"As these Lectures occupied from an hour and a quarter to an hour and three quarters in the delivery, it will be seen by their length, as here given, that the reporter took down but little more than a full skeleton of them. I have made but very slight alterations and additions in revising them, for the following reasons:

1. Their publication was determined on too late, so that I had very little time.

2. My ill health and multiplied duties forbade.

3. To have enlarged them much would have swelled the volume beyond the contemplated size.

4. From experience I have learned that the conversational and condensed style in which they were reported, is more interesting and edifying to common readers, than a more elevated and less laconic style.

I have, therefore, left them as they were reported, with a few verbal and trifling alterations.

The author of the Lectures has no claim to literary merit; and, if he knows his own heart, has no desire that the Lectures should be anything else than useful.

I have reason to believe that, upon the whole, they will be as much so in their present as under any other form I could give them, circumstanced as I am.

As my friends wish to have them in a volume, they must take them as they are.

C. G. FINNEY

New York, 16th March 1837.