To the REV. RICHARD BEARD, D.D., Professor of Systematic Theology in Cumberland University, Lebanon, Tennessee:

REVEREND AND DEAR SIR:--You must allow an old friend and former pupil to dedicate to you this unpretending volume.

The evident want of scholarly skill in the book does not reflect upon your ability or faithfulness as a teacher. It has been a long time since I passed from under your hands, and I am solely responsible for any failure to profit by your instruction, and to follow your excellent example as a diligent and laborious student.

I simply wish, by this means, to put upon permanent record an expression of my high regard for you as the first really learned scholar and the first critical theological author which the Cumberland Presbyterian Church has produced; and also of my high esteem for you as a Christian gentleman and personal friend.

R. C. EWING.

Kansas City, Mo, January, 1874.

THE words and deeds of men and women make up all history. And this history is good or bad, according to the moral character of its authors. If the history which they make is good and beneficent, it should, by all means, be perpetuated.

A faithful minister of the gospel exerts a happy influence, not only by the sermons which he preaches, but by the example which he sets. Able and eloquent discourses may be delivered on the Sabbath; but unless the daily walk shall come in to enforce those sacred teachings, men will turn away from such ministrations with disgust and abhorrence. It is, therefore, the blameless life and the godly conversation that constitute the basis of all influence for good. This is especially true when such a life is crowned by a glorious and triumphant death; because then the power and example of such a life and of such a death are fixed for all time. When a man who leads such a life dies, and when his contemporaries also pass away, how shall the benefits of such consecration and devotion be realized by coming generations, except through the channel of authentic history? As a means of usefulness, then, it becomes the duty of the Church to cause the lives of all its leading pious men and women to be reproduced before the memory of them shall pass away from the minds of those who knew them best. Every man that has exhibited any emphasis of character has a circle of friends and admirers all his own, who love him in life and honor him when dead. If the record of such a man be placed upon the bookshelf of every member of that circle, it will continue to speak through generations to come.

For these, and for other reasons which might be given, I have been influenced to undertake a task which I feel has been poorly executed. For, in the midst of exacting and laborious engagements unfriendly to this vast work, I have snatched a few brief intervals of time in which to renew my acquaintance with the sainted dead, and to rescue from comparative oblivion lives which were illustrated by acts of the sublimest heroism, and by achievements of the greatest moral grandeur.      THE AUTHOR.