EDINBURGH: WILLIAM OLIPHANT AND SONS.

LONDON: HOULSTON AND WRIGHT. GLASGOW: DAVID ROBERTSON.

MDCCCLVII.

PREFACEЕ.

MANY readers do not read Prefaces; with the more sagacious the Preface is sought out and read first in order. Having special regard to the good opinion of the latter class, we adhere to our custom of dedicating this leaf to a few prefatory observations.

Herewith is completed Our Eleventh Volume-the first of a New Series of the Magazine. The occasion, as usual, invites us to reflect on the nature of the work in which we are engaged, and the ever-varying circumstances with which it is surrounded. While endeavouring to furnish, every successive month, reading that may prove of general and permanent interest to the Christians, younger and older, who consult our pages, and giving due place also to the representation and discussion of strictly Denominational affairs, we aspire to a share of the honour and responsibility of expressing, and, it may be, in some degree guiding, the opinions of thousands of Christian men, on the more prominent events which mark and measure the progress of religious truth in this country and throughout the world. This is our prescribed task; we are deeply conscious-every year more deeply conscious of its importance. A publication coming into contact from month to month, and year after year, with so many earnest inquiring minds as this Magazine has, since its commencement, continued to address throughout the wide extent of the United Presbyterian Church, is not an agency to be trifled with. Speaking of the comparative influence of the Pulpit and the Press, an eminent preacher likens the former to the strong bow sending forth its single shaft, whose force, however well directed, is soon spent; and the latter to a famous engine of ancient warfare, discharging a thousand darts in a thousand different directions at once, and containing in itself an apparatus for preparing more darts in endless succession. The figure is so far unhappy, in that it suggests ideas of death and destruction inappropriate to our present purpose; but, apart from these ideas, the ancient Catapulta well represents the power of the Periodical Press for good or for evil. How much they have to answer for, who are intrusted with the working of such a power!-is a reflection which we would wish never absent from our minds in conducting this Magazine.