An examination of the Lord Bishop of London's discourses concerning the use and intent of prophecy. [electronic resource] : With some cursory animadversions on his late appendix, or additional dissertation, containing a farther inquiry into the mosaic account of the fall. In which these following points are chiefly explained and affirmed. I. That the use of prophecy, as it was taught and practised by Christ, his apostles, and evangelists, was drawn intirely from single and separate prædictions, gathered by them from the books of the law and the prophets, and applied, independently on each other, to the several acts and circumstances of the life of Jesus, as so many distinct proofs of his divine mission. And consequently, that His Lordship's pretended chain of antediluvian prophecies, is nothing else, but a fanciful conceit, which has no connection at all with the evidences of the Gospel. II. That the bishop's exposition of his text is forced, unnatural, and inconsistent with the sense of St. Peter, from whose epistle it is taken. III. That the historical interpretation, which he gives to the account of the fall, is absurd and contradictory to reason: and that the said account cannot be considered, under any other character, than that of allegory, apologue, or moral fable. IV. That the oracles of the heathen world, which his Lordship declares to have been given out by the devil, in the form of a serpent, were all impostures, wholly managed by human craft, without any supernatural aid, or interposition whatsoever. By Conyers Middleton, D.D.