serviceable to him. What is wanted at present is, not a treatise for converting the learned, the time for that is long past,but a manifesto for enlightening the multitude. The popular tone assumed, the candid detail of the progress in the author's mind, the very pettiness and almost ludicrous minuteness of some of the arguments, will be as useful weapons as any that could be employed for the special task in hand. The bishop attaches importance to trifles-so do the less instructed of his hearers; he deals with the simplest forms of thought-so do the uncontroversial middle classes of his countrymen; he repeats himself again and again,-it is the very way to gain over a listening crowd. The book is essentially popular. That a priest cannot eat eighty-eight pigeons every day, is just the kind of solid fact which will fasten itself in the apprehension of the vulgar. Stated as a mere jest, it would be repelled with disgust by a nation which, beyond all things, hates a scoffer; stated with earnestness, sanctioned by character and position, enforced, in a spirit of reverence and religion, it must be fatal to ideas of Mosaic accuracy in the minds of most of its readers. The bishop's friends have done wisely in making no attempt to represent him as a luminary of scholarship. Two years ago he confesses that he did not know what books to read on the subject; early in his work he shows his appreciation of the modern lights of English theology by quoting Scott and Pool; and his present idea of the extent of his field of labour may be gathered from his ingenuous statement, that as soon as he has settled the interpretation and status of the Old Testament, he intends, in the same spirit of straightforward inquiry, to proceed to the criticism of the New! If asked for a candid judgment on the merits of Dr. Colenso's work, we should say that, in the first place, we are considerably surprised that its author should have done so little; and, in the second, that we are still more astonished to find how well he has done it. This book may be said to have proved the occasional inaccuracy of the Mosaic narrative with the same completeness, and with very much the same method of argument, as that by which Blunt, in his Coincidences, proved their occasional accuracy. Of the tone and temper in which the book is written, it is impossible to speak too highly. It is courteous, truthful, and reverent. To speak without shocking the deepest feelings of others ought to be no more impossible in a theological than in a political partisan; and though it is not always the most reverent advocates who have most served the cause of truth, none other will ever powerfully sway the opinions of the bishop's countrymen. In well-bred courtesy, in the absence of contemptuous or malicious invective, the author is equally happy. The mutual recriminations of theologians have long been the disgrace of the study which they pursue; and they are not confined, as the bishop seems to imagine, to the conservative cause alone. He instances Hengstenberg as a flagrant offender on the orthodox side; and perhaps he might have quoted that author's mention of Strauss as a man who wrote his Life of Jesus to "gratify his evil passions," as the furthest point to which the odium theologicum can carry the most malicious though the dullest of partisans. But though the orthodox offend most, and though not an abusive word will be found in the pages of the best of the liberal theologians of England, yet there are others who are not free from blame. Dr. Davidson has no hesitation in charging Keil with dishonesty; and the Rev. Rowland Williams cannot be said to err on the side of considerate gentleness. . The thesis which Bishop Colenso maintains is, that the statements of the Pentateuch are in great measure not historically true. He is particular in his choice of words; and it will be observed throughout, that, much in the same way as Ewald, for fear of being misunderstood, forbore the use of the word "myth" in his treatment of similar subjects, and as we shall in these remarks abstain from speaking of " inspiration," our author has in no case characterised the story as "fictitious." He is no doubt aware that he is treading on delicate ground. It cannot be too carefully pointed out, that no two questions could be more distinct than these-Did the author write what is true? and, Did he intentionally write what is untrue? We shall have occasion hereafter to consider the answer to these questions; at present we will endeavour to analyse accurately what it is that the bishop says. His chief arguments, condensed, are the following: 1. Judah was forty-two years old when he went down to Egypt, and was yet old enough to have great-grandsons (by Tamar), who went down with him. 2. It being premised that the number of the Israelites at the exodus, computed from the Mosaic statements, exceeds two millions, the court of the tabernacle could not have held them all, as it is said to have done. 3. With the same premisses, Moses could not have read the law to all the people. 4. Again: the huge camp must have rendered the duties of the priest (carrying out the offal, &c.) impossible. 5. Two numberings distant in time by half a year give identical results. 6. Premising as above, how were the necessary 200,000 tents made and carried? 7. This vast host has arms, and yet is in panic-terror of Pharaoh; or else is not armed, and yet vanquishes the Amalekites. 8. The account of the institution of the Passover is utterly inconsistent with so great numbers, dispersed as they must have been. 9. The same impossibility applies to the march out. 10. The enormous flocks and herds can have had no subsistence in the desert. 11. The danger apprehended from the increase of the "beasts of the field" in Canaan is chimerical, on the hypothesis of so large a population. 12. The small number of the first-born contradicts the large number of the whole. 13. These large numbers could not have been produced in four generations from seventy men; especially, for example, the Danites and Levites. 14. There were only three priests, with duties enough for three hundred. 15. The account of the war on Midian involves (besides its cruelty) a host of improbabilities and inconsistencies. Such are the point-blank arguments of the bishop; and we must acknowledge that they are, on the whole, well worked out and very clearly presented. The most striking are those which we have numbered 8, 9, 10, 13, and 15. Whenever something is to be said which admits of plain matter-of-fact treatment, some common-sense inference, some broad telling statement, the bishop is in his element. How grandly he brings his Natal experiences to bear in the following examination of the march out! "As we have seen, this large number of able-bodied warriors implies a total population of at least two millions. Here, then, we have this vast body of people, of all ages, summoned to start, according to the story, at a moment's notice, and actually started, not one being left behind, together with all their multifarious flocks and herds, which must (73) have been spread out over a district as large as a goodsized English county. Remembering, as I do, the confusion in my own small household of thirty or forty persons, when once we were obliged to fly at dead of night, having been roused from our beds by a false alarm, that an invading Zulu force had entered the colony, had evaded the English troops sent to meet them, and was making its way direct for our station, killing right and left as it came along,-I do not hesitate to declare this statement to be utterly incredible and impossible. Were an English village of (say) two thousand people to be called suddenly to set out in this way, with old people, young children, and infants, what indescribable distress there would be! But what shall be said of a thousand times as many? And what of the sick and infirm, or the women in recent or imminent childbirth, in a population like that of London, where the births are 264 a day, or about one every five minutes? But this is a very small part of the difficulty. We are required to believe that in one single day the order to start was communicated suddenly, at midnight, to every single family of every town and village throughout a tract of country as large as Hertfordshire, but ten times as thickly peopled; that, in obedience to such order, having 'borrowed' very largely from their Egyptian neighbours in all directions (though, if we are to suppose Egyptians occupying the same territory with the Hebrews, the extent of it must be very much increased), they then came in from all parts of the land to Rameses, bringing with them the sick and infirm, the young and the aged; further, that, since receiving the summons, they had sent out to gather in all their flocks and herds, spread over so wide a district, and had driven them also to Rameses; and lastly, that having done all this since they were roused at midnight, they were started again from Rameses the very same day, and marched on to Succoth, not leaving a single infirm person, a single woman in childbirth, or even a 'single hoof' behind them!" Such is a fair specimen of the work,-manly, ingenious, sometimes superficial, always popular. But the bishop is quite as successful in his stray shots as in his grand broadsides. A mere suggestion here and there is thrown in, which is fully as damaging as his strongest direct accusations. He presents a picture of an advocate who has a good case to take up, and an average jury to persuade. He has mastered his brief well, knows its strong points, understands the men he is talking to, lets slip no advantage, and ends by creating an impression on his hearers which a far abler or more subtle pleader might strive in vain, with all his ingenuity, to produce. As it is, he makes few blunders; but it may fairly be said, that if his book had been more learned, it would very probably have been less effectual. There is one observation which will have at once occurred to every one who has perused even a summary of the book. Almost all the direct arguments (from 2 to 14 in our list) proceed on the assumption of the genuineness of the numbers mentioned in the sacred record. It seems at first sight a small peg on which to hang so large an argument. Let us examine it. Six hundred thousand fighting men implies a population of two millions and a half, which renders the facts of the history impossible, as very many even of the orthodox will grant. But they urge that the numbers are exaggerated by the mistakes of the copyists. To this it is replied, that the numbers are consistent with one another, and that this consistency spreads over many chapters, and is involved in many calculations. There is method in the madness. But the defenders of the Pentateuch reply,—It is possible that in some one or two verses an error may have crept in, and that succeeding copyists, perceiving the discrepancy, may have felt the necessity of making an alteration, and altered all the other passages to suit these, instead of altering these to suit the others. Such is the ground taken up by many defenders of Old-Testament accuracy. We cannot say that we think the supposition impossible, though, even granting, for argument's sake only, that the rest of the narrative is accurately true, the present numbers divided by ten will by no means meet all the difficulties. But though not impossible, it appears for several reasons to be extremely improbable. In the first place, the hypothesis assumes that the alteration in the numbers would be merely that of the transposition of the vowel-points, or of the substitution of one letter for another. But to suppose this, is to suppose that the Hebrew system of numeration was similar to the Greek and Roman. There is no proof that letters were used as numerals in the Hebrew Bible; and written numbers cannot so easily be altered by mistake. In the 11th of Judges Jephthah is made to say that his ancestors lived in cities east of the Jordan three hundred years. It has been plausibly conjectured that the word 'years' was originally 'cities,' the two in the original being not utterly dissimilar; and the statement as it now stands is in flagrant contradiction to the book of Joshua. But with the present reading, what was there to prevent a scribe from altering the numeral three hundred to correspond to the facts of the case, if numerals were so easy to alter? The fact that such a change was never made, even under so strong a temptation as this, goes far to prove that the theory of the errors of copyists is very far from valid. In the second place, the exaggeration in numbers is not confined to the Pentateuch. We can more easily suppose that the 600,000 fighting men were the product of the compiler's enthusiasm, when we see a king of Israel slaughtering in one day 120,000 men of Judah and taking as many more captive; or remember the famous battle in 2 Chron. xiii., in which more than a million men are on the ground, and half a million on one side alone are killed. Nor can it be urged that the chronicler alone is given to exaggeration; for the Benjamite army in Judges is given at above 40,000 men, and David slays in a subsequent book a like number of Syrian horsemen. The fact is, that to any one who considers how inexact, in respect of numbers and of rhetorical |