TO THE RIGHT REVEREND JOHN, LORD BISHOP OF NOVA SCOTIA. MY LORD, THE following discourses, which I have presumed to dedicate to your Lordship, have been preached on various occasions within the Diocese of Nova Scotia; and some of them which have been delivered before the Bermuda District Committee of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, have had the good fortune to elicit considerable liberality, in aid of the Society, from the inhabitants of this Colony. Although I have not the vanity to hope that this Volume will serve to justify the patronage which your Lordship has, on the purest motives, extended to a Clergyman known to you only through the exercise of his profession; yet, my Lord, I trust it may be considered the humble instrument of expressing to your Lordship the earnestness of my gratitude, and of evincing to the public my sincere desire to merit a promotion which has been so generously and disinterestedly conferred. I have the honour to be, MY LORD, Your Lordship's most respectful and faithful servant, AUBREY G. SPENCER PREFACE. THE Sermons which in this volume are offered with much diffidence to the Public constitute no regular series of Discourses, but are selected out of a large number which have been preached by the Author during a ministry of seven years, in the colonies of Bermuda and Newfoundland. Aware as I am of the difficulty of rendering this species of composition sufficiently interesting to the general reader, a difficulty considerably aggravated by the multiplicity of similar attempts, I can only hope that the circumstance alluded to in my dedication to the venerable Bishop of the Diocese, will be admitted as some apology for giving publicity to a work which I should perhaps otherwise have suppressed. patronage which your Lordship has, on the purest motives, extended to a Clergyman known to you only through the exercise of his profession; yet, my Lord, I trust it may be considered the humble instrument of expressing to your Lordship the earnestness of my gratitude, and of evincing to the public my sincere desire to merit a promotion which has been so generously and disinterestedly conferred. I have the honour to be, MY LORD, Your Lordship's most respectful and faithful servant, AUBREY G. SPENCER. |