IT is not too much to say that the present work, though it only now appears in a second edition, has achieved one of the greatest known literary successes in the department of theology. It was, on its first appearance, eagerly bought and as eagerly read, and, though it has long been out of print, the demand for it has never ceased. The beloved and admired author resisted the temptation of simply reprinting it, and hoped — but hoped in vain — for leisure and strength to revise it. It would, no doubt, have cost him more labour than the companion-volume of Lectures, which he issued in a conscientiously revised edition in 1893, for reasons which the reader who is unfamiliar with the subject will see when he has finished this Intro duction. And precisely for this reason I lament, as much as any young student, that it was not vouchsafed to the highly gifted author to revise his own work. And now that the publishers have determined on.