1.001 Preface

PREFACE. This little book aims at being a most elementary introduction to the study of the Bible. To many readers much of it will appear to be a perfectly superfluous reiteration of the most obvious truths. But it is a singular fact that warnings that never need to be uttered, and directions that never need to be laid down, in regard to the study of any other work in the world’s literature, are imperatively called for to prevent the student of Scripture from being ensnared by the most outrageous devices of misinterpretation. So perverse have been the methods of popular exposition, and so long have they been pursued as of unquestionable validity, that the mention of some of the simplest rules for a right study of the Bible— rules that are accepted without question and applied almost automatically in the case of other books— will no doubt strike some people, who are in a way very familiar with their Bibles, as a daring innovation. Thus it comes about that those principles which should be most evident, and the setting out of which in words may seem to be almost an insult to the reader’s intelligence, are in fact the very principles which most urgently require to be insisted on,