ABSTRACT
When a volume is described as Gifford Lectures the experienced reader will expect to find a fairly lengthy and erudite work that will not be particularly comprehensible to the man in the street. Indeed sometimes even the student fights shy and looks for some useful ‘digest’. Yet the one who founded the lectureships hoped that the lectures would be appreciated by ‘the whole community without matriculation’ and that they would be both ‘public and popular’. He envisaged the possibility that the lectures or parts of them might be produced at a cheap selling price so that the whole population might benefit. This anthology is an attempt to show the variety of ways in which the ‘Earnest Enquirers after Truth’, appointed from time to time by the Gifford Trustees, have fulfilled their task. Excerpts have been chosen which, it is hoped, will be comprehensible to the ordinary man who wants to know what the Gifford Lectures are all about, and which may prove a useful introduction to the student.
