Moncure M. Daniel BY M. D CONWAY MINISTER OF THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CINCINNATI, OHIO. CINCINNATI: 1858. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by M. D. CONWAY, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of Ohio. TO MY PARENTS I dedicate this book ;-knowing that, whatever they shall find here which shall recall painful differences of belief, it would grieve them far more to think that I had swerved from the lessons of directness and sincerity which, by word and life, they have ever taught as before all, and which they have a right to claim from me always and everywhere. LETTER To a Minister of the Baltimore (Methodist) Conference. DEAR FRIEND Your letter is one of the many of a similar kind, received not only from members of our dear old Conference, but from those who were classmates at Carlisle, members of my circuits, or friends of myself and relatives in Virginia. "Why I have left my old associations and communion," were indeed a question requiring a long answer. But since it is asked by all my friends (and they have every right to ask it), I have been thinking how I could follow out your suggestion and publish an answer. I have concluded to put forth a small collection of discourses, such as have occurred in my regular ministrations. For it is in these that a preacher's heart and life get best garnered after all. I am not of that school who have one set of thoughts for the study, another for the pulpit : I can only preach what is the last result of my own mind. Therefore, though I could wish that the urgency of a city parish allowed more time for completeness and elegance, these thoughts are my real self, and as such are, to me, sacred. From such statements it is easy to trace the threads running back to all I have left, for an apple preserves the mark of the blossom which bore it. CINCINNATI, January, 1858. M. D. C. |