There are serious difficulties besetting the authenticity of the Catholic Epistles under the name of Peter; though there exist no grounds for doubting that they are of the Apostolic age. A large portion too of the difficulties would be removed by the easy and nowise improbable supposition, that Peter, no great scholar or grammarian, had dictated the substance, the matter, and left the diction and style to his 'amanuensis', who had been an auditor of St. Paul. The tradition which connects, not only Mark, but Luke the Evangelist, the friend and biographer of Paul, with Peter, as a secretary, is in favour of this hypothesis. But what is of much greater importance, especially for the point in discussion, is the character of these and other similar descriptions of the 'Dies Messiæ', the 'Dies ultima', and the like. Are we bound to receive them as articles of faith? Is there sufficient reason to assert them to have been direct revelations immediately vouchsafed to the sacred writers? I cannot satisfy my judgment that there is;--first, because I find no account of any such events having been revealed to the Patriarchs, or to Moses, or to the Prophets; and because I do find these events asserted, and (for aught I have been able to discover,) for the first time, in the Jewish Church by uninspired Rabbis, in nearly or altogether the same words as those of the Apostles, and know that before and in the Apostolic age, these anticipations had become popular, and generally received notions; and lastly, because they were borrowed by the Jews from the Greek philosophy, and like several other notions, taken from less respectable quarters, adapted to their ancient and national religious belief. Now I know of no revealed truth that did not originate in Revelation, and find it hard to reconcile my mind to the belief that any Christian truth, any essential article of faith, should have been first made known by the father of lies, or the guess-work of the human understanding blinded by Paganism, or at best without the knowledge of the true God. Of course I would not apply this to any assertion of any New Testament writer, which was the final aim and primary intention of the whole passage; but only to sentences 'in ordine ad' some other doctrine or precept, 'illustrandi causa', or 'ad hominem', or 'more suasorio sive ad ornaturam, et rhetorice'. Ib. Part II. p. 145. Second characteristic. 'The kingdom shall be divided.'--Third characteristic. 'The kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle.'--Fourth characteristic. 'They shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another.' How exactly do these characters apply to the Greek Empire under the successors of Alexander,--when the Greeks were dispersed over the civilized world, as artists, rhetoricians, 'grammatici', secretaries, private tutors, parasites, physicians, and the like! Ib. p. 153.