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THE AUTHOR'S
APOLOGY.
IF good and ill nature equally operated upon mankind, I might have saved myself the trouble of this Apology; for it is manifest by the reception the following discourse has met with, that those who approve it, are a great majority among the men of taste: yet there have been two or three treatises written expressly against it, beside many others that have flirted at it occasionally, without one syllable having been ever published in its defence, or even quotation to its advantage, that I can remember, except by the polite Author of a late Discourse between a Deist and a Socinian.
Therefore, since the book seems calculated to live, at least as long as our language and our taste admit no great alterations, I am content to convey some Apology along with it.
The greatest part of that book was finished about thirteen years since, 1696, which is eight years before it was published. The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head. By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could; I say real ones, because, under the notion of pre-
