Christian's Great Interest. In Two Parts.

THERE are few subjects or exercises more deeply important to professing Christians, than that which forms the principal topic in the following admirable Treatise--the work of Self-examination. But self-examination is a work of great difficulty, and is accordingly shrunk from, or altogether declined by the great body of professing Christians. It is more the habitual style of the mind's contemplations to look at that which is without, than at that which is within--and it is far easier to read the epistles of the written Record, than to read the tablet of one's own heart, and so to ascertain whether it be indeed a living epistle of Christ Jesus our Lord. There is something so shadowy and evanescent in the phases of the human spirit--such a want of the distinct and of the tangible, in its various characteristics--such a turmoil, and confusion, and apparent incoherence in the rapid succession of those thoughts, and impulses, and emotions, which find their way through the avenues of the inner man--that men, as if lost in the mazes of a labyrinth, deem the world which is within to be the most hopeless and impracticable of all mysteries--nor in the whole range of their varied speculations, do they meet with that which more baffles their endeavours to seize upon, than the busy principle that is lodged within them, and has taken up its residence in the familiar intimacies of their own bosom.