The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Gospel of the Pentateuch, by Charles
Kingsley

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Title: The Gospel of the Pentateuch

Author: Charles Kingsley

Release Date: November 27, 2003 [eBook #10325]

Language: English

Chatacter set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOSPEL OF THE PENTATEUCH***

Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

The Gospel of the Pentateuch: A set of Parish Sermons

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE GOSPEL OF THE PENTATEUCH
TO THE REV. CANON STANLEY.

My Dear Stanley,

I dedicate these Sermons to you, not that I may make you responsible
for any doctrine or statement contained in them, but as the simplest
method of telling you how much they owe to your book on the Jewish
Church, and of expressing my deep gratitude to you for publishing
that book at such a time as this.

It has given to me (and I doubt not to many other clergymen) a fresh
confidence and energy in preaching to my people the Gospel of the
Old Testament as the same with that of the New; and without it, many
of these Sermons would have been very different from, and I am
certain very inferior to, what they are now, by the help of your
admirable book.

Brought up, like all Cambridge men of the last generation, upon
Paley's Evidences, I had accepted as a matter of course, and as the
authoritative teaching of my University, Paley's opinions as to the
limits of Biblical criticism, {0a} quoted at large in Dean Milman's
noble preface to his last edition of the History of the Jews; and
especially that great dictum of his, 'that it is an unwarrantable,
as well as unsafe rule to lay down concerning the Jewish history,
that which was never laid down concerning any other, that either
every particular of it must be true, or the whole false.'

I do not quote the rest of the passage; first, because you, I doubt
not, know it as well as I; and next, in order that if any one shall
read these lines who has not read Paley's Evidences, he may be
stirred up to look the passage out for himself, and so become
acquainted with a great book and a great mind.

A reverent and rational liberty in criticism (within the limits of
o