privilege of hearing them delivered,--the Author having few rivals, on
the Continent or elsewhere, in the graces of polished eloquence; but the
subjects treated are, it is to be feared, of increasing importance, not
abroad only, but in England; and in fact one Lecture, the fourth, is in
a large measure occupied with forms of atheism which owe their chief
support to English authors. In that Lecture the Author shows that the
spiritual origin of man cannot "be put out of sight beneath details of
physiology and researches of natural history," and that these not only
"cannot settle," but "cannot so much as touch the question."

The same Lecture is occupied in part by a practical refutation of the
prejudice against religion drawn from the irreligious character of many
men of science. The Author's subject has led him in the present work to
confine his illustrations on this head to the question of natural
religion: but the translator will avow that a main motive with him to
undertake the labor of this translation has been the wish to prove, in
the instance of the distinguished Author himself, that men of
incontestable eminence as metaphysical philosophers may hold and profess
boldly their faith in doctrines, which many who affect to guide the
religious opinions of our youth would teach them to despise as the
heritage of narrow minds, and to cast away as incompatible with the
highest intellectual cultivation. Such doctrines are those of the fall
and ruin of man by nature, the necessity for Divine agency in his
recovery, his need of propitiation by the sacrifice of the
God-Man--_l'Homme-Dieu_. These truths are explicitly stated by the
Author in his former course of lectures--_La Vie Eternelle_,[1] in
which, while discoursing eloquently on that eternal life which is the
portion of the righteous, he does not shrink from declaring his belief
in its awful counterpart, the eternal condemnation of the wicked.