THE SCHEMES AND CONDUCT O F PROVIDENCE, FROM THE CREATION ΤΟ ΤΗΕ Coming of MESSIAH: OR, An ENQUIRY into the REASONS By Mr. WELSTED. The SECOND EDITION. LOND 0 N: Printed for J. WALTHOE, over against the Royal 2 To his GRACE the Duke of CHANDOS. MY LORD, T Here is, it is well known, a piety and greatness, natural to your temper, which muft needs render all well-meant difquifitions into facred fubjects, acceptable to you, and the more fo, the freer they are from anger, prejudice, or any of those narrow paffions, that never had dominion in your own breast. your This treatise, then, I am perfuaded, my Lord, will meet with, at noble hands, a reception, very different from what might be expected from those courtly philofophers, who are too unvulgar to relish any divinity, that is not Pagan, or to approve of any orthodoxy, whether in points of faith, or practice. The caufe of virtue, and true religion, is as much at your Grace's heart, as that of vice and immorality is the care of madmen and libertines; which makes it altogether as right, my Lord, to infcribe to you a view of revelation, as it would have been to infcribe to Polycharmus a defence of Atheism. If I wanted any other, or farther juftification for dedicating this Effay to your Grace, I would humbly mention the fhortness of it, which is either the best excufe for a bad book, or the trueft |