PREFACE. IT must be allowed that the Sermons, from which the following extracts are taken, do not lend themselves very readily to the purpose for which they have been here used. Occupied as they are, for the most part, with the illustration of a single thought, there is scarcely a sentence which does not, for its full understanding, require the key, not only of its immediate context, but of all that has gone before. Each Sermon is complete in itself; every part of it has a direct bearing on the whole, and is so interwoven with what precedes and what follows, that it would seem as if it could not be separated |