"It ill comports with the majesty of truth, or the character of God, to believe that he BY WILLIAM L. STONE. NEW-YORK: PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, AND SOLD BY THE PRINCIPAL BOOKSELLERS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES. cit NOV 1850 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1835, By HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New-York. t PREFACE. Ir was not until the last week in the recent month of April, that the idea of the present work was suggested. In conversation with a distinguished clerical friend, upon the subject of Matthias and his impostures, particularly in regard to the respectability of the people whom he had succeeded in leading so widely astray, the writer mentioned the fact, that, after all, the pretended prophet was but a circumstance, as it were, in a series of delusions originating in fanaticism twelve or thirteen years since, which, in their progress, had been marked at different periods, by transactions and absurdities scarcely less censurable, or extraordinary, than the gross impieties of the arch-impostor himself. With a great number of facts in relation to the matters referred to, the writer had become acquainted as they transpired; and in the belief that he could possess himself of all others essential to a continuous history of one of |