justify bloody persecution, but the New teaches[18] that God will
visit men with fiery vengeance _for holding an erroneous creed_;--that
vengeance indeed is his, not ours; but that still the punishment
is deserved. It would appear, that wherever this doctrine is held,
possession of power for two or three generations inevitably converts
men into persecutors; and in so far, we must lay the horrible
desolations which Europe has suffered from bigotry, at the doors, not
indeed of the Christian apostles themselves, but of that Bibliolatry
which has converted their earliest records into a perfect and eternal
law.

IV. "Prophecy" is generally regarded as a leading evidence of the
divine origin of Christianity. But this also had proved itself to me
a more and more mouldering prop, whether I leant on those which
concerned Messiah, those of the New Testament, or the miscellaneous
predictions of the Old Testament.

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 c