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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Preface
TT is clear that the Christian Faith must now be maintained by -■- new arguments and new expositions of its first principles. The numerous and wonderful revelations of science have, so to speak, furnished new eyes to the understanding, and cleared the intellectual horizon far and wide. We breathe an entirely new, scientific, moral, intellectual and religious atmosphere. The old arguments and persuasions which once sufficed to establish and perpetuate popular religious convictions, have no longer any influence on the great mass of intelligent and thoughtful men. For centuries the teachings of Theologians have been in the highest subject of human thought miserably in discord with reason and fact. The old modes of thought, like the old conceptions, are fast becoming obsolete. Christian truth and life in the Church can only be saved by the revindication and reassertion of the fundamentals of the faith in a form adapted to the new state of thought. To further this end these Dissertations have been compiled and material gathered from every source and form found convenient. All lovers of the truth will gladly welcome every movement tending to clear the faith once delivered to the saints from the conventional glosses which now obscure it, and to set it forth in its primitive purity, simplicity and attractiveness. Let it be understood that there is no attempt within the narvia PREFACE.
row limits of these "Dissertations" — which should be read in course to be justly comprehended, — to explain in all their varied aspects the several doctrines treated, or to defend revealed religion. The intention Js simply to emphasize and point out inconsistencies in current theology, and to give hints and suggestions along a certain line of thought, for a system more in accord with modern ideas and feeling. Much of our standard theology is like an old field that must be ploughed and planted again, that it may yield an ampler and better harvest. In the middle ages the mind of Europe was bound by the two-fold and closely linked chain of ecclesiastical subjection and doctrinal orthodoxy. The effect of the Reformation was to break one strand of this two-fold cord, leaving the other as strong as ever. It freed its adherents from subjection to the Church's government, but it enforced by the whole weight of its authority a dogmatic creed no less minute and strict than the old one.
Christendom is now longing for a new reformation, not in the direction of the narrow bigotry of Protestant Sectarianism, not for the exchange of one task-master for another, but for the broad and glorious libert)' of Catholic Evangelic truth, which teaches that Christianity is not so much a matter of polemics, as a living power in the hearts and lives of men.
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The end
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