It was against the mistakes and mis-statements of my opponents that I first wrote, and it was their ignorance, or their want of honesty and candor, that gave me at times the advantage over them in our debates on the subject. It was for want of seeing things in their proper light, and putting them in their proper shape before their hearers and readers, that made their efforts to keep people from doubt and unbelief unavailing. They, in truth, made unbelief or infidelity to consist in something in which it did not consist, and made people think they were infidels when they were no such thing. If they had given up all that was erroneous with regard to the Bible, and undertaken the defence of nothing but what was true, they might both have convinced the honest skeptic, and strengthened the faith of Christians. But they undertook to defend the false, and to assail the true, and the consequence was, they were beaten, and the cause which they sought to serve was injured. John Wesley says, that the way to drive the doctrine of Christian perfection, or 'true holiness,' out of the world, is to place it too high,--to make it consist in something that is beyond man's power. And the way to drive the doctrine of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures out of the world, is to give the doctrine a form which the Scriptures themselves do not give it,--to change it from a truth into an error,--to teach that divine inspiration produces effects which it does not produce,--that it imparts qualities which it does not impart, and which the Scriptures themselves do not exhibit. And this is what many defenders of the Bible do. And this is one great cause both of the increase of infidelity, and of the confidence of its disciples.