatic, when it approaches a subject with
views derived from other sources, and pronounces on right or wrong, truth
or falsehood, by reference to them.

It is hoped that the reader will not be unduly prejudiced, if the
confession be frankly made, that the criticism in these Lectures is of the
latter kind. This indeed might be expected from their very character. The
Bampton Lecture is an establishment for producing apologetic treatises.
The authors are supposed to assume the truth of Christianity, and to seek
to repel attacks upon it. They are defenders, not investigators. The
reader has a right to demand fairness, but not independence; truth in the
facts, but not hesitation in the inferences. While however the writer of