louds 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.

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 t