But to enter on this inquiry into the origin of the Book which has produced such results, with a preconceived opinion that it must be a forgery, and an imposition, the fruit of a depraved heart, and a lying tongue, implies so much home-born deceit that, till the heart capable of such a prejudice be completely changed, no reasoning can have any solid fulcrum of truth or goodness to rest on.

It is sheer folly to talk of one's being wholly unprejudiced in such an inquiry.

No man ever was, or could be so.

As his sympathies are toward goodness and virtue, and the happiness of mankind, or toward pride and deceit, and selfishness and savageness, so will his prejudices be for or against the Bible.
On looking at the Bible, we find it composed of a number of separate treatises, written by different writers, at various times; some parts fifteen hundred years before the others.

We find, also, that it treats of the very beginning of the world, before man was made, and of other matters of which we have no other authentic history to compare with it.
Again, we find portions which treat of events connected in a thousand places with the affairs of the Roman Empire, of which we have several credible histories.