As a preface to our Second Edition, we cannot do better than record the experience derived from our first. It is indeed gratifying to find a wonderful want of unanimity among the critics who assail us, and it is probably owing to this cause that we have been able to preserve a kind of kinetic stability, just as a man does in consequence of being equally belaboured on all sides by the myriad petty impacts of little particles of air.

Some call us infidels, while others represent us as very much too orthodoxly credulous; some call us pantheists, some materialists, others spiritualists. As we cannot belong at once to all these varied categories, the presumption is that we belong to none of them. This, by the way, is our own opinion.

Venturing to classify our critics, we would divide them into three groups:—

1. (1.) There are those who have doubtless faith in revelation; but more especially, sometimes solely, in their own method of interpreting it; none, however, in the method according to which really scientific men with a wonderful unanimity have been led to interpret the works of nature. These critics call us, some infidels, some pantheists, some dangerously subtle materialists, etc.

2. (2.) There are those who have faith in the methods according to which men of science interpret the laws of nature, but none whatever in revelation or theology. These consider us as orthodoxly credulous and superstitious, or as writers of “the most hardened and impenitent nonsense that ever called itself original speculation.”

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