1.  As to the Messianic prophecies, I began to be pressed with the difficulty of proving against the Jews that “Messiah was to suffer.”  The Psalms generally adduced for this purpose can in no way be fixed on Messiah.  The prophecy in the 9th chapter of Daniel looks specious in the authorized English version, but has evaporated in the Greek translation and is not acknowledged in the best German renderings.  I still rested on the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, as alone fortifying me against the Rabbis:  yet with an unpleasantly increasing perception that the system of “double interpretation” in which Christians indulge, is a playing fast and loose with prophecy, and is essentially dishonest No one dreams of a “second” sense until the primary sense proves false:  all false prophecy may be thus screened.  The three prophecies quoted (Acts xiii. 33—­35) in proof of the resurrection of Jesus, are simply puerile, and deserve no reply.—­I felt there was something unsound in all this.

2.  The prophecies of the New Testament are not many.  First, we have that of Jesus in Matt xxiv. concerning the destruction of Jerusalem.  It is marvellously exact, down to the capture of the city and miserable enslavement of the population; but at this point it becomes clearly and hopelessly false:  namely, it declares, that “immediately after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, &c. &c., and then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.  And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect,” &c.  This is a manifest description of the Great Day of Judgment:  and the prophecy goes on to add:  “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.”  When we thus find a prediction to break down suddenly in the middle, we have the well-known mark of its earlier part being written after the event:  and it becomes unreasonable to doubt that the detailed annunciations of this 24th chapter of Matthew, were first composed very soon after the war of Titus, and never came from the lips of Jesus at all.  Next:  we have the prophecies of the Apocalypse.  Not one of these can be interpreted certainly of any human affairs, except one in the 17th chapter, which the writer himself has explained to apply to the emperors of Rome:  and that is proved false by the event.—­Farther, we have Paul’s prophecies concerning the apostacy of the Christian Church.  These are very striking, as they indicate his deep insight into the moral tendencies of the community in which he moved.  They are high testimonies to the prophetic soul of Paul; and as such, I cannot have any desire to weaken their force.  But there is nothing in them that can establish the theory of supernaturalism, in the face of his great mistake as to the speedy return of Christ from heaven.