since I commenced speaking it, I have been actively and constantly engaged in the work of the Lord, which has not left me as much time as I could have wished to attend more strictly to the rules of rhetoric, and therefore humbly request the reader to attend more to the matter than to the style and composition of the following letters.
One object which I have constantly kept in view is, to show that the fundamental doctrines of our holy religion are neither “cunningly devised fables," nor "the inventions of modern priestcraft," but that they have been revealed in the Old Testament, and believed by the ancient people of God, and have been taught by Christ and his apostles in the New Testament, only in a fuller and clearer manner.
I have addressed these letters to Benjamin, my own brother, merely as a representative of all my Jewish brethren, concerning whom I can adopt the language of the great apostle of the Gentiles, if not as feelingly, yet I trust as sincerely, in declaring, "I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart, (for I did wish that myself were accursed from Christ,*) for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the
* Perhaps few passages have been considered more difficult to be understood than this. But the mind of the apostle may be easily known; 1. if the second and third verses are read without the clause "for I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ;" 2dly. let the original word Euchomén, the imperfect middle voice, be translated I did wish, instead of I" could," i. e. before my conversion; 3dly. let this sentence be read in a parenthesis, as a reason why Paul felt and expressed greater sympathy for his brethren than any other of the apostles did. As if he had said, "they never hated Christ as I did; for before my conversion I was as bad as my unbelieving brethren are. For like them I did wish myself accursed from