alked of
now-a-days, seems to me (as I believe it will to all practical
common-sense Englishmen), a faculty not to be depended on; as
fallible and corrupt as any other part of human nature; apt (to
judge from history) to develop itself into ugly forms, not only
without a revelation from God, but too often in spite of one--into
polytheisms, idolatries, witchcrafts, Buddhist asceticisms,
Phoenician Moloch-sacrifices, Popish inquisitions, American spirit-
rappings, and what not. The hearts and minds of the sick, the poor,
the sorrowing, the truly human, all demand a living God, who has
revealed himself in living acts; a God who has taught mankind by
facts, not left them to discover him by theories and sentiments; a
Judge, a Father, a Saviour, and an Inspirer; in a word, their hearts
and minds demand the historic truth of the Bible--of the Old
Testament no less than of the New.

What I needed therefore, for my guidance, was a book which should
believe and confess all this, without condemning or ignoring free
criticism and its results; which should make use of that criticism
not to destroy but to build up; which employed a thorough knowledge
of the Old Testament history, the manners of the Jews, the
localities of the sacred events, to teach men not what might not be
in the Bible, but what was certainly therein; which dealt with the
Bible after the only fair and trustful method; that is, to consider
it at first according to the theory which it sets forth concerning
itself, before trying quite another theory of the commentator's own
invention; and which combined with a courageous determination to
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that
Christian spirit of trust, reverence and piety, without which all
intellectual acuteness is but blindness and folly.

All this, and more, I found in your book, enforced with a genius
which needs no poor praise of mine; and I hailed its appearance at
such a crisis as a happy Providence, certain that it would be, what
I now know by experience it has been, a balm to many a wounded
spirit, and a check to many a wandering intellect, inclined, in the
rashness of youth, to throw away the truth it already had, for the
sake of theories which it hoped that it might possibly verify
hereafter.

With your book in my hand, I have tried to write a few plain
Sermons, telling plain people what they will find in the Pentateuch,
in spite of all present doubts, as their fathers found