PREFATORY NOTE. SOME weeks ago it was suggested to me that it would be seasonable and of service to publish, from the late Principal Hill's Lectures in Divinity, such extracts as bear on the theological discussions which are engrossing so much of the public attention. For the last forty years these Lectures have been held in high estimation in Scotland and elsewhere. They present the matured fruit of much research and reflection on questions of infinite importance, and exhibit throughout a dispassionate love of truth with unfailing candour and liberality. Humble inquirers after the truth as it is in Jesus, who cannot but be startled and grieved by the irreverent and disparaging freedom with which the Sacred Volume has been handled, may be reassured by the calm and deliberate sentiments of a divine so greatly respected as Principal Hill. The flippant remark of a recent writer, that "the Calvinist, in fact, ignores almost the whole of the Sacred Volume for the sake of a few verses," is in no respect applicable to him. He shows what all intelligent Calvinists well understand, that the defence of the system rests not merely on particular texts, but on sound |