PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
Yet it is this very quality that gives to the writings of Owen their peculiar value to the diligent student. Let such a student have the patience to spend hours of close study in any one of his theological treatises and he will find his mind filled, enlightened, expanded; his field of vision enlarged to a degree that will attend the productions of no other writer with whom we are acquainted. It is almost impossible that any intelligent student of Owen should write sermons either meagre in thought or of a thin theological consistence. We could not suggest a
better corrective of the vicious tendencies of modern religious discourse than the study of this master of scriptural theology.
It is hence highly gratifying to know that an American publisher has undertaken to issue these volumes. There is a fact connected with this publication which is of touching interest in itself, and in its relation to many friends of a sainted herald of the cross. It is that the publisher has been led to this and other efforts to promote the circulation and study of Owen's Works by his intercourse with the late Rev. James Henry Fowles, Rector of the Church of the Epiphany, Philadelphia, and now offers them to the church as a tribute to the memory of this man of God whose own mind had drunk deeply at the spring to which readers are now invited.