owed me how hopeless a cause he had undertaken.

* * * * *

In this period I came to a totally new view of many parts of the
Bible; and not to be tedious, it will suffice here to sum up the
results.

The first books which I looked at as doubtful, were the Apocalypse and
the Epistle to the Hebrews. From the Greek style I felt assured that
the former was not by John,[8] nor the latter by Paul. In Michaelis
I first learnt the interesting fact of Luther having vehemently
repudiated the Apocalypse, so that he not only declared its
spuriousness in the Preface of his Bible, but solemnly charged his
successors not to print his translation of the Apocalypse without
annexing this avowal:--a charge which they presently disobeyed. Such
is the habitual unfairness of ecclesiastical corporations. I was
afterwards confirmed by Neander in the belief that the Apocalypse is
a false prophecy. The only chapter of it which is interpreted,--the
17th,--appears to be a political speculation suggested by the civil
war of Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian; and erroneously opines that
the eighth emperor of Rome is to be the last, and is to be one of the
preceding emperors restored,--probably Nero, who was believed to have
escaped to the kings of the East.--As for the Epistle to the Hebrews,
(which I was disposed to believe Luther had well guessed to be the
production of Apollos,) I now saw quite a different genius in it from
that of Paul, as more artificial and savouring of rhetorical culture.
As to this, the learned Germans are probably unanimous.

Next to these, the Song of Solomon fell away. I had been accustomed to
receive this as a sacred representation of the loves of Christ and the
Church: but after I was experimentally acquainted with the playful and
extravagant genius of man's love for woman, I saw the Song of Solomon
with new eyes, and became entirely convinced that it consists of
fragments of love-songs, some of them rather voluptuous.

After this, it followed that the so-called _Canon_ of the Jews could
not guarantee to us the value of the writings. Consequently, such
books as Ruth and Esther, (the latter indeed not containing
one religious sentiment,) stood forth at once in their natural
insignificance. Ecclesiastes also seemed to me a meagre and shallow
production. Chronicles I now learned to be not credulous only, but
unfair, perhaps so far as to be actually dishonest. Not one of the
historical books