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.