At Rome, the self-styled seat of Christianity, the putative successor to the chair of Peter is undermining social order with his invisible but omnipresent net-work of bigoted agents, and incites them to revolutionize Europe for his temporal as well as spiritual supremacy. We see him who calls himself the “Vicar of Christ,” fraternizing with the anti-Christian Moslem against another Christian nation, publicly invoking the blessing of God upon the arms of those who have for centuries withstood, with fire and sword, the pretensions {x} of his Christ to Godhood! At Berlin—one of the great seats of learning—professors of modern _exact_ sciences, turning their backs on the boasted results of enlightenment of the post-Galileonian period, are quietly snuffing out the candle of the great Florentine; seeking, in short, to prove the heliocentric system, and even the earth’s rotation, but the dreams of deluded scientists, Newton a visionary, and all past and present astronomers but clever calculators of unverifiable problems.[4] Between these two conflicting Titans—Science and Theology—is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of a mere animal existence. Such is the picture of the hour, illumined by the bright noon-day sun of this Christian and scientific era! Would it be strict justice to condemn to critical lapidation the most humble and modest of authors for _entirely rejecting the authority of both these combatants_? Are we not bound rather to take as the true aphorism of this century, the declaration of Horace Greeley: “I accept _unreservedly_ the views of no man, living or dead”?[5] Such, at all events, will be our motto, and we mean that principle to be our constant guide throughout this work.