PREFACE.
The object of the following Pages is to present some sugestions respecting the Study of the Bible and of Theology which may assist earnest inquirers in the formation of opinions at once enlightened and spiritual. And such suggestions seem at this time peculiarly required: for the present ecclesiastical controversies cannot much longer continue to be of interest for the more thoughtful, but will probably for such be superseded by others relating to questions of far deeper import, and of far more difficult solution. Indeed after a few years it will probably seem simply humiliating that questions which had been so frequently and so fully discussed in past ages, with everywhere uniformly the same kinds of results, should have been supposed by us, without new data, to admit of any decisions essentially different from those which our fathers had so deliberately and repeatedly and emphatically pronounced. It cannot surely be long before it will be seen that there really never can be but one fundamental ecclesiastical question, which is this: Whether the Idea of the Christian Church includes as essential a Mediatorial Priesthood, or exclusive caste of any kind, through which alone the blessings of Christianity can be conveyed and received: for if this be decided in the affirmative, there can be no doubt whatever but
that the Church of Rome possesses least ambiguously such a prerogative of Priesthood, and in submission to it all other questions are virtually determined: or if it be decided in the negative, then there will be felt to be devolved upon the individual the responsibility of determining for himself, by the fullest and freest inquiry possible for him, the essential requirements of the Gospel. Now it is to any who have finally decided this great question in the Negative, that these Pages are offered as an aid in those further inquiries in which such a decision must involve them.
