PREFACE.
Students who are learning Irish will be much pleased at the publication of this volume.
The work was commenced some few years ago;—from that time it has received a large share of literary care from the editor.
The original discourses have been recast in correct spelling, then transcribed and published (with translation) in the columns of a public journal; again corrected, before the text and English version had been finally committed to the printer's hands. To publish a volume in Irish-Gaelic, without a translation, would have been, thirty years ago, a boon: not so now, without a version in English to aid those who are wishing to acquire a knowledge of Irish-Gaelic.
The vocabulary annexed to the Sermons will aid more fully still, those who wish to make Irish a study, either as a language or as a branch in the department of comparative philology. The prevailing public promotive spirit in favor of Irish studies has made the task of providing a vocabulary a necessity.
To write the text anew, and to present it in a becoming orthographic garb—to copy and to prepare an English version—to complete a full vocabulary of each word in the Seventeen Sermons—was labor quite as great as if one were to write the work several times over.
The Aryan Origin of The Gaelic Race and Language, written during the same period, was light in the labor which its execution imposed, compared with the re-writing, translating and editing of the present volume of sermons.
