In adopting this course, we are only following the footsteps of the profound author of the "Analogy," who finding it, he knew not how, "to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry," set himself, in the first instance, to prove "that it is not, however, so clear a case that there is nothing in it;"-- this preliminary proof being designed to neutralize objections, and to disburden the subject of all adverse presumptions, so as to be judged on its own proper and independent merits.

We are imitating, too, the example of another sagacious writer on a kindred theme, who thought that "Apologists had paid too little attention to the _prejudices_ of their opponents, and had been too confident of accomplishing their object at once, by an overpowering statement of the direct evidence, forgetting that the influence of prejudice renders the human mind very nearly inaccessible to both evidence and argument."[1] If this method was ever necessary or expedient, it is peculiarly so in the present age.

Opinions are afloat in society, and are even avowed by men of high philosophical repute, which formally exclude Theology from the domain of human thought, and represent it as utterly inaccessible to the human faculties.

They amount to a denial, not merely of its truth, but of its very possibility.

They place it among the dreams of the past--with the fables of the Genii, or the follies of Alchemy, or the phantoms of Astrology.