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Excerpt from Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church, Vol. 1 of 3: Abraham to Samuel Moreover, there already exists in English a well-known narrative of the History of the Jews, which has lately reappeared, with the most recent revisions, from the pen of its distinguished author. The venerable Dean of St. Paul's will add to many other kindnesses his forgiveness of this intrusion on a field peculiarly his own - an intrusion which would not have been attempted, but in the belief that it would not interfere with those labours which have made his name dear to all who value the combination of a genuine love of truth and freedom with profound theological learning and high ecclesiastical station. Secondly, although for these reasons abstaining from the attempt to write a consecutive history, I have wished to present the main characters and events of the Sacred Narrative in a form as nearly historical as the facts of the case will admit. The Jewish History has suffered from causes similar to those which still, within our own memory, obscured the history of Greece and of Rome. Till within the present century, the characters and institutions of those two great Countries were so veiled from view in the conventional haze with which the enchantment of distance had invested them, that when the more graphic and critical historians of our time broke through this reserve, a kind of shock was felt through all the educated classes of the country. The same change was in a still higher degree needed with regard to the history of the Jews. Its sacred character had deepened the difficulty already occasioned by its extreme antiquity. That earliest of Christian heresies - Docetism, or 'phantom worship' - the reluctance to recognise in sacred subjects their identity with our own flesh and blood - has at different periods of the Christian Church affected the view entertained of the whole Bible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.