Excerpt from Dissertations Upon the Principles and Arrangement of an Harmony of the Gospels, Vol. 1 of 4 The best apology, however, which I can offer in be half of the present work, is a candid statement of the circumstances out of which it arose. I was previously engaged upon an inquiry of a different nature, though connected, it is true, with sacred literaturea, which ne cessarily required me to examine, more narrowly than I had ever done before, into the relations of time and place, affecting the order and succession of events throughout the different portions of the Gospel history. In the course of this examination, during which I had to consult some of the most popular Harmonies, I could not but observe in them such remarkable inconsis tencies as were abundantly sufficient to convince my own mind that the principles, upon which they had proceeded, could not be right. The dissatisfaction pro duced by this discovery determined me to lay them aside, and to take the four original narratives, and nothing more, into my hands, with a View to frame out of them, for myself, a system which, if it possessed no other merit, might at least avoid such difficulties as had appeared so glaringly and so palpably in the cases alluded to. 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.