BAPTIST MAGAZINE FOR 1831. THE PROFITS ARISING FROM THE SALE OF THIS WORK ARE GIVEN PUBLISHED BY GEORGE WIGHTMAN, 24, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1831. PREFACE. THE annual preface to a periodical is designed to form a connecting link, by which the past is united to the future. It briefly surveys the successive steps which have been trodden, during the lapsed period, and, while, with adoring thankfulness, it inscribes, as the epitaph of the expiring year, "Hitherto hath the Lord helped us," its anticipations, as to the next division of time, recline serenely on Him who " fainteth not;" and whose " years shall have no end." It is scarcely possible so to advert to the difficulties which occur in conducting a monthly publication, whose pages are open to the valuable contributions of so many respected correspondents, as to avoid giving any just occasion for the imputation of neglect or unfairness, without appearing to solicit commendation for a vigilance and an impartiality which, with every endeavour to the contrary, may, after all, in some instances, seem to have been disregarded. It is, however, due to the readers, and but justice to the conductors of this work, to secure an opportunity favourable as the present for renewing the assurance formerly given, that, in considering the respective claims of the numerous communications forwarded to enrich its columns, the decision is invariably regulated by anxious concern that the Baptist Magazine should continue to be a medium of conveying, through the denomination, a theology decidedly orthodox in its principles, and eminently holy in its tendeney. To meet the urgency of particular cases, it sometimes becomes indispensable to contract one department of our work, and enlarge another; and, not unfrequently, the demand on each is such as can only be met by an undesirable postponement of some articles, and a reluctant curtailment of |