NEW YORK:
CARLTON & LANAHAN.
SAN FRANCISCO: E. THOMAS.
CINCINNATI: HITCHCOCK & WALDEN.
1870.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Southern District of New York.
TO
D.D. WHEDON, D.D.,
MY EARLIEST LITERARY FRIEND, WHOSE VIGOROUS WRITINGS HAVE
STIMULATED MY INQUIRIES, WHOSE COUNSELS HAVE GUIDED
MY STUDIES, AND WHOSE KIND AND GENEROUS WORDS
HAVE ENCOURAGED ME TO PERSEVERANCE
AMID NUMEROUS DIFFICULTIES,
I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME AS A TOKEN OF MY MORE THAN
ORDINARY AFFECTION
THE AUTHOR.
In preparing the present volume, the writer has been actuatedby a conscientious desire to deepen and vivify ourfaith in the Christian system of truth, by showing that it doesnot rest solely on a special class of facts, but upon all the factsof nature and humanity; that its authority does not reposealone on the peculiar and supernatural events which transpiredin Palestine, but also on the still broader foundations of theideas and laws of the reason, and the common wants and instinctiveyearnings of the human heart. It is his convictionthat the course and constitution of nature, the whole currentof history, and the entire development of human thought inthe ages anterior to the advent of the Redeemer centre in, andcan only be interpreted by, the purpose of redemption.
The method hitherto most prevalent, of treating the historyof human thought as a series of isolated, disconnected, andlawless movements, without unity and purpose; and the practiceof denouncing the religions and philosophies of the ancientworld as inventions of satanic mischief, or as the capriciousand wicked efforts of humanity to relegate itself from the bondsof allegiance to the One Supreme Lord and Lawgiver, have, inhis judgment, been prejudicial to the interests of all truth, andespecially injurious to the cause of Christianity. They betrayan utter insensibility to the grand unities of nature and ofthought, and a strange forgetfulness of that universal Providencewhich comprehends all nature and all history, and isyet so minute in its regards that it numbers the hairs on everyvihuman head, and takes note of every sparrow's fall, A justermethod will lead us to regard the entire history of humanthought as a development towards a specific end, and the providenceof God as an all-embracing plan, which sweeps over allages and all nations, and which, in its final consummation, will,through Christ, "gather together all things in one, both thingswhich are in heaven and things which are on earth."
The central and unifying th