Excerpt from Notes, Critical and Practical, on the Book of Genesis, Vol. 1 of 2: Designed as a General Help to Biblical Reading and Instruction A very slight inspection of the pages of the present work will disclose to the reader its general character, and enable him to judge how far it is likely to supply an existing desideratum. Little therefore need be said by way of preface. My main object has been to afford facilities for the correct understanding of the sacred text - to aid the student of the Bible in ascertaining, with the utmost practicable exactness, the genuine sense of the original. With such an object in view it was perhaps impossible to avoid giving the work an aspect predominantly critical. But an apology on this score can scarcely be requisite at the present day, when the claims of sacred philology are beginning to be so highly appreciated; when at is so generally admitted that the grand aim of the Scriptural expositor should be to fix with the most absolute precision the 'mind of the Spirit' in his own word; and when it is so well understood that this end can be attained only by means of a familiar acquaintance with the original in its verbal and idiomatic peculiarities, its parallel usages, and its archaeological illustrations. Besides, unless I have come wholly short of my aim, there will be found such a union of the practical with the critical, as to adapt the present and the ensuring volumes somewhat happily to popular use. Should this prove not to be case, I shall feel that the failure has been rather in the execution, than in the plan; for I know no reason to suppose the two departments intrinsically incompatible, or that the two-fold function of the exegetical and the ethical expositor may not be united in the same person 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."