is the design of the present publication; to which I have been induced by several considerations.
I have often thought that the great truths of Christianity, if digested in a regular orderly method, so that the establishing one point should be a prelude and preparation to the next, would show that Divine religion in a more amiable point of view, and be a great ease and help both to those who are to instruct others, and to those who are learners: this idea has been confirmed by frequent experience, and I hope that the method which I have found so useful may prove equally beneficial to others. There are many excellent works published in our language upon different parts of religion; but I am afraid they too often suppose the generality of their readers better instructed in these matters than they commonly are, and are written more for the learned than the ignorant. The view I have had in this present work is to assist the most unlearned, and beginning with the first rudiments of Christianity, to conduct the reader, step by step, through the whole body of the principal truths of revelation, so that the knowledge of one truth may serve as an introduction to those which follow.
The sacred Scriptures are an inexhaustible fountain of heavenly knowledge, but are commonly less used than they might be in illustrating and establishing the truths of religion. A text or two hinted at now and then seem lost in the multitude of other reflections and reasons which surround them; but, when the principal stress both of the explanation and proof is laid upon these Divine oracles, and a number of texts are placed in the proper order for illustrating the point in question, they give an incredible force to what is proposed, show that it is God Himself who speaks, and cut off all occasion for human sophistry to enter. This I have had in a
