t incomplete. "To
whom can I go, but unto Thee? THOU ONLY HAST THE WORDS OF ETERNAL LIFE."
For me, I have nothing more to live for here. In a few weeks I gladly
go to join my brother in his distant exile;--and for Thee, my Country,
"Peace be within thy dwellings, and prosperity within thy palaces!"
And that it may be so, may that Christianity, which, all imperfectly
as it has been exemplified, has yet been thy Palladium and thy Glory,
be ever and increasingly dear to thee!
____

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.

F.B.

THE END.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Eclipse of Faith, by Henry Rog