TO THE

HON. JOSEPH COURTEN HORNBLOWER, LL.D.

CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE STATE OF NEW-JERSEY, AND RULING ELDER IN THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN

CHURCH, NEWARK, N. J.

HONORED AND DEAR SIR-You will brook the liberty here taken with your name, I think, in honor properly less of a friendship now of more than thirty years standingfrom my first acquaintance with you and respect for you, than of a spiritual relation, that crowns all others, which is exactly-as I count-thirty years old the present autumn; especially when the motive is known and appreciated, by which I am influenced, in the inscription of this little volume to my countrymen, through you, their proper and honored representative.

You shall not be offended or alienated, be sure of it, by any thing like flattery, or the

remotest approach to that style of adulation, that is less at home in our country, it may be, than in the older hemisphere; and that is not more revolting to the Christian, than obnoxious to correct taste, ordinarily censurable on the score of sincerity, incongruous to the simplicity of a republican, frequently verging from the affected sublime to the purely ridiculous, and really impeachable on the sober ground of courteous respect; since it is a specimen of grossness and bad manners, to tell a person directly and at large all the good or fine things, even if they are true, which might be said, and are possibly well said, by his friends, in his favor.

If there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, however, in rightly estimating those things of God, which it is our present design to unfold, and which are supremely excellent, it is not amiss that this appeal is made to one whose probity and intelligence, whose impartial love of the truth and catholic Christian piety, are the mature and the appropriate qualifications which an author might select or prefer, in making that appeal, in behalf of his work, where the matter and the

motive, as distinguished from the manner and the style, are the whole of its pretension to public countenance and support.

As to its name or title, since a name is that by which any person or thing is known, it ought to be designating, distinctive, peculiar. All scripture is given by inspiration of God; a proposition among the most signal and momentous ever couched in human language! Eight words express it in the translation, three in the original; and the last word there we have appropriated-THEOPNEUSTON—in the neuter form, as the name of our little volume. The chief reason is that it proposes to be conversant with divine inspiration, as the soul of its body and the vitality of its being; while it answers all the ends of a name and is perhaps wholly unappropriated. The THEOPNEUSTY that has lately appeared, from an author in Geneva and a translator in Boston, both known and loved by the present writer, is not precisely the same word; while the work it entitles, however allied it may be and however superior, is widely dissimilar; and our name was adopted and fixed before we heard of the

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