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INTRODUCTION.

THE attempt to enumerate and class errors might at first view appear to be merely a waste of time. Truth is one and the same, but error appears infinite and ever varying: from its very nature it would seem to have no limits and no end. But the limits which it has not in itself, it receives from the nature of belief, and from the nature of the mind. Error, in order to be believed, must include a considerable proportion of truth: and errors, in order to be received, must either have a similitude to the reality of things, or an adaptation to the disposition or state of the mind which embraces them.

Thus, in philosophy, as well as in religion, there are only a certain number of outlets by which the mind forsakes the straight way of truth. Hence, the same systems are ever recurring in the most distant ages and countries. The cosmogonies of the Ionic schools of Philosophy in Greece are at this day flourishing among the Chinese, and the

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transcendental Pantheism of the Eleatic school has its counterparts in the writings of the Buddhists and the Burmans: and the mind, in its narrow revolution of changes, is ever presenting again the same darkened phases of error.

The origin of all departures from the true religion consists in the want of spirituality in the fallen mind of man. "God is a spirit; and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" but in the darkened understanding of man, the glory of the divine character is soon obscured. He that lives to God, and would retain the divine knowledge, must walk by faith, and not by sight. Men, unless renewed in the spirit of their minds, walk by sight, and not by faith: if a revelation of the will of God is granted to them, they either forsake it entirely, or cover and conceal its true import with vain traditions and lying fables.

The first departure from true religion, after the deluge, consisted in imperceptibly substituting a visible object of worship for the true and invisible God. The visible heavens, and the spirit that was supposed to animate them, received the homage of the early tribes of mankind, (by a gradual departure, which they themselves scarcely perceived) instead of that pure and holy Being, whom "heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain," whom the eye of man cannot behold, and who must be discerned and approached by faith alone. This

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