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The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1 [of 2] cover

The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1 [of 2]

Chapter 77: PREFACE.
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
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About This Book

A collected volume assembles early Gothic romances, political pamphlets, a refutation of deism, travel letters, essays on art and literature, critical notices, and various fragments and minor pieces. The fictional tales deliver dramatic scenes of revenge, abduction, and confinement, while the pamphlets set out radical proposals and a declaration of rights. The essays and letters offer close readings of sculpture and painting, personal reflections, and literary criticism. Alternating narrative, polemic, and aesthetic commentary, the material showcases a range of prose registers from vivid description to philosophical argument and intimate correspondence.

PREFACE.

The object of the following Dialogue is to prove that the system of Deism is untenable. It is attempted to shew that there is no alternative between Atheism and Christianity; that the evidences of the Being of a God are to be deduced from no other principles than those of Divine Revelation.

The Author endeavours to shew how much the cause of natural and revealed Religion has suffered from the mode of defence adopted by Theosophistical Christians. How far he will accomplish what he proposed to himself, in the composition of this Dialogue, the world will finally determine.

The mode of printing this little work may appear too expensive, either for its merits or its length. However inimical this practice confessedly is, to the general diffusion of knowledge, yet it was adopted in this instance with a view of excluding the multitude from the abuse of a mode of reasoning, liable to misconstruction on account of its novelty.