culpa, mea maxima culpa.  But it is open to him also to protest against the common critical folly of making an offender for a word:  of driving analogies on all four feet, and straining thoughts beyond their due proportions.  Above all, never let a reader stir one inch beyond, far less against, his own judgment:  if there seem to be sufficient reasons, well:  if otherwise, let me walk uncompanied.  The first step especially is felt to be a very difficult one; perhaps very debatable:  for aught I know, it may be merely a vain insect caught in the cobweb of metaphysics, soon to be destroyed, and easily to be discussed at leisure by some Aranean logician.  However, it seemed to my midnight musings a probable mode of arriving at truth, though somewhat unsatisfactorily told from poverty of thought and language.  Moreover, it would have been, in such a priori argument, ridiculous to have commenced by announcing a posterior conclusion:  for this cause did I do my humble best to work it out anew:  and however supererogatory it may seem at first sight to the majority of readers, those keener minds whom I mainly address, and whose interests I wish to serve, will recognise the attempt as at least consistent:  and will be ready to admit that if the arduous effort prove anteriorly a First Great Cause, and His attributes, be futile (which, however, I do not admit), it was an attempt unneeded on the score of its own merits; albeit, with an obvious somewhat of justice, pure reason may desire to begin at the beginning.  No one, who thinks at all upon religion, however misbelieving, can entertain any mental prejudice against the existence of a Deity, or against the received character of His attributes.  Such a man would be merely in a savage state, irrational:  whilst his own mind, so speculating, would stand itself proof positive of an Intellectual Father; either immediately, as in the first man’s case, or mediately, as in our own, it must have sprung out of that Being, who is emphatically the Good One—­God.  But if, as is possible, a mind, capable of thinking, and keen to think on other themes, from any cause, educational or moral, has neglected this great track of mediation, has “forgotten God,” and “had him not in all his thoughts,” such an one I invite to walk with me; and, in spite of all incompleteness and insufficiency, uncaptious of much that may haply be fanciful or false, briefly and in outline to test with me sundry probabilities of the Christian scheme, considered antecedently to its elucidation.

A GOD:  AND HIS ATTRIBUTES.