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and comment in this perfectly intelligible throughout, even to those who have not read his book.

That the work may meet the Divine approval and prove a blessing to the world, has been the single aim and inspiring hope of the

August, 1876.

AUTHOR.

INTRODUCTION.

AID an avowed and educated infidel when in conversation with the writer, on the religious state of the world, "Let the final issue be what it may, the majority is against you; and I go with the majority." But while such a species of argument may suffice to satisfy the mind of one who has laboured hard to quench his God-given rationality, to one with sense unimpaired, and judgment unfettered by any untoward influence, this is clearly impossible. If the road to ruin be really broad, and the gate wide, those who resolve with the many to go in thereat, cannot be wise. But unfortunately, as with this gentleman, so with many, it is this (to them) uncertain and unsettled if, they would fain pursuade themselves, that is alone answerable for the choice they make. It is to be hoped, however, that the following pages will convince the reader that the if is purely fanciful, and that uncertainty in the matter there is none.

To creatures endowed with a moral sense, and placed under inflexible righteous law, all misapprehensions of God's plan of moral government must necessarily be ruinous in their tendency, involving consequences fatal to man's happiness and well-being. If the character of that

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Being who stands at the head of the created universe be, as the Bible declares, holy and just, then all departures from the eternal principles of truth and rectitude on the part of free moral agents, must necessarily involve a proportionate amount of misery. And as the further men recede from those principles of truth and practice which constitute "pure and undefiled religion" as unfolded in

the Gospel of Christ, He being truly the Messiah, “the sent of God," the more miserable they must ultimately become; so the more closely they adhere to the teaching, and the more nearly they approximate to the character of Him who as "God manifest in the flesh" was a living embodiment of the truth, who as man's Exemplar went about doing good, and who is in Himself a self-sufficient and an inexhaustible source of the purest happiness, the happier they must of necessity become. Happiness in its highest attainable degree the entire family of man would fain enjoy; but the faith and practice of the truly Christian life alone furnish the means and facilities for obtaining this most desirable of ends.

That the plan of salvation as preŝaged by the Jewish prophets, revealed and unfolded in the New Testament Scriptures, and practically developed among men from the time of Christ to the present, is eminently adapted to meet the spiritual requirements of man in his present state, as well as to prepare him for a higher and a better, no one can, with any show of reason, deny. Man is a guilty creature. Every one who has arrived at the years of consideration, must be aware that both his natural inclination and his practice have been often in direct opposition to his moral sense of what is right and wrong. Sin, evinced by the universal disposition in man to

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