Then, too, the new discoveries which account for so much that seemed unaccountable; which overturn so many baseless theories; which question so rudely, and often so unanswerably, so many old admitted theories; and which appear to be always advancing, and as they advance promising almost unlimited increase of knowledge;-all this by necessary consequence shakes everywhere the rule of authority; of authority in everything which has been heretofore received. So many false theories have been subverted, so many shams exposed, so many figures of terror before which our fathers shivered resolved into the mere creatures of an utterly ignorant and therefore credulous timidity, that nothing seems left which may not in its turn fall before a bolder assault or a more practised aim.

And for many reasons all this applies especially to authority in matters of religion and faith. Unhappily, there have been so many false defences of the true, that it is hard for the truth not to suffer in the downfall of the falsehoods or errors to which she has been so unrighteously wedded.

Elaborate defences of Theism and of Christianity

have been rested upon what now prove to have been utterly misapprehended scientific facts. In many of these cases there has been no intentional direct falsehood. It has not, for the most part, been that the writers of these evidential works have believed that God could not govern the world without the devil's aid; that truth could be helped by a little falsehood (though, alas, there have been such pious frauds even as these); but it has been, for the most part, the fault of moral cowardice; the not daring to admit that there were apparent contradictions between God's voice in Nature and God's voice in Scripture, which as yet believers knew not how to reconcile; but which they had faith enough to know could be reconciled, and would be reconciled when God saw fit and so arose the restless, feverish, sad effort to invent a theory of reconciliation, and so a resting the truth of Scripture on the reconciling theory, and therefore a great shock and violence to its true claims when the whole theory came to be swept away like an ancient cobweb by the besom of destruction in the strong hand of

Like evils, too, have arisen from the tearing to pieces by the sharp tooth of recent, more severe, and more exact criticism of finely-developed theories as to inspiration, the text of Scripture, and cognate

matters.

All of these assaults on old authority have arisen as out of the ground sown with dragons' teeth, and have given forth a harvest of death. It is against such evils as these that the lectures of the first and second series of the Christian Evidence Society have been directed.

We claim for them, that they are calm, sober, earnest, honest dealings with the several subjects they handle. They exhibit the evidence which the order and adaptations in nature around us afford of the existence of a God. They do this from the pen of one who from full acquaintance with all the last discoveries of the branch of science with which he has to deal, and from a manifested readiness to advance wherever true science leads, is an able and ought to be an unsuspected advocate for God.

exhibits in them the true philosophy of human responsibility.

The supposed collision between the Scriptures and Natural Science, is examined with an unfaltering clearness of investigation which can hardly fail to carry conviction with it. The great sore of alleged moral difficulties in the Old Testament is probed to the very quick.

The principle of Causation, as it is opposed to atheistic theories, is examined and exhibited with a metaphysical subtlety and a firm grasp on truth which cannot easily be surpassed; whilst another essay draws out the positive argument for the truth. of Christianity which is based on the convergence to a common centre of a number of distinct lines of proof.

Moral arguments in the same direction of the greatest force are drawn from the suitableness of Christianity to all forms of civilization, from its actual existence in them all, and its achievements in every phase of society; a subject drawn out from another point of view in another essay by a masterly contrast between society under Pagan

These subjects cover the whole field of sceptical attack. We trust they will be found in the following pages to have been calmly, truthfully, and convincingly handled by men worthy by intellectual might, by knowledge of the times, and by their being thoroughly possessed with the truth of Christ, of dealing with such high arguments.

May God be graciously pleased to give to this effort to maintain His truth His heavenly blessing.

S. WINTON.

WINCHESTER,

September, 1872.