PREFACE. THESE Notes are not in any sense an autobiography. I should not consider my personal life or character in the least worthy of any record. Very much otherwise indeed. Any reader will be here forewarned against disappointment, which he would otherwise experience both from what is and from what is not contained in these pages. They are intended merely as notes bearing on that religious work to which my whole life has been consecrated. What is personal is here only because it is needed to put that work into its right light. Whatever importance attaches to that work belongs to these notes. Having lived nearly sixty years, and forty of them in public, it is from no youthful self-satisfaction or unjustified enthusiasm that I do attach some importance to that life-work. That questions of immeasurable seriousness are now agitating the public mind in reference to religion, no rational man doubts. They have been before me all my life, and they are considered in these pages; not, perhaps, so much in themselves as looked at by the public, but rather in relation to some deeper religious questions out of which they spring. For always-while the thoughtless mob can ask no more than, Is religion to be accepted or rejected ?– the thoughtful few will ask, Is it really religion that is under consideration, or only some distorted likeness to religion? Should we ever be engaged in the absurd question of its acceptance or rejection, if we knew what we meant by it? Of certain things-personal to myself-I am very fully convinced that I have been placed in a most unusually favourable position to consider and form a judgment upon certain religious principles; that certain principles or questions prominent in these notes have also been prominent and more or less tested through my whole life in a manner not possible to any one |