PREFACE. IN now introducing to the Christian portion of the community the First Volume of THE CHURCH MAGAZINE, it is our pleasing duty first of all to present to our numerous friends and readers our hearty thanks for the very generous support with which they have favoured us. The assistance and encouragement which we have received far surpasses our utmost anticipations, when, a year ago, we determined to establish a cheap and popular periodical in direct defence of the Church and truth of God; and thus to supply a want which we knew to be extensively felt. "The Religious World," as it is inconsistently called, had been for some time, as indeed it continues to be at present, in a feverish and restless state. The rival and jostling sects, agreeing only in their hatred and opposition to the Church, had assumed to themselves a fictitious importance and con-. fidence which only served to attract attention to their principles, their arguments, and their opinions, and to the pretensions on which they rested. The result was that a large number of considerate, pious, and sober people were daily becoming more and more dissatisfied with principles, opinions, and proceedings which were passing current in the world, and the truth of which they had taken for granted without due examination. On scrutinizing those common principles and pretensions, however, they discovered their entire destitution of divine origin and scriptural foundation; and looking about them for a resting-place for their feet, were anxiously enquiring, "Who will shew us any good?” Such appearing to us to be the state of things, we resolved on the publication of a Magazine, in which to make known, at a low price and in a popular style, the divine origin, the scriptural foundation, and the incomparable superiority, generally and particularly, of the constitution, government, doctrines, and ceremonies of that branch of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ so happily existing and flourishing amongst us. We considered that a firm belief in those scriptural and Catholic principles whereby the Church of England is distinguished from the Romish sect on the one hand, and from the various sects of protestant dissenters on the other, was the only remedy for those divisions and distractions in "The Religious World" which all good men so greatly deplore. We have consequently from time to time asserted, explained, and defended those great principles, shewing their heavenly origin and the solid foundation on which they rest; and at the same time exposed the human origin, the unseriptural nature and dangerous tendency of the principles, opinions, |