BT 1849 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and forty-nine, by HARPER & BROTHERS in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. } INTRODUCTORY ESSAY, BY MRS. H. E. B. STOWE. ONE of the principal difficulties realized by those who wish to bring themselves under the influence of the Bible, in commencing its reading, is that want of freshness and reality which is caused by early and long-continued familiarity with its language. It is true that the Christian, in happy hours and with a mind magnetized by contact with the great inspiring mind of the book, often sees passages as it were illuminated like a transparency, behind which the light necessary for its development has been suddenly kindled. A mind imbued with poetic fervor, or a scholar with leisure to search out, and knowledge to elucidate, may both find means to rise above this obstacle, and read with ever-increasing interest. But there are many who have, unhappily, yet confessedly, neither devotional fervor, nor communion with the inspiring mind, and are, furthermore, neither poetical nor learned, and yet are desirous of reading the Bible that they may become spiritual; and they deeply lament when they find that its reading is to them but a wearisome task. In vain they ponder its pages; nothing is suggested; and while words known by heart from childhood pass under their eye, their mind wanders in dreamy vacancy. They start at the end of a chapter, and rise from it sighing and discouraged. Even the true Christian, of an unimaginative temperament, suffers greatly from very much the same cause-the want of wing and fire to rise into the conceptions of the most fervent, the most ideal book that ever existed. It has often seemed, therefore, to the writer, that no greater service could be done to a large class of the community than to reproduce the Sacred Narrative, under the aspects which it presents to an imaginative mind, with the appliances of geographical, historical, and critical knowledge. The present work is the commencement of a series which contemplates such a presentation of the narrative of the Evangelists. There may be some who at first would feel a prejudice against this species of composition, as so blending together the outlines of truth and fiction as to spread a doubtful hue of ro |