3.  As for the Old Testament, if all its prophecies about Babylon and Tyre and Edom and Ishmael and the four Monarchies were both true and supernatural, what would this prove?  That God had been pleased to reveal something of coming history to certain eminent men of Hebrew antiquity.  That is all.  We should receive this conclusion with an otiose faith.  It could not order or authorize us to submit our souls and consciences to the obviously defective morality of the Mosaic system in which these prophets lived; and with Christianity it has nothing to do.

At the same time I had reached the conclusion that large deductions must be made from the credit of these old prophecies.

First, as to the Book of Daniel:  the 11th chapter is closely historical down to Antiochus Epiphanes, after which it suddenly becomes false; and according to different modern expositors, leaps away to Mark Antony, or to Napoleon Buonaparte, or to the Papacy.  Hence we have a prima facie presumption that the book was composed in the reign of that Antiochus; nor can it be proved to have existed earlier:  nor is there in it one word of prophecy which can be shown to have been fulfilled in regard to any later era.  Nay, the 7th chapter also is confuted by the event; for the great Day of Judgment has not followed upon the fourth[19] Monarchy.

Next, as to the prophecies of the Pentateuch.  They abound, as to the times which precede the century of Hezekiah; higher than which we cannot trace the Pentateuch.[20] No prophecy of the Pentateuch can be proved to have been fulfilled, which had not been already fulfilled before Hezekiah’s day.

Thirdly, as to the prophecies which concern various nations,—­some of them are remarkably verified, as that against Babylon; others failed, as those of Ezekiel concerning Nebuchadnezzar’s wars against Tyre and Egypt.  The fate predicted against Babylon was delayed for five centuries, so as to lose all moral meaning as a divine infliction on the haughty city.—­On the whole, it was clear to me, that it is a vain attempt to forge polemical weapons out of these old prophets, for the service of modern creeds.[21]

V. My study of John’s gospel had not enabled me to sustain Dr. Arnold’s view, that it was an impregnable fortress of Christianity.

In discussing the Apocalypse, I had long before felt a doubt whether we ought not rather to assign that book to John the apostle in preference to the Gospel and Epistles:  but this remained only as a doubt.  The monotony also of the Gospel had often excited my wonder.  But I was for the first time offended, on considering with a fresh mind an old fact,—­the great similarity of the style and phraseology in the third chapter, in the testimony of the Baptist, as well as in Christ’s address to Nicodemus, that of John’s own epistle.  As the three first gospels have their family likeness, which enables us on hearing a text to know that it comes out of one