The extraordinary acceptance which Mr. Love's books have found with sober and solid Christians, as it has occasioned the publishing of more treatises of his than was at first intended, so it has emboldened some without our knowledge and consent to thrust forth some imperfect copies under Mr. Love's name; concerning which we will only say, that the want of our attestation (to whose care the publishing of his sermons were entrusted) is ground enough to render them as suspected and suppositious to the serious and deliberate reader.
Among some other sermons of Mr. Love's, which have been printed by imperfect copies, these two treatises had the unhappiness to be very hastily and unhandsome published, being never perused by any of us, or compared with his own notes.
Now that these two very useful tracts may be fit to be joined with the rest of Mr. Love's works, the reader is desired to know that they have been diligently compared with the notes written with Mr. Love's own hand, and have been corrected from very many faults, with which the former edition abounded, and most of them material.
We will add no more but this: that in the polemical part of these discourses, as we approve the author's judgment to be sound and orthodox, so we believe that had he lived to publish his own labors, this and other books had come forth more answerable to the learning, piety, and vigorous parts of the author. We commend you to God, and the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among those that are sanctified.
London, April 27, 1657. Edmund Calamy. Simeon Ashe. William Tailor. William Whitaker.
