Nor, where they are to be found, are they generally read.
Being deemed heavy reading, the magazine, or the newspaper is preferred.
Ministers do not in general devote enough of their time to such sound teaching as will stop the mouths of gainsayers.

I have been assured by skeptical gentlemen, who in the early part of their lives had attended church regularly for twenty-two years, that during all that time they had never heard a single discourse on the Evidences.

Moreover, the protean forms of Infidelity are so various, and many of its present positions so novel, that books or discourses prepared only twenty years ago miss the mark; and rather expose to the charge of misrepresentation, than produce conviction.

New books on Infidelity are needed for every generation.
The lectures expanded into this volume were delivered in Cincinnati, in 1858.

Replying to different, and discordant systems of error, whose only bond is opposition to the gospel, they are necessarily somewhat disconnected.