ical character of Porphyry's statements,
though partly attributable to the literary culture of his mind, is a
slight undesigned evidence corroborative of the authoritative nature
already attributed to the scriptures in doctrine and truthfulness.
Porphyry seems accordingly to have directed his critical powers to show
such traces of mistakes and incorrectness as might invalidate the idea of
a supernatural origin for the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and shake
confidence in their truth as an authority.

The first book of his work(202) dragged to light some of the
discrepancies, real or supposed, in scripture; and the examination of the
dispute between St. Peter and St. Paul was quoted as an instance of the
admixture of human ingredients in the body of apostolic teaching. His
third book(203) was directed to the subject of scripture interpretation,
especially, with some inconsistency, against the allegorical or mystical
tendency which at that time marked the whole church, and especially the
Alexandrian fathers. The allegorical method coincided with, if it did not
arise from, the oriental instinct of symbolism, the natural poetry of the
human mind. But in the minds of Jews and Christians it had been sanctified
by its use in the Hebrew religion, and had become associated with the
apocryphal literature of the Jewish church. It is traceable to a more
limited extent in the inspired writers of the New Testament, and in most
of the fathers; but in the school of Alexandria(204) it was adopted as a
formal system of interpretation. It is this allegorical system which
Porphyry attacked. He assaulted the writings of those who had fancifully
allegorised the Old Testament in the pious desire of finding Christianity
in every part of it, in spite of historic conditions; and he hastily drew
the inference, with something like the feeling of doubt which rash
interpretations of prophecy are in danger of producing at this day, that
no consistent sense can be put upon the Old Testament. His fourth
book(205) was a criticism on the Mosaic history, and on Jewish
antiquities. But the most important books in his work were the
twelfth(206) and thirteenth,(207) which were devoted to an examination of
the prophecies of Daniel, in which he detected some of those peculiarities
on which modern criticism has employed itself, and arrived at the
conclusions in reference to its date, revived by the English deist Collins
in the last century, and by many German