To the READER.
1. I HAVE had a desire for several years, if God should spare me a little longer, to print in one collection, all that I had before published in separate tracts. (I mean all the PROSE, except the _Notes on the Bible_, the _System of Philosophy_, the _Christian Library_, and the _Books_ which were designed for the use of _Kingswood School_.) These I wanted to see printed together; but on a better paper, and with a little larger print than before.
2. I wanted to methodize these tracts, to range them under proper heads, placing those together which were on similar subjects, and in such order, that one might illustrate another. This it is easy to see may be of use to the serious reader, who will then readily observe, that there is scarce any subject of importance, either in practical or controversial divinity, which is not treated of more or less, either professedly or occasionally.
3. But a far more necessary work than that of methodizing was the correcting them. The correcting barely the errors of the press, is of much more consequence than I had conceived, till I began to read them over with much more attention than I had done before. These in many places were such as not only obscured, but wholly destroyed the sense; and frequently to such a degree, that it would have been impossible for any but me to restore it, neither could I do it myself in several places, without long consideration; the word inserted having little or no resemblance to that which I had used.
4. But as necessary as these corrections were, there were others of a different kind, which were more necessary still. In revising what I had wrote on so many various subjects and occasions, and for so long a course of years, I found cause for not only rational or verbal corrections, but frequently for correcting the sense also. I am the more concerned to do this, because none but myself has a right to do it. Accordingly I have altered many words or sentences; many others I have omitted, and in various parts I have added more or less as I judged the subject required: So that in this edition, I present to serious and candid men, my last and maturest thoughts: agreeable, I hope, to Scripture, Reason, and Christian Antiquity.
5. It may be needful to mention one thing more, because it is a little out of the common way. In the extract from Milton’s Paradise Lost, and in that from Dr. Young’s Night Thoughts, I placed a mark before those passages, which I judged were most worthy of the reader’s notice; the same thing I have taken the liberty to do, throughout the ensuing volumes: Many will be glad of such an help; tho’ still, every man has a right to judge for himself, particularly in matters of religion, because every man must give an account of himself to God.