M 30 #7 
 
 THE VERACITYV4;"" [ «; 
 
 DIVINE AUTHORI 
 
 OF 
 
 THE PENTATEUCH 
 
 VINDICATED, 
 
 m 
 
 A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF DR. COLENSO'S BOOK, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. GEORGE EDWARD BIBER, LL.D., 
 
 PERPETUAL CUBATE OF R0EHA5IPT0N ; 
 
 WITH AN APPENDIX, 
 
 OONTAININQ 
 
 TWO LETTERS 
 
 ON 
 
 MIRACLES AND SCRIPTURAL DIFFICULTIES, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. AVILLIAM GRESLEY, M.A., 
 
 PREBENDARY OF LICHFIELD. 
 
 "Seek not out the things that are too hard for thee; neither search the things 
 that are above thy strength. But what is commanded thee, think thereupon with 
 reverence ; for it is not needful for thee to see with thine eyes the things that are in 
 secret. Be not curious in unnecessary matters : for more things are shewed mito 
 thee than men tmderstand. For many are deceived by their own vain opinion ; 
 and an evil suspicion has overthrown their judgment." — Ecclesiasticus iii. 21-24. 
 
 [REPEINTED FROM THE "CHUECH EEVIEW."] 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 CHURCH REVIEW" OFFICE, 11, BURLEIGH STREET, W.C. 
 J. LIASTEES, ALDERSGATE STREET AND NEW BONI> STREET. 
 
 1863. 
 

THE VERACITY V^ 
 
 DIVINE AUTHORITTT 
 
 OF 
 
 THE PENTATEUCH 
 
 VINDICATED, 
 
 IN 
 
 A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF DR. COLENSO'S BOOK, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. GEORGE EDWARD BIBER, LL.D., 
 
 PERPETUAL CUBATE OF EOEHAMPTON ; 
 
 WITH AN APPENDIX, 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 TWO LETTERS 
 
 ON 
 
 MIRACLES AND SCRIPTURAL DIFFICULTIES, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. AVILLIA^I GRESLEY, M.A., 
 
 PREBEXDAKT OF LICHFIELD. 
 
 " Seek not out the things that are too hard for thee ; neither search the things 
 that are above thy strength. But what is commanded thee, think thereupon with 
 reverence ; for it is not needful for thee to see with thine eyes the things that are in 
 secret. Be not curioiis in unnecessary matters : for more things are shewed unto 
 thee than men imderstand. For many are deceived by their own vain opinion; 
 and an evil suspicion has overthrown their judgment." — Ecclesiasticus iii. 21-24. 
 
 [REPKDnTED FKOM the " CHUECH REVIEW."] 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 "CHURCH REVIEW" OFFICE, 11, BURLEIGH STREET, W.C. 
 J. MASTERS, ALDEESGATE STREET AND NEW BOND STREET. 
 
 1863. 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 When, in the autumn of last year, public rumour, and subsequently a 
 succession of newspaper paragraphs, announced the proposed publication 
 of an attack on the Old Testament, and the Pentateuch in particular, 
 from the pen of the Bishop of Natal, the Author of the following 
 pages, having previously written a short critique of his Lordship's Com- 
 mentary on the Epistle to the Romans for the columns of the Church 
 Review^ undertook, at the request of the Editor, to review the forth- 
 coming volume ; not contemplating at the time anytliing beyond an 
 ordinaiy literary notice. 
 
 Upon the volume reaching his hands, the first cursory perusal of its 
 contents impressed him with the conviction that, however shallow and 
 untenable the Bishop's reasoning might be, such an attack upon an 
 integral and fundamental portion of Holy Scripture, published to the 
 world with all the weight of authority attaching to the Episcopal OfBce, 
 was calculated to work extensive mischief ; that it would necessarily 
 stagger those who, having but a superficial acquaintance with the Pen- 
 tateuch, were unable to answer the objections raised ; and that the 
 Bishop's book would eagerly be laid hold of by numbers, especially among 
 young men of all classes, who, having already loose notions on the sub- 
 ject of revealed religion, would be delighted to find what to them would 
 appear a clear case made out against the traditional belief of the Church 
 in the Inspiration of the Bible, and its consequent authority as the 
 Standard of Faith. Under this impression he obtained the consent of 
 the Editor of the Church Review to an expansion of the proposed 
 critique into a succession of notices, so as to enable him to enter upon 
 an examination in detail of the several points on which the Bishop's 
 denial of the voracitv of the narrative of the Peutatouoh, and of the 
 
IV ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 authenticity and Divine authority of the Book itself, ^vas founded. Such 
 an answer, refuting the Bishop's cavils one by one, and so taking away 
 from under him the foundation of his argument, seemed indispensable, 
 if the mischief likely to result from his publication was to be effectually 
 counteracted. After the appearance of the first few notices of the 
 Series in the columns of the Church Review, a suggestion, in which he 
 could not but readily acquiesce, was made to the Author by the Council of 
 the English Church Union, whose attention they had attracted, for the 
 re-publication of them, when completed, in a separate form, as tending 
 more extensively to promote the object for which he had entered on a 
 more elaborate examination of Bishop Colenso's book. 
 
 Having thus accounted for the origin of the following pages, and for 
 the part he has been led to take in the controversy raised by the Bishop 
 of Natal, the author is desirous of adding a few words in explanation of 
 the manner in which he has treated the subject. This, it appeared to 
 him, was determined for him by the character and the avowed object 
 of the Bishop's book ; which was not so much a bond fide investigation 
 into the historical foundations of the portion of Holy Scripture sub- 
 jected to his criticism, as an attempt to discredit it, by making its con- 
 tents appear utterly absurd, incredible, and contemptible ; and which, 
 moreover, was not written ad clerum, but adpopulum, and that advisedly 
 with the intention of ovei-powering the voice of the Church by the 
 clamour of popular unbelief. There seemed to be only one way of 
 meeting such an opponent. To show that, not the statements of Holy 
 Writ, but the cavils advanced against them, were, by reason of their ab- 
 surdity and untenableness, contemptible, was at once the shortest and 
 the most effective mode of rendering the latter innocuous. From the 
 nature of the cavils, the only refutation they either deserved or ad- 
 mitted of, was to demonstrate their utter futility by exposing the gross 
 ignorance and vfant of common sense in which they originated ; and 
 in doing this it was f olt that any delicacy or tenderness towards a writer 
 so unsparing in his exposure of the imaginaiy misstatements and in- 
 consistencies of the sacred narrative would be altogether misplaced. 
 
ADVERTISEMEKT. V 
 
 It vras evidently a case calling for the application of Solomon's counsel, 
 to " answer a fool according to his folly." Seeing, moreover, that the 
 Bishop's attack on the Pentateuch was addressed to the laity, in the 
 hope of exciting them, Korah fashion, to revolt against " Moses, the 
 man of God," it appeared desirable that the reply to it should be given 
 in a form intelligible to the unlearned ; excluding from it disquisitions 
 of a more abstruse or scholastic nature which might tend to perplex 
 them, and interfere in their minds with the lucidity and conclusiveness 
 of the argument. Fortunately this was not difficult, since upon most 
 of the points raised by the Bishop it was easy to confute him by a 
 simple reference to the narrative as it stands in the authorized English 
 version, and an appeal to common sense. 
 
 To have left the argument in the position in which it was placed by 
 the demolition of the Bishop's objections, would not, however, have 
 answered the main object which the Author had at heart, that of guard- 
 ing and confirming men's faith in the authenticity and Divine Inspiration 
 of the Pentateuch. For this pui-pose he deemed it desirable to present, 
 in a condensed and popular form, the historical evidences by which its 
 character as an integral part of the Word of God is supported. To do 
 this, appeared to be the more important, since the Bishop had put for- 
 ward the insidious suggestion that, as far as he had ascertained, — for he 
 did not profess to have gone fully'into this part of the question, — the 
 adoption of his theory was not incompatible with behef in Christianity ; 
 and had thus thrown out a direct challenge to show the utter impossi- 
 bility of reconciling the view of the Pentateuch contended for by the 
 Bishop with belief in the Divinity of Christ and the truth of the 
 New Testament Scriptures. The Author trusts that this part of his 
 argument has incontrovertibly established the inseparable connection 
 between Christianity and the Pentateuch, and the support which they 
 mutually derive from, and give to, one another. The conviction of 
 this fact may, indeed, render the refutation in detail of Dr. Colenso's 
 cavils, though indispensable for the satisfaction of another class of minds, 
 wholly superfluous in the case of many whose faith in Christianity is 
 
VI ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 too firmly rooted to be shaken by an attack of this nature. Those wbo 
 are, happily for themselves, in this case, will find in the tvro letters from 
 the pen of Mr. Gresley, who has kindly consented to their re-publication 
 in the form of an Appendix, some valuable suggestions as to the view to 
 be taken, from the standing-point of faith, of such objections as have 
 been raised by the Bishop of Natal, and of Scripture diflBculties in 
 general. 
 
 Lastly, the anomalous position which Dr. Colenso has taken up, and 
 which, if possible, he proposes to maintain, as at once a reviler of God's 
 Word and a Bishop of God's Church, called for an unflinching exposure 
 of the moral inconsistencies involved in the attempt to combine in one 
 and the same person two characters so utterly incompatible, and of the 
 monstrous fallacy of the pretension to a singular and pre-eminent love 
 of truth on the part of one who makes bold to doubt the Divine Omni- 
 science, or else to impeach the strict veracity, of Him who is, emphatically, 
 *' the Truth." In handling this point, arguments of a severely personal 
 nature became unavoidable ; but, having regard to the attitude assumed 
 by Dr. Colenso, this will scarcely be thought to require an apology. At 
 the same time, the Author hopes that he has not exceeded the bounds of 
 that just indignation which cannot fail to be excited in every honest 
 mind on seeing the possession of the Episcopal office pleaded as a justi- 
 fication for the promulgation of a manifesto of scoffing unbeHef. 
 
 ROEHAMPTON, Epiphany, 18U3. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Chapter I. 
 Introductory Remarks ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 1 
 
 Chapter II. 
 The Family of Judah (Co/e?i50, Ch. II.) 4r 
 
 Chapter III. 
 The Number of the Israelites at the time of the Exodus (^Coknso, 
 
 Ch. XV., XVI., XYIL) 7 
 
 Chapter IV. 
 The People witnessing the Consecration of Aaron and his Sons 
 
 (Co/e«50, Ch. IV.) 12 
 
 Chapter V. 
 Moses and Joshiia addi-essing all Israel (^Culenso, Ch. V.) ... ... 16 
 
 Chapter VI. 
 Institution of the Passover — March out of Eg}T)t — Tents and Arms 
 
 of the Israelites {Colenso, Ch. X., XI., VIII., IX.) 21 
 
 Chapter VII. 
 The Camp — Sanitary Regulations — Supplies of Food — Pasture for 
 the Cattle — General View of Difficulties (Cohnso^ Ch. VI., 
 
 XII.) 2a 
 
 Chapter VIII. 
 Number of First-born — The Census and the Poll-tax — " Borrowing" 
 of the Egyptians — The Number of Israehtes compared with 
 the Extent of the Land of Canaan (Colenso, Ch. XIV., XVIII., 
 VIL, X., XIII.) ... 31 
 
 Chapter IX. 
 The Priests and Levites, and their Duties — The Law in the Wilder- 
 ness and in the Land of Canaan — Provision for the Priests — 
 The War on Midian {Colenso, Ch. XX., XXL, VL, XXIL) ... 35 
 
 Chapter X. 
 Historical Evidence of the Divine Origin and Authority of the Pen- 
 tateuch.— L The Christian Church 40 
 
Vlll CONTKNTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter XL 
 Historical Evidence of the Divine Origin and Authority of the Pen- 
 tateuch. — 11. Tlie Jewish Church ... 44. 
 
 CHArTER XII. 
 
 Historical Evidence of the Divine Origin and Authority of the Pen- 
 tateuch. — III. The Samaritan — Effect of the whole Evidence 48 
 
 Chapter XIII. 
 
 Dr. Colenso's Theory incompatible with Belief in the Truth of 
 
 Christianity. — I. Teaching of our Lord Himself 52 
 
 Chapter XrV\ 
 Dr. Colenso's Theory incompatible with Belief in the Truth of 
 
 Christianity.— II. Replies to the Tempter ; Prophecy ; Types 56 
 
 Chapter XV. 
 
 Dr. Colenso's Theory incompatible with Belief in the Truth of 
 Christianity.— III. Writers of the New Testament— Facts of 
 the Unseen World — Alternative Conclusions 59 
 
 Chapter XVL 
 Dr. Colenso's Theory incompatible with the Ordinaiy Functions of 
 
 a Priest or Deacon 63 
 
 Chapter XVII. 
 Dr. Colenso's Theory incompatible with the Position of a Bishop. 
 — I. The Unbeheving Bishop and the Believing Candidate for 
 Orders ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 59 
 
 Chapter XVIII. 
 Dr. Colenso's Theory incompatible with the Position of a Bishop. 
 — II. The Unbelieving Bishop and the Doubting Priest — Con- 
 clusion of the whole Matter 74 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Letter I. — Miracles 70 
 
 Letter TI. — Scripture DifficiUties 84 
 
THE VERACITY AND DIYINE AUTHORITY 
 
 OP 
 
 THE PENTATEUCH VINDICATED. 
 
 Chapter I. 
 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 
 
 The tremendous explosive shell, of which we have heard so much 
 as being about to be fired against the sides of the Church, has 
 at length* descended ; not, indeed, upon the Church's deck, nor 
 yet against her hull, neither of which are likely to sustain much 
 damage from the operation, but into the water, where it has burst, 
 and is making a horrible hissing noise. In its character and 
 effects it bears a strong resemblance to Captain Warner's famous 
 long range ; which, after being before the public for a long while, 
 raising expectations of the most extravagant kind, has quietly 
 sunk into obhvion. That such will be the fate of Dr. Colenso's 
 pretentious performance, we venture confidently to predict ; and 
 we should be quite willing, for our own part, to let it die a natural 
 death, but for the alarm industriously excited by the manner in 
 which it has been ushered into the world. The object of the 
 various and contradictory intimations which preceded its publica- 
 tion has no doubt been thus far answered by a rapid and extensive 
 sale : whether in the long run the result will prove equally satis- 
 factory, admits, we think, of considerable doubt. 
 
 The fact is, that after examining the contents of Dr. Colenso's 
 volume, we experience a feeling somewhat akin to disappointment. 
 
Z INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 
 
 We expected, from all that had been bruited about and circulated 
 in newspaper paragraphs, that the Bishop of iN'atal had made some 
 fresh discovery ; which, however small might be its intrinsic impor- 
 tance, was yet calculated to startle the world by its novelty, and 
 to raise, in reference to the authority of Holy Scripture, questions 
 which had never been raised before. Instead of this, we have no- 
 thing here but the cramhe his repetita of the cavils of the crudest 
 rationalism, the credit of which has long since fallen below zero 
 in the country of its birth. What is really extraordinary in the 
 whole affair is, that any man should have risen to the position of 
 a Bishop in the Church of England, v/ho not only does not seem 
 to have been aAvare of the fact that attacks of this kind upon the 
 truth and Divine Inspu-ation of Holy Scripture had been both 
 made and refuted, but appears to have been so ill-grounded in the 
 evidences of the religion of which he is an authorized teacher and 
 guardian, that on being confronted by them he at once furled and 
 hauled down the flag of his faith. 
 
 That this is really Dr. Colenso's case, we do not for a moment 
 doubt. We cheerfully acquit him of all evil intent or mischievous 
 design in the business. We accord the fullest credence to the as- 
 surance he gives us that at so recent a date as January of last year 
 " he had not the most distant idea of the results at which he has 
 now arrived." He is, simply, the victim of his own ignorance ; a 
 melancholy illustration of the weight that attaches to St. Paul's 
 wise caution, in selecting men for the responsible office of " taking 
 care of the Church of God," to avoid choosing " a novice," ''lest 
 being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil." 
 Had Dr. Colenso not been a " novice " in theology, when he was 
 raised to the Episcopate, he would have been cognizant of the fact 
 that objections such as those which he propounds in his book have 
 ong been kept in store in Satan's armoury for the purpose of sup- 
 plying the enemies of the Church with weapons against the truth. 
 He would have known, moreover, that those objections have been 
 fully considered by men of undoubted piety, and love for the Truth 
 quite as sincere as Dr. Colenso's own ; men eminent, moreover, for 
 
INTRODUCTORY RESIARKS. o 
 
 their Biblical scholarship ; and that these men, after bestowing on 
 those objections a careful examination, have deemed them uiterly 
 unworthy to come into competition with the weighty evidences in 
 favour of the Divine origin and authority of the Sacred Volume. 
 
 Thus far we are prepared to make every allowance for Dr. 
 Colenso, and to regard the book to which he has committed him- 
 seK as his misfortune rather than his fault. ISTotlnng was further 
 from his thoughts, assuredly, than lo constitute himself an Apostle 
 of Infidelity. He became so unconsciously, imperceptibly to him- 
 self, through the want in his own mind of a solid foundation for his 
 faith. He was overpowered by arguments which he did not know 
 how to meet or to handle. What lie rea,lly deserves to be blamed 
 for, is the overweening self-confidence which led him to look upon 
 the conclusions of his own mind as unanswerable, and to set upon 
 the die of opinions which he had scarcely given himself sufficient 
 time to form, much less to consider them in all their bearings, the 
 fearful stake of his own future usefulness ; and, more than that, to 
 incur the tremendous responsibility of shaking the faith of thou- 
 sands, and becoming a stumbhng-block in the Church of God. 
 
 Viewing the matter in this aspect, we must say, and we say it 
 with regret, — ^for, after reading his book we feel inclined to pity 
 rather than to condemn him, — he is altogether without excuse. 
 He might surely have given himself time to reconsider his con- 
 clusions, — some of them most hastily formed, and on most in- 
 sufficient grounds : he might, before blurting out his unbelief 
 before the whole world in a tone of unbecoming triumph and 
 defiance, have sought for advice ajid instruction at the hands of 
 men better informed and more competent than himseK ; and he 
 might thus have spared the Church a great scandal and himself an 
 indelible disgrace. 
 
 B 2 
 
Chapter II. 
 
 THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. 
 (CoLEXso, Ch. n.) 
 
 How miserably weak are the premises from which Dr. Colenso 
 has, with more haste than discretion, drawn conckisions subversive 
 of aU real belief in Divine Kevelation, the first of his great histori- 
 cal difficulties may suffice to show. There is, confessedly, consider- 
 able uncertainty attaching to the chronology of the family of Jacob. 
 The Sacred Volume contains, in fact, no sufficient data from which 
 such a chronology may be constructed. AVe need hardly add 
 that such a chronology is no way essential to the object for which 
 the Book of Genesis was written by inspiration of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Looking at the date (Gen. xxvi. 3i) assigned by the sacred 
 historian to Esau's intermarriage with the Hittite women, wMch 
 was the cause of so much displeasm-e to his parents, and especially 
 to liis mother, and considering the close connection between that 
 event and Jacob's departure for Padan Ai^am, which it furnished 
 Rebecca with a plausible pretext for urging upon her aged husband, 
 there appears to have been an interval of not much less than ninety 
 years between the last-named event, and the date of Jacob's re- 
 moval into Egypt, when he states himself, in his interview with 
 Pharaoh (Gen. xlvii. 9), to be one hundred and thirty years old. 
 During that interval there was abundant time for Judah to be 
 born, as the fourth son of Jacob by his marriage with Leah, after 
 his first seven years' service in Laban's household ; — for Judah to 
 marry his ^lie Shuah, and for his third son Shelah by that mar- 
 riage to grow to man's estate, after the mitimely death of his 
 brothers Er and Onan ; — for Pharez and Zarah to be born of the 
 incestuous connection of Judah with Tamar ; — and for Pharez him- 
 self to become the father of two children, Hezron and Hamul. 
 
 While this is the result of the chronology of Jacob's life, — so 
 
THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. 5 
 
 far as we have certain, or at least highly probable, data to go 
 upon, — another mode of arriving, approximatively at least, at the 
 dates of the events antecedent to the descent of Jacob's family into 
 Egypt, is furnished by the statement of Joseph's age at the time 
 when he was sold into Egypt (Gen. xxxvii. 2), and again when he 
 was raised to the government of that country by Pharaoh (Gen. 
 xli. 46). By adopting this basis of computation, and couphng 
 with it the assumption (wholly gratuitous, and inconsistent with 
 several collateral circumstances), that Judah was only tliree years 
 older than Joseph, Dr. Colenso arrives at the conclusion that it 
 was physically impossible for Judah, at the time of the descent into 
 Egypt, to have had grandchildren by Tamar, seeing that his third 
 son by his wife Shuah must have attained a marriageable age before 
 the disappointment of the promise made to her induced Tamar to 
 practise the deceit upon her father-in-law of which the birth of 
 Pharez and Zarah was the result. 
 
 To the hypothesis on which this alleged impossibility is founded 
 there are, besides the necessity of accounting for the large interval 
 in Jacob's life between his departure for Padan Aram and his 
 descent into Egypt, several grave objections. Supposing Judah to 
 have been only three years older than Joseph, and Joseph's birth 
 to have been coincident with the expiration of Jacob's second term 
 of service, how are we to account for the interval of time during 
 which Leah ceased from child-bearing (Gen. xxx. 9) aft^r the 
 birth of Judah ; and for the fact that Dinah [her third child (Gen. 
 xxx. 17-21) after she recommenced child-bearing] was of an age to 
 excite the passion of Shechem (Gen. xxxiv. 1-4) during the jour- 
 ney of Jacob from Padan Aram to. Bethel, which, by Dr. Colenso's 
 reckoning, would have been six years after the birth of Joseph ? 
 Those two circumstances evidently point to a totally different com- 
 putation of Judah's age from that wliich the Bishop of Natal has, 
 upon a very partial and insufficient view of the data furnished by 
 the sacred historian, seen fit to adopt. 
 
 But even supposing that computation not to be open to these 
 manifest objections,— supposing that there wa.s the most conclusive 
 
b THE FAMILY OF JUDAII. 
 
 evidence that at the time of the descent of Israel's family into Egypt 
 Judah was, as Dr. Colenso affirms, not more than forty-two years 
 old, — there is really no conclusive evidence, — though it appears the 
 more probable supposition of the two, — that the sacred historian 
 intends it to be understood that the two sons of Pharez were born 
 before the descent into Kgy]3t. At any rate there is in the sugges- 
 tion that they might be enumerated among the descendants of 
 Jacob who formed the nucleus of the Israelitish nation in Egypt, 
 although born after the removal of the family into Egypt, far less 
 improbability than in the date at which Dr. Colenso fixes the birth 
 of Judah. 
 
 It thus appears that the difficulty which Dr. Colenso pomts out 
 in connection with "the family of Judah," and wliich he puts in 
 the forefront of all his proofs of the " unhistoric " character of the 
 Pentateuch, is entirely of his own making ; that he has created, 
 rather we should say adopted it from his rationalistic instructors, 
 without sufiicient investigation ; and that even if it did exist, an 
 explanation of it might be given which is far more tenable than 
 his own view of the history. 
 
 This, then, is the first of "a number of prominent instances," 
 by means of which the Bishop of Natal undertakes to "show that 
 the books of the Pentateuch contain, in their own account of the 
 story which they profess to relate, such remarkable contradictions, 
 and involve such plam impossibilities, that they cannot be regarded 
 as true narratives of actual, historical, matters of fact." We leave 
 our readers to form from this specimen their own estimate of the 
 modesty and reverence, the sense of fairness and impartiality, which 
 Dr. Colenso has brought to his work ; and above all, of his com- 
 petency for critical investigation of Holy Scripture. We pity the 
 poor Zulus ; but we pity their Bishop more ! 
 
Chapter III. 
 
 THE NUMBER OF THE ISRAELITES AT THE TIME OF 
 THE EXODUS. 
 
 (CoLENso, Ch. XV. xvi. xvn.) 
 
 Having, as he imagines, effectually disposed of the family of 
 Judah, Dr. Colenso proceeds in the next place to make a 
 clean sweep of the whole nation of Israel. The method which he 
 pursues for accomphshing this further and greater feat of Biblical 
 critisism is somewhat singular. His main point is to show that 
 no such people as the Israelites could ever have existed. With a 
 view to do this, he, curiously enough, assmnes that they did exist ; 
 and thereupon demonstrates, to his own entire satisfaction, that 
 the" events and circumstances recorded of them, and the observances 
 enjoined upon them, were utterly '' absm-d and impossible." From 
 the non -occurrence of the events and circumstances connected with 
 them in the sacred narrative, and the non-performance of the reli- 
 gious ceremonies attributed to them, he next infers that no such 
 law as the law of I^Ioses was ever given ; all of which follows as a 
 matter of course, if it can really be proved that there never was, 
 nor ever could have been, such a people as is described in the 
 sacred narrative. And thus the bishop arrives at the infaUible con- 
 clusion that all we read on the subject in the Pentateuch is pure 
 romance. 
 
 This mode of treating the question lays Dr. Colenso open to the 
 damaging remark, that either he felt no confidence in his own argu- 
 ments, and therefore sought by cmnulative impossibihties to 
 strengthen the weakness of the demonstration by which he pretends 
 to prove the very existence of the people impossible ; or, that he has 
 most unnecessarily superadded all the other instances of " absurdi- 
 ties and impossibihties " for the sole purpose of exhibiting his own 
 critical skill in the detection and exposure of the historical falsifica- 
 
8 KUMBER OF THE ISRAELITES. 
 
 tioris, or " unhistoric " statements, which, according to him, run 
 through the entire Pentateuch. 
 
 Leaving the Bishop of Natal to determine which of these two 
 suppositions is the less creditable to him, our first business must be 
 to show that the existence of the people of Israel involves no "ab- 
 surdity or impossibihty," and with this view to test the solidity of 
 the argument by which he endeavours to show that no such people 
 as the Israelites could have existed. 
 
 By way of making the very existence of the nation of Israel 
 appear an impossibility, the bishop fixes on the numbers of the 
 family of Israel which settled in Egypt on the descent of Jacob 
 with his sons. In round numbers, they are stated to have been 
 " seventy souk " (Gen. xlvi. 27; Deut. x. 22); but subdividing 
 them into generations, omitting the women whose names appear in 
 the list, and reckoning the two sons of Judah, Er and Onan (who 
 died in Canaan, and whose case was exceptional), we obtain in the 
 first two generations from Jacob the following numbers (Gen. xlvi. 
 8-27) of men caj)able of bearing arms, — sons of Jacob, 12 ; grand- 
 sons, 53 ; or, as the bishop inaccurately reckons them, 54, For 
 convenience sake, we shall adopt his less accurate computation, the 
 difference being immaterial to the argument. As it is evident that 
 the 430, or, in round numbers, 400, years assigned as the period of 
 the sojourn of Israel in Egypt, — or rather in a strange country 
 (Gen. XV. 13 ; xxxvii. 1 ; Heb. xi. 9), as the land of Canaan itself 
 was to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, — must be reckoned from the 
 date of the covenant of God with Abraham (Acts vii. 6 ; Gal. iii. 
 17), there remains, from the generation which went down into 
 Egypt with Jacob, to the "fourth generation" (Gen. xv. 16 ; Ex. 
 vi. 16-20) which was brought up out of Egypt by Moses, a period 
 of about 215 years. AVithin this period, and in the com-se of four 
 generations. Dr. Colenso thereupon proceeds to argue, it was 
 physically impossible that the descendants of the twelve sons and 
 fifty-four grandsons of Jacob should have multiplied to such an 
 extent that, when Moses numbered them in the wilderness, there 
 were found of male adults of tAventy years and upwards, capa])le 
 
NUMBEU OF THE ISRAELITES. i) 
 
 of bearing arms, more than 600,000 men. How can this be? 
 trimnphantly asks the Bishop of Natal. How can I, "as a man 
 of truth," ask a Zulu, or indeed anybody else, to believe this? 
 The sons of Jacob were twelve, his grandsons fifty-four : there is 
 an increase here of 4^ per generation. Assuming this to have been 
 the regular ratio of increase, the second generation would have 
 numbered 243 : the thii^d, 1,094 ; the fourth, in the time of Moses, 
 4,923,— not quite 5,000 men, instead of 600,000 ! ! 
 
 Unfortunately for his argument, Dr. Colenso has overlooked a 
 circumstance too trifling to have attracted his notice, yet one 
 which, in such a question as this, has considerable weight. From 
 the graphic account given of the patriarch Abraham, of his position 
 and movements, w^e learn that he was the head of a wandering 
 tribe. At tbe time when Lot was carried captive by the four kings 
 who made war upon the cities of the plain, we learn that the war- 
 like portion of Abraham's retinue amounted to 318 men (Gen. xiv. 
 14). In what position these and their families, — for that they had 
 such the narrative clearly implies,— stood with regard to Abraham, 
 and in what light they w^ere regarded by him, we learn on the oc- 
 casion of the Covenant of Circumcision. Whether " born in the 
 house," or " bought with money,"— by whatever process they came 
 to be incorporated in the " household " of Abraham, though " not 
 of his seed," — they were all commanded to be circumcised. " My 
 covenant shall be in your flesh " (not that of the hneal descendants 
 of Abraham alone) " for an everlasting covenant; and the uncir- 
 cumcised man-child shall be cut off from his people " (Gen. xvii. 
 13, 14). The nucleus, then, of the nation of Israel was not merely 
 the famlhj of Abraham, he and his lineal descendants, but the 
 tribe of which he was the Xomad Prince. That this continued to 
 be tlie case,— that Isaac succeeded to all " the souls " which his 
 father Abraham "had gotten" (Gen. xii. 5; xxv. 5); and that 
 they passed in due time by inheritance to Jacob, who brought, 
 moreover, a similar retinue of his own with him from Padan Aram 
 (Gen. xxxii. 10 ; xxxvi. 6, 7),— is not only to be inferred from 
 the very nature of things ; but there are distinct indications 
 
10 NU.AIBER OF THE ISRAELITES. 
 
 of it iu the history. It is evident, therefore, that when the 
 history mentions seventy souls as having settled in Egypt on the 
 invitation of Joseph, that number is to be understood only of the 
 princely house, and does not comprise its retainers, whatever might 
 have been their number, who were included with the descendants 
 of Abraham in the covenant of circumcision, and reckoned with 
 them as one " people." In the absence of any data as to what their 
 number might have been, we will, for argument's sake, assume that 
 in Jacob's time the number of men capable of bearing arms did not 
 exceed that of Abraham's retainers at the date before-mentioned. 
 Applying to this number the same ratio of increase which Dr. 
 Colenso has laid down for the lineal descendants of Jacob, we 
 arrive at this result, — that in the fourth generation, when Dr. 
 Colenso computes the latter at 4,923, the " people " of whom they 
 were the princes would number as many as 686,741 men of twenty 
 years and upwards, capable of bearing arms ; making, together with 
 the princely families, 591,664, or nearly the precise number obtained 
 at the census in the v/ilderness. That no addition should have been 
 made to the number of their dependants, either by purchase or by 
 natural increase, from the time when Abraham delivered Lot with the 
 aid of his armed retinue, to the time when Jacob succeeded to the in- 
 heritance of his father Isaac, is, we need not say, improbable to the 
 last degree ; and since the ratio of increase assumed by Dr. Colenso, — 
 at the rate of 4^ for adult males, in a generation of from fifty-three 
 to fifty-four years, — is anything but excessive : it is perfectly clear 
 that the number of male adults at the census in the wilderness, so 
 far from being incredibly large, is, on the contrary, considerably 
 under the mark : a fact which may be accounted for (among other 
 circumstances of which no record is preserved) by the measures 
 taken in the last generation to check the increase of the Israelites, 
 which had become alarming to the Egyptian mind. Certainly 
 there is not the slightest improbability in the numbers given by the 
 author of the Pentateuch, as the result of the census taken in the 
 wilderness. The alleged " impossibility " arises simj^ly, — as before 
 in the case of the fajnilyof Judah, — from an oversight on the part 
 
NUMBER OF THE ISRAELITES. 11 
 
 of Dr. Colenso, whose essentially uncritical and " unhistoric " mind 
 catches hold of a few figures, the real bearing of which on the 
 question at issue he does not imderstand, and by the aid of them 
 works out truly incredible results. To realize the nature of the 
 blunder in which he has entrapped himself, we must imagine some 
 one of those inquisitive Zulus on whose cleverness the Bishop's 
 faith has made shipwreck, getting hold of a British Peerage, and, 
 after counting up carefully the numbers of individuals enumerated 
 therein, breaking out into a fit of virtuous indignation, " as a man 
 of truth," against the Registrar- General, whose romancing record 
 gives utterly absurd and incredible milHons as the number of Queen 
 Victoria's subjects. 
 
Chapter IV. 
 
 THE PEOPLE WITNESSING THE CONSECRATION OF AARON 
 AND HIS SONS. 
 
 (COLENSO, Ch. IV.) 
 
 Having rescued the author of the Pentateuch from the imputa- 
 tion of romancing as to the number of the Israelites, whose exis- 
 tence, as recorded by INIoses, is perfectly consistent with the laws 
 of nature and the rules of credibility, we might, perhaps, consider 
 that enough has been done to deprive Dr. Colenso's arguments 
 and conclusions of all weight, and consign the rest of his cavils and 
 quibbles to the contempt which they deserve. But as the Bishop 
 of Natal, not satisfied with proving the existence of the people an 
 impossibility, has gone on to show that various matters related con- 
 cerning them are equally impossible, supposing such a people to 
 have existed, it may not be amiss to turn his cumulative proofs of 
 the "unhistoric" character of the Pentateuch into cumulative 
 proofs of his own utter unfitness for anything like historical re- 
 search and critical investigation. To some of these, therefore, we 
 will now turn our attention, 
 
 A leading proof, which to the Bishop of Natal appears to lie on 
 the very surface, of the fictitious character of the whole narrative, 
 is the account given of the consecration of Aaron and his sons to 
 the priesthood. On that occasion the whole congregation of Israel 
 was summoned to appear before the door of the tabernacle, in order 
 that they might witness so imposing and important a ceremony. 
 Under the influence of that sj)irit of perverse ingenuity which in- 
 variably fixes on premises that will lead to absurd conclusions. Dr. 
 Colenso understands the sacred historian to assert that the whole 
 congregation came inside the tabernacle, instead of remaining out- 
 side spectators of what was being transacted within. Thereupon 
 he takes out his foot-rule, and ascertains that the area of the outer 
 tabernacle in which the altar of burnt-offering stood, and where 
 
Aaron's consecration witnessed by the people. 13 
 
 therefore the ceremony was performed, was only 1,692 square 
 yards. And upon these 1,692 square yards the whole congre- 
 gation, — amounting, with women and children, to two millions, 
 or two miUions and a haK, — are, so says the Bishop of Xatal, sup- 
 posed to have found standing room for witnessing the ceremony 
 in question! Of course there is here an absolute impossi- 
 bihty, and an utter absurdity ; but the impossibihty consists in 
 this, that the author of the narrative could have intended to make 
 a statement so palpably absurd ; and the absurdity consists in Dr. 
 Colenso's for a moment imagining that such could have been his 
 meaning. 
 
 Read under the guidance of common sense, the narrative amounts 
 to this, that IMoses, with Aaron and his sons, and the necessary 
 number of attendant Levites, went through the ceremony of con- 
 secration, as there described, inside the tabernacle in which the 
 altar of burnt-offering stood, and that the proceeding was wit- 
 nessed by the whole congregation assembled outside. A proceeding 
 of an analogous character may be witnessed at this day in some of 
 the democratic cantons of Switzerland, at the annual election of 
 their magistrates and chief officers. In the amphitheatre of some 
 large valley, with a spacious plain in the centre, may be seen an en- 
 closure within wliich the outgoing magistrates formally lay down the 
 sword of justice and other insignia of their offices. The election of 
 new magistrates, or re-election of the old ones, as the case may be, 
 then takes place by acclamation, on the part of the sovereign people, 
 crowding the plain in thousands ; whereupon the sword of justice 
 and other insignia are taken up again. Of course it is impossible 
 that all should hear what is said, or see distinctly what is done. 
 The mass of the people have to content themselves with witnessing 
 as much of the ceremony as they can discern at the distance at 
 which they may be placed. But this does not affect the reality or 
 validity of the transaction : on the contrary, by virtue of the cere- 
 mony they have thus witnessed and taken part in, the whole of the 
 people of the canton are bound to render all due allegiance to the 
 magistrates so created. 
 
14 
 
 Let this scene be transferred, only on a grander scale, to the plain 
 in front of Mount Sinai, where the Israelites were encamped at the 
 time in question. Whether the people assembled to witness the 
 ceremony be sixty thousand, or six hundred thousand, or a couple 
 of millions, makes not the slightest difference, provided there be 
 standing-room for them all, so that they can get a sight, however 
 imperfect, of what is going on at the centre of attraction. Howthen, 
 in the locality where the scene is laid in the Pentateuch, does this 
 matter stand ? There is in front of Mount Sinai a plain, the pro- 
 bable locality of the encampment of Israel, which is described as 
 being nine miles long and three miles broad. Taking only the first 
 three miles in length, this gives an area of 27,878,400 square yards, 
 within which the whole congregation might take up their position. 
 IlsTow Dr. Colenso, who with a wonderful affectation of fairness 
 declines to push the absurdity so far as to suppose that the whole 
 congregation hterally turned out to witness the ceremony, but 
 contents himself with testing the possibility of the 600,000 male 
 adults being present on the occasion, calculates that standing in a 
 crowd they would have covered an area of 201,180 square yards. 
 DecHning to avail ourselves of his concession, but adopting his cal- 
 culation, the result is that for the whole people, reckoned at four 
 times the number of male adults, an area of 804,720 square yards, 
 or a trifle more than half a mile each way, would have sufficed ; 
 that is to say, the 878,400 odd square yards would have con- 
 tained them ail, lea\ang 27,000,000 square yards by way of elbow- 
 room. 
 
 Again, it is evident that the alleged " absurdity and impossi- 
 "bifity " exists not in the story as told in the Pentateuch, but in the 
 story as perversely misapprehended in Dr. Colenso's brain. 
 Common sense would lead any reader to take it for granted that 
 what the author of the Pentateuch meant to convey, and what 
 is perfectly consistent with his language, is that the peoi^le wit- 
 nessed, — as well as they could from their respective distances and 
 positions, — from the outside, the ceremony which was being per- 
 formed inside the tabernacle. But this, wliich involves no absur- 
 
Aaron's consecration witnessed by the people. 15 
 
 dity or impossibility whatever, is too obvious a sense for so acute 
 and critical a mind as that of the Bishop of Xatal. He must needs 
 construe the narrative as placing the whole congregation inside, 
 and so assigning an area of 1,692 square yards as' standing-room 
 for upwards of 2,000,000, — or, according to his more moderate 
 hypothesis, at least 600,000 people. 
 
 One cannot help being reminded by ail this that Dr. Colenso 
 is the author of a standard book on Arithmetic. That, clearly, is 
 his forte. He is great in multiphcation and long division, great 
 in mensuration, great in squares and square roots, great in loga- 
 rithms, which he, — very unnecessarily as it appears to us, — drags 
 into liis calculations. Before he had the misfortune of being made 
 a bishop, he was eminently successful, we believe, as a teacher of 
 arithmetic. In that capacity he must, we should think, have fallen 
 in with boys who, while exceedingly clever and quick at working 
 a sum when set for them, proved regular dunces when called upon 
 to set the sum themselves. In this peculiar variety of mathematical 
 genius Dr. Colenso might, as in a mirror, behold the type of him- 
 self. Ready at figures, he is utterly deficient in discerning the 
 data upon which his arithmetical operations should proceed. 
 While puzzling liis head with numbers and dimensions, he over- 
 looks facts which lie under his nose. When he attempts to play 
 the part of critical inquirer into the historic statements of the 
 Sacred Volume, he simply furnishes a fresh illustration of the old 
 adage: Nesutor uIU'cc crepidam. 
 
 It is on the strength of the wonderful mares' nests which he 
 has discovered by this extraordinary process of critical investiga- 
 tion, that he has the modesty to summon the Church Catholic to 
 surrender her belief in the Inspiration of the Sacred Volume, 
 attested by the uniform tradition of upwards of three thousand 
 years. Is this credible ? Is it not, perchance, extremely absurd ? 
 
Chapter V. 
 MOSES AND JOSHUA ADDRESSING ALL ISRAEL. 
 
 (COLENSO, Ch. V.) 
 
 After the evidence we have adduced in support of the correctness 
 of the account given in the Pentateuch of the number of the 
 IsraeHtes, — showing the utter futihty of the calculations on the 
 strength of which Dr. Colenso has presumed to impugn the 
 veracity of the sacred record, — it only remains for us to advert to 
 the various points in reference to which he thinks he has discovered 
 insuperable difficulties arising out of those very numbers which he 
 so rashly pronounces " absurd and impossible." 
 
 One of these, — the assembling of the whole congregation, to 
 witness the consecration of Aaron and his sons, — we have already 
 disposed of. Another and somewhat similar difl&culty is started by 
 the bishop in connection with the statement that first Moses, and 
 afterwards Joshua, addressed the whole congregation, promulgating 
 to them, or rehearsing unto them, the law which Moses had re- 
 ceived for them at the hands of God. 
 
 In considering this statement, it would naturally suggest itseK 
 to any one desirous of dealing fairly with the sacred narrative, to 
 inquire if there are in any part of it indications of a regularly 
 organised system of communication between Moses and the people. 
 If such an organisation can be shown to have been on foot, nothing 
 is more natural than that special reference should not be made to 
 it upon every occasion when the people had a communication 
 addressed to them by their leaders. Any statement on that subject 
 must necessarily be read in connection with the fact that a certain 
 mode of communication was estabhshed. To draw inferences 
 calculated to cast suspicion upon the truth of the narrative, while 
 ignoring that fact, bespeaks not a critical mind, but a captious 
 spirit. 
 
MOSES AND JOSIIL'A ADDRESSING ALL ISRAEL. 17 
 
 Now, it so happens that nothing is easier than to find in the 
 narrative itself an answer to the question in what way Moses 
 contrived to communicate with the people, so as to bring the 
 purport of his communications to the knowledge of all. Upon the 
 very first occasion when Moses, in pursuance of the Divine command 
 he had received in Mount Horeb, acquainted the Israehtes with his 
 mission as their dehverer, we read : — " And Moses and Aaron went 
 and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel ; and 
 Aaron spake all the words which the Lord had spoken unto Moses, 
 and did the signs in the sight of the people ; and the people believed; 
 and when they heard that the Lord had visited the children of 
 Israel, and that he had looked upon their affliction, then they 
 bowed their heads and worshipped" (Exod. iv. 29-31). The obvious 
 and only legitimate construction to be put upon this statement is 
 that Moses and Aaron communicated with the people at large 
 through the medium of their elders ; the information received tlirough 
 them being confirmed by the exhibition of the miraculous powers 
 with which Moses was endowed. This, as appears from the sequel 
 of the narrative, was the regular plan of communication. AVhen 
 jMoses had received command for the keeping of the first passover, 
 in these terms : — '■'■Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel ''^ 
 (Exod. xii. 3), it is expressly stated that, in pursuance of this 
 command, " Moses called for all the elders of Israel" (Exod. xii. 
 21). When Moses was instructed to intimate to the Israehtes 
 their high calling as God's own peculiar people, the command is 
 couched in these words : — " Thus shalt thou say to the house of 
 Jacob, and tell the children of Israel " (Exod. xix. 3). In com- 
 pliance with this order, we read that " Moses called for the elders 
 of the people, and laid before them (their faces) all these words 
 which the Lord conmaanded him" (Exod. xix. 7). And the result 
 is thus stated : — " All the jjeoj^le answered together and said: — ' All 
 that the Lord hath spoken we will do ' " (Exod. xix. 8). And so 
 again, when Moses came down the second time from the Mount, 
 charged to deliver to the people the law he had received for them 
 from God ; and when, in consequence of the resplendency of his 
 
18 MOSES AND JOSHUA ADDRESSING ALL ISRAEL. 
 
 countenance, they were afraid to come near him, it was Aaron and 
 all the rulers of the con(jrc<jation that were prevailed upon, by his 
 calhng unto them, to return and to hear the message v/hich he had 
 to dehver ; and " afterward," it is said, " all the children of Israel 
 came nigh, and he gave them in commandment all that the Lord had 
 spoken with him in Mount Sinai " (Exod. xxxiv. 29-32). It is 
 after these circumstantial accounts, repeated over and over again, 
 of his manner of proceeding, that the particulars of the commands 
 he had received, and delivered unto the people, evidently through 
 their rulers, are introduced by the general statement, — " Moses 
 gathered all the congregation together, and said unto them" (Exod. 
 XXXV. 1). Singularly enough, in taking excej^tion to this state- 
 ment, on the ground that it was impossible for all the congregation 
 to have heard what Moses said, Dr. Colenso quotes, not this passage 
 from Exodus, where within a few verses the proper explanation is 
 suggested by the context of the story, but he quotes a similar 
 statement from two places in Deuteronomy, and afterwards from 
 the book of Joshua. Not less strangely he omits all reference 
 to the commencement of one of the communications so made, 
 as recorded in this very book of Deuteronomy, — " And Moses 
 with the elders of Israel conunanded the people, saying. Keep 
 all the commandments lahich I command you this day." (Deut. 
 xxvii. 1.) Is this the inadvertence of utter carelessness, or 
 is it design? Whichever it be, it is extremely discreditable to 
 the Bishop, as tending to show that it was for the pm^pose of dis- 
 covering difficulties in them, that he "searched the Scriptures dili- 
 gently ;" and that upon this object he was so intent as either to over- 
 look in his eagerness, or else deliberately to keep out of sight, what, 
 if duly considered, would at once have removed those difficulties, 
 by suggesting an obvious explanation. 
 
 But this is not all. While the sup^DOsed difficulty of oral com- 
 munication with the whole congregation vajiishes before the ex- 
 pressly recorded intervention of the elders and rulers of the people, 
 to whom, upon some occasions in the presence of the whole 
 assembly, Moses imparted tlie commands of God for the information 
 
MOSES AND JOSHUA ADDRESSING ALL ISRAEL. 19 
 
 of the j)eopl3 at large, it appears that a further provision ^vas made 
 to secure accuracy and permanency for those communications. 
 Moses, we are informed, put the law, orally promulgated in the 
 first instance, ^n icrltlng^ and delivered it unto the in'iests^ and 
 unto all the elders of Israel. And in connection with this written 
 record of the law, he gave an injunction that upon certain solemn 
 occasions it should be read over unto the people, in all future 
 generations, by those to whose keeping it was committed (Deut. 
 xxxi. 10-13). It is in obedience to this injunction, modified 
 by the altered circumstances of the people, that after their dispersion 
 into all the world, not only was the law rehearsed, and to this day 
 continues to be so, in the ears of the people on the great festivals, 
 but "Moses," — i.e., this very law which Dr. Colenso contends 
 never could have been given at all, — was, and stiU is, " read in the 
 synagogues every Sabbath day" (Acts xv. 21). 
 
 But further it appears on looking more closely into the narrative, 
 that when the law thus orally delivered in the first instance, and 
 afterwards put in writing, was solemnly rehearsed, together with a 
 retrospective view of God's deahngs with them, and with additional 
 injunctions and exhortations, in the ears of the people, — not those 
 who came out of Egypt, but those who were about to enter into 
 the land of Canaan, — this was done, not all at once, as Dr. Colenso 
 represents it by v/ay of exaggerating the supposed difficulty, but 
 at different times, and at certain intervals. And on careful exami- 
 nation (an average calculation of the number of syllables contained 
 in each, compared with the number of syllables contained in a 
 pulpit discourse of half -an -hour's duration) of the several addresses 
 which are collected in the book of Deuteronomy, and constitute 
 its principal contents, — it turns out that the longest of them (even 
 supposing the whole of it to have been orally delivered at the time, 
 which is highly improbable), would not occupy more than two 
 hours and a haK in the dehvery,— about as much as a fuU-sized 
 Episcopal Charge. Even this, the longest address (Deut. v-xxvi.), 
 —though probably only a portion of it (Deut. v-xi.) was actually 
 spoken at the time, and the rest (Deut. xii-xxvi) handed over in 
 
20 MOSES AND JOSHUA ADDRESSING ALL ISRAEL. 
 
 the shape of a document containing detailed enactments, — miglit 
 therefore with perfect ease be delivered by JMoses to the elders in 
 the presence of the whole congregation, and subsequently by the 
 elders to the portions of the people over whom respectively they 
 were appointed. If, which appears most hkely, only the first 
 part was orally dehvered at the time, it would not take more than 
 from forty-five to fifty minutes to do so ; and the other addresses 
 (Deut. i-iv. ; xxvii., xxviii. ; and xxix., xxx) would occupy still 
 less time, from a quarter to half an hour. What, then, becomes of 
 the alleged impossibility or incredibility of their being from time to 
 time dehvered, both orally and in writing, by Moses to the elders, 
 in the presence of all the people, and by them afterwards to the 
 multitude, in such wise that, except through wilful absence or inat- 
 tention, not a single individual could remain ignorant either of the 
 purport of those communications, or of the fact that they were 
 communications made to the whole peojDle by JNIoses in the name 
 and by the command of God Himself ? 
 
 What thus holds good of the promulgation of the law by Moses, 
 is, of course, equally applicable to the subsequent rehearsal of it by 
 Joshua, who would naturally follow the system of communication 
 established ever since the commencement of Moses's mission. The 
 suggestion of Dr. Colenso, that " the day would not have sufficed 
 for reading in this way," — i.e.^ by Joshua himsaK reading them, 
 " first to one party and then to another till ' all the congregation' 
 had heard them," — "■ ' all the blessings and cm-sings,' " (which 
 would take about a quarter of an hour), " much less ' all the 
 words of the law,' " (the whole of which might be read within 
 fom* or five hours), '' especially after that he had been already 
 engaged on the same day in writing a copy of the law of Moses 
 upon the stones set up in Mount Ebal," thus reduces itself to a 
 mere rhetorical flourish. There is not a word said about its 
 being done all in one day, or in the way suggested by Dr. Colenso ; 
 the whole being a gratuitous assumption on his part, devised for the 
 purpose of making incredibility more incredible, and, — which in one 
 i^ensQ he certainly lias succeeded in doing. — absurdity more absurd. 
 
Chapter VI. 
 
 INSTITUTION OF THE PASSOVER— MARCH OUT OF EGYPT 
 
 —TENTS AND ARMS OF THE ISRAELITES. 
 
 (CoLESso, Ch. X., XI., Vin„ IX.) 
 
 The existence, from the very first, of a regular system of commu- 
 nication between Moses and tlie elders or rulers on the one hand, 
 and between them and the people on the other hand, removes in 
 like manner some of the difficulties suggested by the Bishop in 
 connection with the Exodus itself. When it is considered that at 
 the very outset the people were, through their elders, apprized of a 
 great national deliverance about to be accomplished,— that they 
 were from time to time informed of the result of the conferences 
 with the Iving of Egypt,— that during the progress of those con- 
 ferences they were in daily, nay hourly, expectation of marching 
 orders,— that with that expectation they would naturally make, 
 and had ample time to make, every preparation for their removal, 
 there is nothing so very wonderfvil,— much less any impossibility,— 
 involved in the fact that the directions given with regard to the 
 passover lamb, and various other directions connected with the 
 final departure of the Israelites from Egypt, should have been made 
 known to the whole people in an exceedingly brief space of time. 
 Some surprising instances of the celerity with which intelligence 
 can be transmitted when a whole nation is on the qui vice, and a 
 previous understanding exists among them, transpired quite re- 
 cently, dm^ing the Indian mutiny. To understand such a rapidity 
 of communication in the case of the Israehtes, we have only to 
 reahze the attitude of that people, dweUing, though among the 
 Egyptians, yet in quarters of their own, partly, no doubt, in cities, 
 and partly in the open comitry ; expecting from day to day, and 
 from hour to hour, the order to move forward. When that order 
 was at last given, both it, and the few l^rief directions connected 
 
22 THE PASSOVER ISrAKCH OUT OF EGYPT. 
 
 with it, would be conveyed from quarter to quarter, from encamp- 
 ment to encampment, without much loss of time, provided their 
 officers, the elders and rulers, had made proper arrangements. All 
 that is related in the course of the narrative of the Exodus is per- 
 fectly compatible with the supposition that the process of removal 
 was pre-arranged ; that the people were fully prepared for it, ready 
 to set out at a moment's notice, and did so when the final com- 
 mand reached them. Xor is it in the least inconsistent with this 
 attitude of readiness to march, that when at last the Egyptians in 
 their terror became urgent to see them move off, the process of 
 baking in which they happened to be engaged should have been so 
 far interrupted as to compel them to carry off their dough half 
 kneaded and unleavened. 
 
 The movement thus long preconcerted, and at last precipitated 
 by the panic which had seized upon the Egyptians, would naturally 
 take place simultaneously from every point at which any of the 
 Israelites had their habitations, or, as would be the case with most 
 of them, their encampments, towards the place indicated by their 
 officers as the first place of rendcz-vons. The statement that they 
 started from Rameses, in which city they appear to have had their 
 head-quarters, does not imply, as Dr. Colenso again most gratui- 
 tously assumes, that they must all have been concentrated in the 
 first instance in that city, and marched out of it in a close column 
 twenty-two miles long. What would be said of an historical critic 
 who, on reading that on a certain night the Duke of Wellington 
 moved his forces forward from Brussels to the field of Waterloo, 
 should thence infer that the whole of the British army was in that 
 night marched through the Place Hoyale in the Belgian capital, 
 and, from the impossibihty of this being done within the time 
 allowed for by the history, should conclude that the whole account 
 of the battle of Waterloo was notliing but an absurd, incredible 
 romance, and that no such battle was ever fought ? Yet, in truth, 
 the reasoning by which Dr. Colenso attempts to demonstrate the 
 impossibility of the Exodus as described by Moses, is not a whit 
 less ridiculous or luicritical. With all submission to the Bisliop of 
 
MARCH OUT OF EGYPT TEXTS. 23 
 
 Natal, we woiiid venture to suggest that the movemeuts o.^ large 
 masses of men, duly organized and properly officered, such as we 
 have abundant examples of in modern history, form a much better 
 basis for reasoning from analogy as to the possibility of the Exodus, 
 than the "confusion" which, he tells us, was once occasioned in 
 his own small household by a sudden alarm (happily a false one) of 
 a night attack from a body of hostile Zulus ; and which, if we may 
 judge of the practical good sense he might be expected to display 
 on an emergency, from the arguments in his book, we can well 
 beheve to have been " confusion worse confounded." 
 
 Equally irrelevant, — and, if the truth must be told, puerile and 
 silly, — are some of the other objections raised by Dr. Colenso with 
 a view to prove the account of the Exodus unhistorical and in- 
 credible. They are such as no man, having mastered aH the facts 
 of the position, could for a moment seriously entertain. Where, 
 the Bishop asks, did the Israelites get the tents in which they are 
 said to have dwelt, and how did they manage to get them trans- 
 ported from Egypt into the Wilderness ? And how is the state- 
 ment that they dwelt in tents to be reconciled with the statement 
 that they dwelt in booths, a fact commemorated to this day by a 
 national festival ? That the Israelites should be familiar with the 
 construction of tents, is not more wonderful, surely, than that the 
 Arabs of the Desert should be so to tliis day. It was their national, 
 their traditional, and, considering their pastoral occupation, their 
 most natural mode of living. If any of them, during their sojourn 
 in Egypt, dwelt in cities and houses, which appears to have been 
 the case, that was the exception. Tent-life was the rule, and had 
 been so for four centuries. Abraham dwelt in tents during the 
 days of his pilgrimage ; so did Isaac ; so did Jacob ; so must the 
 great body of the people have done while occupying the land of 
 Goshen with theii- herds and their flocks. The tents of the Pa- 
 triarchs, and of their lineal descendants, the Princes of the people, 
 were probably, like the double tent erected for the sanctuary in the 
 midst of the camp, structures of a more finished character, afford- 
 ing ample convenience and comfort. But the common people, the 
 
24 TENTS AND ARMS OF THE ISIIAELITES. 
 
 "mixed multitude," the^"^^")];, — is this tlie derivation of our 
 English " riif-raff "? — would be content with accommodation of a 
 much more primitive character. Even in our far more advanced 
 state of civilization, and in our far mor^ severe climate, we have 
 illustrations of tent-life which might have helped Dr. Colenso, if 
 he had the gift of taking a common sense view of conmon things, 
 over all his difficulties, both jDractical and philological, connected 
 with the tents of the Israelites. Has the Bishop of Natal ever seen 
 a gipsy tent on an English common ? Constructed with the aid 
 of a few stakes and a sheet of rough canvas, under some thorn 
 hedge or furze bush, it affords ample accommodation for the wife's 
 conj&nements (one of Dr. Colenso's monster difficulties), and for any 
 number of bairns with which she may present her lord. Its architect 
 and owner, it is likely, would be not a little amused at the Bishop's 
 puzzle between 'pHN ^^^ HDD- ^^ asked the question, he might 
 probably say with great truth that his "tent" partook a little 
 of both, — being ^^^^ ^ ^^^ ^^ "t^ie stakes and canvas go, and 
 HDD having regard to the hedge or fm-ze bush ; — which would at 
 once relieve Dr. Colenso of the necessity of consulting either the 
 Hebrew Vocabulary or Galton's "Art of Travel." 
 
 Then there is the difficulty about arms. Where did the Israelites 
 get them ? The answer is, that the possession of weapons of war 
 was of as old date among them as the use of tents. Abraham's 
 retinue, on the occasion of the rescue of Lot, were armed ; the 
 " two bands" into which Jacob's Syriac household had gTown 
 could scarcely traverse the distance between Padan Aram and the 
 land of his nativity, with all the property he had accumulated, 
 without the protection of men in arms ; neither would they, when 
 settled in the land of Goshen, — their numbers increasing, and their 
 herds and flocks multiplying, — be without the means of defending 
 themselves and their property. The very jealousy which the 
 Egyptians felt towards them indicates that they were not an un- 
 armed and utterly defenceless multitude. We read nothing of a 
 general confiscation of such arms as they might possess, as in the 
 case of a proclaimed Irish county ; aiid even if such a course liad 
 
ARMS OF THE ISRAELITES. 25 
 
 been resorted to, among other oppressive measiu-es, it was not likely 
 to be rigorously carried out, any more than the order for the de- 
 struction of every male child. At the same time, it is quite consis- 
 tent with their possession of arms that, in the absence of a regular 
 mihtary organization, and in the face of the warrior caste of Egypt, 
 whose mihtary organization was no doubt of a most eifective kind, 
 the Israehtes should experience the greatest alarm at the approach 
 of the Egyjitian host. Examples are not so rare, in our own days, 
 of crowds, even though largely supplied with arms, giving way 
 before a mere handful of soldiers marching against them in regidar 
 mihtary array, as to render the panic of the Israelites at the Red 
 Sea at all incredible ; nor is it in any way inconsistent with this 
 that, "a month afterwards," they should have "fought bravely 
 enough with Amalek."' During that month they had undergone 
 a disciphne of miraculous guidance which might well inspire them 
 with courage and confidence in any subsequent conflict, however 
 dispirited and — to use a modern expression — " demoralised" they 
 might have been at their first coming out of Egypt. The wonder 
 rather is that that courage and confidence should ever have failed 
 them afterwards, as it did on the occasion of their refusal to enter 
 upon the conquest of the land of Canaan when brought to the 
 borders of it. 
 
Chapter VII. 
 
 THE CAMP— SANITARY REGULATIONS— SUPPLIES OF FOOD 
 —PASTURE FOR THE CATTLE— GENERAL VIEW OF DIF- 
 FICULTIES. 
 
 (CoLEXso , Ch. VI. XII.) 
 
 A A^ARiETY of difficulties are conjured ujd by Dr. Colenso, in con- 
 nection with the extent of the camp, the sanitary regulations 
 imposed upon the people, the supply of wood and water, and of 
 victuals (previous to the j)rovision of manna) for the people, as 
 well as of provender for their cattle. In answer to all these it may 
 suffice to say that it would be easy, by taking up similar points, 
 and working them up by means of statistical calculations, to make 
 the existence of such a city as London , or the movements of armies 
 in modern times, appear utterly incredible. The sewerage of the 
 metropolis would be a powerful weapon in the hands of a critic of 
 the Colenso type, who should three thousand years hence, — if in 
 the teeth of Dr. Cummiug the world should last so long, — take in 
 hand to demonstrate the fabulous character of the records preserved 
 of the British Empire and its capital. What would he say to 
 such an account of the commissariat of London, as that given by 
 Dr. Wynter in his " Curiosities of Civihzation ?" What are the 
 150,000 or 200,000 yearling lambs for the passover, or the 90,000 
 pigeons annually, which the Bishop pronounces to be incompatible 
 with historic truth, when compared with the numbers result- 
 ing from modern statistical inquiries ? These exhibit as the annual 
 supply to the London markets such incredible figiu-es as these : — 
 1,411 million wet fish ; 220 milhon dry fish ; 1,420 million shell 
 fish ; 480,000 beasts ; 2,140,000 sheep ; 133,000 calves ; 159,000 
 pigs ; one and a half million game fowls ; three million domestic 
 fowls ; 1,400,000 hares and rabbits ; from 90 to 100 millions quarts 
 of milk ; an incalculable quantity of eggs, 70 millions being imported 
 from France alone ; 400 miJIion half -quartern loaves ; fi0,0n() 
 
SUrPLIES OF FOOD PASTURE FOK THE CATTLE. 2 / 
 
 bushels of apples and peare ; one and a lialf million pounds of 
 grapes and cherries , 60 million oranges, and 15 million lemons ; 
 besides vegetables and other articles of consumption in quantities 
 which defy calculation ; to say nothing of the 1,600,000 barrels of 
 beer, and the immeasm-able volumes of water, absorbed by such a 
 populatioji. Let, we say, any critic three thousand years hence, 
 go to work in Dr. Coienso's style u^wn such figm^es as these ; what 
 a monstrous myth would the existence of London become under his 
 hands ! 
 
 If the Israelites had food enough to support them in Egypt,— if , 
 moreover, they brought away with them the stores which they had 
 there,— which, with the aid of their cattle, they might easily do,— 
 there is nothing incredible, surely, in their having a supply of 
 victuals sufficient to maintain them for a month. And when at the 
 end of that time this supply was exhausted, we read that the mira- 
 culous provision of manua reheved the apprehension of the people, 
 lest the whole assembly should die with hunger. But, then, says 
 Dr. Colenso, the manna was for the people only ; what I want to 
 know is how the cattle were supported? For them, too, some 
 provender might, and naturally would, be brought away from Egypt 
 in the first instance, as the Israelites were quite aware that they 
 were to make some stay in the wilderness, and to take their cattle 
 with them. When this stock was consumed, no doubt the pasture 
 in the wilderness,— wliich term does not, any more than our Eng- 
 lish " waste land," imply a total absence of herbage, or vegetation 
 of any kind,— would, and the narrative shows that it actually did, 
 appear but scanty in comparison with the fertility of the land of 
 Goshen ; but there is no evidence to show that there was no pasture 
 at aU : on the contrary, since we read of IMoses keeping the flock 
 of Jethro, his father-in-law, in the very districts where afterwards 
 the Israelites were encamped, it is clear that the envhons of Mount 
 Sinai were regular pasture land. As regards the present condition of 
 the country, it affords clearly no evidence of what it might have been 
 at that remote period, any more than the estimate formed by an 
 Australian sheep farmor can be accepter] as a criterion of the space 
 
28 PASTURE FOR THE CATTLE MIRACULOUS SURPORT. 
 
 required for the cattle of the IsraeUtes. That the pasturage was 
 not as plentiful as that to which they had been accustomed in 
 Egypt, is indeed more than probable ; but as the history does not 
 enter into particulars, — mentioning only the occasional outbreaks 
 of discontent among the people, — there is no sufficient ground for 
 asserting that even the natural condition of the country could 
 not have furnished enough food for the cattle to prevent their 
 perishing from want. And where natural resources failed, the 
 power of the Almighty was surely all-sufficient to supply any 
 deficiency by miraculous means. That this power was exerted 
 only on the few occasions on which a record of the miracle is 
 preserved, is a purely gratuitous assumption on the part of the 
 Bishop of Natal, The conclusion to be drawn from the interven- 
 tion of miraculous agency recorded on particular emergencies is 
 rather that, whenever such intervention was called for, it was vouch- 
 safed. And to this the language of Moses himself, as well as the He- 
 brew tradition embodied in some of the Psalms, evidently points : — 
 " Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, 
 these forty years" (Deut. viii. 4). " I have led you forty years in 
 the wilderness ; your cbthes are not waxen old upon you, and thy 
 shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot" (Deut. xxix. 5). And so in the 
 Psalms : " There was not one feeble person among their tribes " 
 (Ps. cv. 37) ; a statement which Dr. Colenso openly derides, — "not 
 one single infant, or young child, or pregnant woman, or aged person, 
 or invalid !" — is his sneering comment upon the passage. Again, 
 with evident reference to God's especial care of His chosen people : 
 " He turneth the wilderness into £t standing water, and dry ground 
 
 into watersprings He blesseth them, so that they are multiplied 
 
 greatly, and suffereth not their cattle to decrease" (Psahn cvii. 35, 
 38). The whole of the discipline which they underwent in the 
 wilderness had for its object to teach them that " man doth not 
 live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
 mouth of the Lord " (Deut. viii. 3) ; in other words, to teach them 
 to rely, not on the ordinary supplies of nature, but on the all- 
 sufficiency of Clod's Almighty Power, 
 
ABSENCE OF DETAILED INFORMATION. 29 
 
 Even apart, however, from the fact of miraculous agency, the 
 absence of details of this kind in the narrative would not warrant 
 the conclusion that the history itself must be untrue. The data 
 which were obtained by an official inquiry, as to the commissariat 
 of our army in the Crimea, were extremely unsatisfactory : without 
 that inquiry nothing whatever might have become known on the 
 subject. But that, and even the story which is on record, that the 
 horses were browsing upon each other's tails, — notliing half so dis- 
 tressing is mentioned in the story of the Exodus, — would not war- 
 rant a critic some centuries hence, in arguing that because it does not 
 appear how our army in the Crmiea was supported, and because the 
 account o? the campaign contains distressing statements of want of 
 food, clothing, and accommodation of every kind, the whole story of 
 the Crimean war can only be considered as a romance ; that no such 
 city as Sebastopol ever existed ; or, if it had existed, the idea of 
 its having been taken by a victorious armj'-, whose condition appears 
 from the story itself to have been one of the most wretched destitu- 
 tion, is simply " absurd and incredible." Dr. Colenso seems to 
 forget that the history of the Pentateuch was written for a very 
 different object from that of furnishing materials for curious, 
 speculative calculations by a captious and pedantic arithmetician ; 
 and that the truth of its narrative is perfectly compatible with the 
 omission of much information for which an over-inquisitive and 
 not very wise sceptic might petulantly ask three thousand years 
 after the event. 
 
 Who that reflects on the wonderful arrangements of Providence 
 which pervade all nature, and sustain the hfe of both man and 
 beast under an endless variety of conditions, can permit himself to 
 doubt that the same God was able to sustain His own chosen people 
 even under exceptional cii'cumstances ? To prove a negative is at 
 no time an easy task ; to attempt to prove it by such miserably 
 weak arguments, and in the absence of data for ascertaining the 
 exact state of affairs upon matters of detail, is palpably futile. 
 Admitting, for argument's sake, that there may be some of these mat- 
 ters of detail of which, while the history is silent concerning them. 
 
30 DIFFICULTIES NOT INCONSISTENT WITH TRUTI[. 
 
 expositors writing at the distance of many ages are unable to 
 suggest a satisfactory explanation, what does this prove against the 
 truth of the history, if it be supported, as we shall see by and by 
 that the histcry of the Pentateuch is, by other and incontrovertible 
 evidence ? We are not bound to accept Dr. Colenso's infidel con- 
 clusions, because we are unable to point out how this or that 
 difficulty may be resolved, this or that apparent discrepancy 
 reconciled, this or that seemingly improbable statement accounted 
 for. 
 
 This view of the subject ought, — considering the importance of 
 the issue, — not to be lost sight of. Where an explanation can be sug- 
 gested, let it be done ; but if it seem unsatisfactory, let it not thence 
 be inferred that no satisfactory explanation can, or, with more 
 information than v/e possess could, be given. Where Dr. Colenso's 
 arguments admit of direct refutation, a fortiori^ let that be done. 
 It is on this principle that we have proceeded in noticing the leading 
 objections to the IMosiac account of the Exodus, which the Bishop 
 of Natal's book presents in apparently so formidable an array. 
 Upon the remainder of his cavils we must content ourselves with 
 bestowing a passing notice. 
 
Chapter VIII. 
 
 NUMBER OF FIRST-BORN— THE CENSUS AND THE POLL- 
 TAX— "BORROWING" OF THE EGYPTIANS— THE NUMBER 
 OF ISRAELITES, COMPARED WITH THE EXTENT OF THE 
 LAND OF CANAAN. 
 
 (CoLEXso, Ch. XIV., -kvhl, YJI., X., xni.) 
 
 The nuiuber of the first-born, twenty -two thousand, of one month 
 and upwards, Dr. Colenso pronounces wholly incredible, because 
 not reconcilable with modern statistics, and with certain arbitrary 
 data assumed by him. That number was ascertained a year after 
 the Exodus. As the object of this nimibering was the claim pre- 
 ferred by Jehovah to the first-born, in, consideration of their de- 
 liverance by the death of the first-born in Egypt, it seems but 
 reasonable to suppose that those numbered upon the occasion in 
 question were the first-born males born smce the date of that de- 
 liverance. ISTow to allege that in a population including 600,000 
 marriageable men there could not have been so many as 30,000 
 marriages contracted, — and the fii^st-born being generally males, as 
 many as 20,000 or 22,000 male children born as the issue of those 
 marriages, within the space of a twelvemonth, is surely a very bold 
 assertion ; more especially since there is reason to conclude that 
 during the latter part of the sojourn in Egypt the danger of having 
 their children torn from them and destroyed, must have operated 
 as a serious discouragement to marriage, which would cease with 
 the Exodus, and a more than ordinary nimiber of marriages in the 
 year of their emancipation might thus be accomited for. To test 
 this matter by the averages detained by the Registrar- General 
 within the bills of mortality is palpably inconclusive. Having 
 regard to the intellect of those to whom it is addressed, such an 
 argument is simply impertinent ; but remembering Who it is that 
 by His sovereign appointment and secret operation determines the 
 
32 THE CExsus and the poll-tax. 
 
 number and the sex of the children that are born, it is a piece of 
 the grossest irreverence, which might be excused in some underling 
 in the office of a Statistical Society, or some coxcomb of a lecturer 
 at a jNIechanic's Institute, but in a Christian bishop is altogether 
 unpardonable. He, at least, might be supposed to know, and ex- 
 pected to remember, that the Almighty is not tied down to a law 
 of averages. 
 
 The above remarks, and the observations previously made res- 
 specting the number of the Israelites at the Exodus, render any 
 further noticeof the chapter on the Danites and Levites superjfluous. 
 As regards the identity of tlie numbers resulting from the census of 
 the men of twenty years and ujDwards, at the first muster, with the 
 numbers obtained six months previously, the difficulty which the 
 Bishop sees in it is remarkable only for the exquisite perverseness of 
 his mind, which is as much offended, seemingly, when two state- 
 ments of the Pentateuch tally with each orher, as when there is an 
 apparent discrepancy between them. Is it likely that at a census 
 or nmster of this kind the age of each individual would be calculated 
 from the precise day of his birth ? AU the males born twenty or 
 more years before the commencement of the year in which the 
 census was taken, would be reckoned as "men of twenty years and 
 upwards" to the end of that year ; and as both enumerations took 
 place within the same year, it is obvious that the result must have 
 been the same, whether arrived at by a muster in ranks of tens or 
 of fifties, or by the smn total of a poll-tax. 
 
 The objection based upon the use of the expression "shekel of 
 the sanctuary," before there was any sanctuary in existence, is 
 altogether unworthy of a man having the shghtest pretension to 
 Biblical scholarship. The veriest tyro is aware that explanatory 
 references of tliis kind, introduced parenthetically into the text, 
 are of frequent occurrence. It does not follow that the words 
 "after the shekel of the sanctuary" are " put into the mouth of 
 Jehovah," because, m reporting His words at a subsequent period, 
 the historian makes an explanatory reference to a measure of value 
 which was fully established and well kno\An at the time he wrote. 
 
BORROWING OF THE EGYPTIANS. 33 
 
 Another instance of sciolism, even more inexcusable, because the 
 explanation has been given over and over again, is the adoption of 
 the translation " borrow " of the Hebrew word ^J^i:^ in Exod. iii. 
 22, and xii. 35, 86. The primary meaning of the word b^^I^r 
 being " to ask," "to demand," there is no real difficulty involved 
 in the matter. The Egyptians had exacted much hard labour from 
 the Israelites, for which they had never paid them. The latter had 
 a fair claim, therefore, upon the Egyptians for compensation, and 
 at the express command of Jehovah they now preferred that claim. 
 Nor is it at all surprising, after the exhibitions of the power of the 
 God of the Hebrews which the Egyptians had witnessed, that they 
 should recognize its fairness, and comply with the demand. And 
 this is the sense in which both the Greek and the Latin Versions 
 take the passage ; the former rendering alniu. the latter postulare 
 petere. Yet Dr. Colenso argues from the English rendering " to 
 borrow," as if that was the only and the true sense ! Is he so 
 ignorant as not to know better ? Or, knowing better, does he 
 deliberately give the preference to that construction which shall 
 make the narrative appear in an equivocal light ? In either case 
 it is plain that he is deficient in one of the primary qualifications 
 of a Biblical critic. 
 
 Another objection is raised upon the ground of the gradual con- 
 quest of Canaan, leaving a portion of the old inhabitants undis- 
 turbed ; the object assigned being that the land should not become 
 desolate, and that the beasts of the field should not multiply against 
 the Israelites. For this the Bishop contends there could have been 
 no occasion, as by his calculation not more than ten or twelve 
 acres on an average would have fallen to each of the 600,000 men 
 capable of bearing arms. Even this is nearly three times as much 
 as the proverbial quatuor jugera of Roman mihtary colonists in 
 the palmy days of the RepubHc. But the measurement which 
 Dr. Colenso has taken for the basis of his calculation is,— as might 
 be expected,— the smallest. A more accm:ate measiu-ement gives 
 16,200 square miles (instead of 11,000 as assumed by Dr. Colenso), 
 or'l0,368,000 acres, giving 17 acres, or about four times the Roman 
 
 D 
 
34 THE LAND OF CANAAN. 
 
 allowance, to each man ; and if we take the utmost limits of the 
 land, as they stood in the time of King David, the area is 26,000 
 square miles, or 16,640,000 acres, giving an allowance of nearly 
 28 acres, or seven times the Koman measure, to each man. The 
 question, however, is not a mere rule-of -three sum, as Dr. Colenso, 
 more soUto, makes it. I\Iuch would depend on the nature of the 
 land — the character of its sm-face, the existence of ravines and 
 caves, as well as of large forests — which would afford shelter to wild 
 animals. In these respects an Engh'sh county affords no parallel 
 for Palestine ; nor is the disappearance of the larger annuals, — 
 such as lions, elephants, &c,, — from the colony of JSTatal any cri- 
 terion. Dr. Colenso admits that leopards, wUd boars, hysenas 
 and jackals are killed occasionally in the bush. Now it is the 
 latter kinds of beasts of prey, together with bears and wolves, that 
 infested the land of Canaan ; and how great is the difficulty of ex- 
 terminating them, as well as the rapidity of their increase, may be 
 inferred from the fact that wolves, — so long the pest of England, 
 — are to this day to be met with in France and other civilised 
 countries of the Continent, and sometimes make their appearance 
 in large and alarming numbers. 
 
Chapter IX. 
 
 THE PRIESTS AND LEVITES, AND THEIR DUTIES — THE 
 LAW IN THE WILDERNESS AND IN THE LAND OF CANAAN 
 —PROVISION FORI THE PRIESTS— THE WAR ON MIDIAN. 
 (Colenso, Ch. XX., XXI., VL, XXIL) 
 
 Not the least telling of the cavils by which Dr. Colenso hopes to 
 subvert the historical character of the Pentateuch, is the alleged 
 impossibility of carrying into effect the provisions of the Levitical 
 law under the circumstances in which the Israehtes were placed in 
 the wilderness. To show this, he enters into a variety of calcula- 
 tions as to the duties which devolved upon the priests, — founded 
 apparently on the letter of the Le^dtical law, but in reahty on his 
 construction of it, and on sundry assumptions of the same gratuitous 
 character as those of which we have already had to notice so many 
 examples. Without troubling om- readei-s with the details of what 
 would prove a tedious enquiry, we shall content ourselves with 
 adverting to a few points wliich, as usual, have been overlooked by 
 the Bishop of ]N'atal, and which, as will be seen, are as fatal to his 
 argiunent as that argument itself, if really made out, would be 
 to the historic character of the Pentateuch. 
 
 In the first place, Dr. Colenso ignores the fact that the Levites 
 were " given," as the sacred text expresses it, to the house of Aaron 
 for the service of the tabernacle (iSTumb. iii. 9 ; viii. 19 ; xviii. 6, 
 21-23). With the exception of the few acts immediatdy connected 
 with the altar, such as the sprinkling of blood, and the placing of 
 the sacrifice upon the altar, the priests had personally nothing to 
 do ; an the preparatory acts, except such as devolved upon the 
 persons offeriag the sacrifice, were performed by the Levites, as 
 servants of the Tabernacle, and ministers to the priests ; even to 
 the collecting of the blood into basons to be presented to the 
 priests for the ceremony of sprinkling (2 Chron. xxx. 16 ; xxxv. 
 10, 11). 
 D 2 
 
36 PRIESTS AND LEYITES, AND THEIR DUTIES. 
 
 Another mistake into which he falls is that, in the case of a 
 number of similar sacrifices, such as the offerings for women after 
 childbirth, or the killing of the passover lamb by the whole con- 
 gregation, he assumes that the whole ceremonial had to be gone 
 through separately for each individual sacrifice, and therefore re- 
 peated as many times as there were individuals offering the sacri- 
 fice ; whereas it is evident that on such occasions the proceedings 
 would be greatly simplified by taking all the sacrifices of the same 
 character together ; collecting, for instance, the blood of a number 
 of them into the same vessels to be afterwards presented to the 
 priests. And not only so, but in some instances a number of persons 
 might club together, as they did for the passover lamb ; and as St. 
 Paul did when, at the suggestion of his brother Apostles, he joined 
 the four men who had a vow, " being at charges with them " (Acts 
 xxi. 23, 24, 2G). Taking this into account, and remembering more- 
 over that all the ministerial and more menial acts of the ceremonial 
 were performed not by the priests themselves, but by a numerous 
 body of Levites in attendance on them, there is an end at once of 
 the alleged impossibility of the priests getting through all the 
 duties imposed upon them by the law ; the difficulty being founded 
 on the erroneous supposition that every single act connected with 
 every individual sacrifice must be performed by the priest himself 
 with his own hands. With the assistance of the Levites, assigned 
 to them as their ministers for this very purpose, Aaron and his two 
 sons might, without any undue demand either on their time or 
 on their physical powers, offer a very large number of sacrifices, 
 which, on Dr. Colenso's supposition, it would have been clearly 
 impossible for them to have offered. 
 
 But while by a due consideration of these points the difficulty 
 conjured up by the Bishop is in a great measure removed, another 
 and still greater fallacy underlies the whole of his arguments on 
 this subject; the supposition, namely, that the ceremonial law laid 
 down in various parts of the Pentateuch, and especially in the Book 
 of Leviticus, is the law which the Israelites were to observe, and 
 accordinor to the storv as narrated did observe, durinof their wan- 
 
THE LEVITICAL LAW. , 37 
 
 deling in the wilderness. His arguing upon that hypothesis is the 
 more inexcusable, since it is evident from Dr. Colenso's own book 
 that the inapplicability of many of the provisions of the law so 
 laid down to the circumstances of the Israelites in the wilderness had 
 not altogether escaped his notice. The very nature of the sacrifices 
 shows this, as for instance the meat offering made of fine flour, the 
 diink offering of wine, the first-fruit offerings, as well as the 
 nature of some of the festivals commanded to be kept. The fact 
 that the enactments of the law promulgated in the wilderness were 
 intended to apply to the future arrangements after the settlement 
 of the Israehtes in the land of Canaan, is further evident from the 
 provisions made with regard to the families of the priests, to their 
 support from the meat of the sacrifices, of which not only the priests 
 and their children, but their servants, whether bought or born in 
 the house, were to partake (iSTumb. xviii. 10-13 ; Levit. xxii. 
 11-13), as well as priests incapacitated by some blemish (Levit. xxi. 
 21-23). These and many other provisions, such as the prohibition 
 not to offer sacrifice in any of their gates, but in the '' place which 
 the Lord God should choose to put His name there " (Deut. xii. 
 5-9), most clearly prove that the code of the ceremonial law given 
 in the wilderness was in fact the code to be observed in the land 
 of Canaan. That sacrifices were also offered in the wilderness, is 
 indeed true ; but there was no occasion for placing the law and 
 order of them on permanent record. They would naturally involve 
 such modifications of the permanent code as the nature of the case 
 required ; but for these directions would be given from time to 
 time as they were required, since all that was done in the wilderness 
 was done by special command from God Himself. 
 
 Curiously enough. Dr. Colsnso, shutting his eyes to all this, 
 selects, for the purpose of exhibiting the " absurdity " of the law in 
 the most glaring light, the point Avhich of all others ought to have 
 made him pause before he argued upon the supposition that the 
 law given in the wilderness was to be kept in the wilderness in the 
 identical form in which it was recorded. Thirteen cities were re- 
 served as the special patrimony of the priests, whereupon Dr. Co- 
 
38 CITIES RESERVED FOR THE PRIESTHOOD. 
 
 lenso observes that, as there were not more than two, or at most 
 three, of Aaron's family then alive, there was clearly no object in 
 making so large a provision for their dwellings, and that therefore 
 the account of this appropriation must be fabulous ; hinting that 
 it was foisted into the narrative in a much later age. A candid 
 reasoner would have inferred from this very fact that the provision 
 was made with a view to the state of things which should obtain 
 in a later age, and of which the Divine Lawgiver was of course 
 cognizant beforehand. Not so Dr. Colenso ; he is determined to 
 discover evidence of falsification ; and he makes the most of it. 
 We wonder whether Dr. Colenso ever heard of a similar provision 
 being made, much nearer to our own time, not by Divine, but by 
 human foresight. Has he ever heard of the Clergy Reserves in 
 Canada? Is he prepared to contend that, because at the date 
 when the Act of Parliament reserving lands for the maintenance of 
 the clergy vv^as passed, there were only a few missionaries scattered 
 in Canada, the whole history of the conquest of Canada and its 
 incorporation with the British Empire is a manifest, unmistakable 
 romance, without a shadow of historical foundation ? Yet this is 
 strictly the line of argument which the Bishop of Natal has seen 
 fit to adopt, and which emboldens him to deny, in express terms, 
 the historical veracity of the Pentateuch ! 
 
 The most formidable, however, of all his objections, that at least 
 which is evidently so in his own opinion, Dr. Colenso has reserved, 
 asa&onwe houclie^ for the last of his criticisms upon the sacred narra- 
 tive. It is the indignant repudiation, not for arithmetical reasons 
 merely, but on moral grounds, of the history of the slaughter of the 
 Midianites, in comparison with which, " if indeed we were required 
 to believe it," the butchery of Cawnpore, he observes, " would sink 
 into nothing." As far as the arithmetical part of the difiiculty is 
 concerned, we are fain to admit that the objections made to this 
 story by Dr. Colenso admit of no refutation. In order to prove 
 it altogether impossible, Dr. Colenso adopts tlie simple and easy 
 expedient of enumerating all the events said to have happened 
 within the six months between the death of Aaron and the address 
 
THE WAR ON MID1.^>. 39 
 
 of Moses to the Israelites in the plains of Moab ; and by assuming, 
 — for he has confessedly no dates to guide him, — how much time 
 must he allowed for each of them, he proves conclusively, to his own 
 mind at least, that there was no room left for such an expedition as 
 the war upon Midian, and that therefore it could not have taken 
 place. To attempt an answer to an argument of this description 
 would be a waste of words. So, leaving the Bishop to take the 
 full benefit of his assumptions, we turn to that part of his argmnent 
 which rests on the moral aspect of the war. On this point it may 
 be sufficient to remind him that the destruction of the Midianites 
 was a judgment decreed against them by the Lord HimseK, for the 
 abominable idolatries into which they had inveigled the Israelites 
 (Numb. XXV. 16-18 ; xxxi. 1, 2), and that the latter were in this 
 matter simply the executioners of the Divine sentence. By treat- 
 ing this point in the way he does, Dr. Colenso has changed the 
 whole issue of his book. It is no longer the authenticity and vera- 
 city of a written document that he calls in question, but the cha- 
 racter of God Himself. The Bishop in fact arraigns the ICing of 
 kings and Lord of lords before the august tribimal of his own reason 
 and sense of right. Thus he enters upon an entirely new field of 
 inquiry, which lies altogether beyond the scope of the first part of 
 his work ; and into which, as we may have future occasion to do 
 so, we shall not follow him for the present. 
 
ClIAPTEIl X. 
 
 HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF THE DIVINE ORIGIN AND 
 AUTHORITY OF THE PENTATEUCH.— I. THE CHRISTIAN 
 CHURCH. 
 
 The point we have aimed at hitherto, in examining Dr. Colenso's 
 book, has been to demohsh the objections which he has raised 
 against the historic character and the veracity of the Pentateuch. 
 We venture to think that we have done so effectually; that 
 the considerations suggested by way of explanation, and the facts 
 pointed out by us which have been either inexcusably overlooked or 
 wilfully ignored by Dr. Colenso, are sufficient to convince any 
 attentive and candid reader of the futility and inconclusiveness of 
 the arguments on the strength of which he has ventured to impugn, 
 not the inspiration merely, but the common truthfulness, of the 
 first great division of the Canon of Scripture. We trust we have 
 made it clear that, for aught that the Bishop of Natal has written, 
 the authority of the Pentateuch stands precisely in the same posi- 
 tion as it did before the evil hour in which that clever arithmeti- 
 cian was taken from the scholastic desk which he adorned, to be 
 dressed up in lawn sleeves, and sent forth, professedly to convert 
 the Zulus to Christianity, but in reality, as it has turned out, to be 
 himself made a convert to infidelity by " an intelligent Zulu." 
 
 Looking merely at the intrinsic imjDortance of the Bishop's book, 
 therefore, we might stop here, abandoning it to the contempt and 
 oblivion into which, even in the absence of a formal refutation of 
 its contents, it is, from its natm-e, sure to fall. But the publication 
 put forth by Dr. Colenso has a significance beyond what properly 
 belongs to it. Taking it in connection with the "Essays and 
 Reviews," and with a mass of unsoundness that is floating about, 
 like a blight, in the religious atmosphere, it must be considered as 
 
HISTORICAL TESTIMONY TO THE PENTATEUCH. 41 
 
 oue among many indications of a general looseness of thought, as 
 well as ignorance of facts, respecting the Divine origin and autho- 
 rity of the Pentateuch. Under these circumstances it becomes a 
 question of some importance to inquire by whom, and upon what 
 grounds, its Divine origin and authority is asserted. It is not 
 enough to show that there is no reason why the facts and events 
 related in the Pentateuch should not be true. Though the Bishop 
 of Natal has failed in his attempt to prove them imtrue, it does 
 not follow from thence that they are true. The mere fact that 
 their truth has been, however impotently and unsucessfully, chal- 
 lenged, may in the minds of some raise the question, what reasons 
 there are for believing them to be true. And from this question 
 we must not shrink, if we would effectually vindicate in the eyes 
 of men the truth that has been so rudely as well as rashly assailed. 
 Independently of all the nonsense which Dr. Colenso has written, 
 we must deal with the hypothesis that the Pentateuch is a fable, 
 and confronting it with the opposite hypothesis, which assumes it 
 to be true, ascertain which of the two suppositions has reason and 
 evidence on its side. \Ve propose, therefore, now to examine Dr. 
 Colenso's proposition that the Pentateuch is " unliistoric," in the 
 abstract, without reference to the argmnents by which he has en- 
 deavoured to support it. 
 
 In doing so, we shall start from the fact, that the Pentateuch is, 
 actually, in the hands of more than one body of men by whom not 
 only its veracity is vouched for, but its contents are held sacred, as 
 the Word of God HimseK, given by inspiration of His Holy Spirit. 
 This is a matter of fact which it is, of course, impossible for the 
 Bishop of Natal to dispute, however strong an opinion he may 
 entertain that it ought to be otherwise. 
 
 In the first place, it is in the hands of the Chm-ch of which, — 
 worse luck for her ! — Dr. Colenso is a Bishop, and to which his 
 lordship is indebted for his knowledge, — such as it is, — of the book 
 impugned by him. That Church in her Articles places the Penta- 
 teuch at the head of "those Canonical Books of the Old Testa- 
 ment of whose authority was never any doubt in the Chiu-ch ;" 
 
42 TESTIMONY OF THE CHPaSTIA.> CHUIICH. 
 
 and that in express contradistinction to certain other books termed 
 " ajDOcryphal," which, altliough she orders them to be read " for 
 example of hfe and instruction of manners," she does not recognize 
 as having any claim upon men's faith by virtue of any Divine 
 authority. The testimony so borne by the Enghsh branch of the 
 Western Church is enhanced in critical value by the jealousy with 
 which she resisted the attempt of the Roman branch of that 
 Church to place the last-named books on a level with the books 
 of Holy Scripture ; showing thereby that her reverent estimation 
 of these, including the Pentateuch, is not the result of an un- 
 discriminating adherence to tradition. 
 
 In her acceptance of the Pentateuch, together with the other 
 Canonical Books of the Old Testament, as Sacred Scripture, or God's 
 Word written, the Enghsh Church followed from the beginning 
 the example and authority of the Universal Clmrch, antecedently to 
 the separation of the Western from the Eastern Churches. In the 
 earher ages after the promulgation of the Gospel that Church was 
 called upon, more than once, by formal decisions, to determine what 
 were the books entitled to that high and incontrovertible authority 
 which must attach to books written by Inspiration of the Holy 
 Ghost, and can attach to no other. But upon all those occasions 
 the inquiry was only concerning the Scriptures of the New 
 Testament ; the Divine authority of the Books of the Old Testa- 
 ment, as they are now held to be Canonical by the English Church, 
 being never once called in question, but universally acknowledged, 
 on the ground of the well-known and clearly estabhshed fact that 
 those Scriptm-es, and the Pentateuch amongst them, had long before 
 the time of Christ been held to be inspired, and as such of Divine 
 authority, by the Jewish Church ; and that they were distinctly 
 recognized and appealed to in that character by Christ and His 
 Apostles. 
 
 That period, the period of Christ and His Apostles, was remark- 
 able ahke in the history of the whole world, to which the promul- 
 gation of the Gospel gave an entirely new aspect, its civilization 
 having from that day to this been bound up with belief in Chris- 
 
TESTIMONY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 43 
 
 tianity ; and in the history of the Jewish people, whose national 
 pohty was then broken up, and the nation itself driven into exile, 
 and dispersed, as they are to this day, through all the countries of 
 the world. From that remarkable period ^ve have, in support of 
 the Divine origin and authority of the Pentateuch, along with the 
 other Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament, not only the 
 testimony of the Chi'istian Church in all its branches, including 
 the believing portion of the Jewish Church, — that is, the testimony 
 of all who continued in reverent obedience to God's Word ; but 
 the testimony of the unbeUeving portion of the Jewish Church, 
 whose rejection of Him to whom their ancient Scriptures so clearly 
 pointed, entailed on them the overthrow of their national pohty, 
 and their universal dispersion, in accordance with the Divine sen- 
 tence pronounced beforehand against them for such disobedience by 
 Moses, and recorded in that very Pentateuch which Dr. Colenso 
 would persuade us is no better than a tissue of fables. 
 
Chapteii XL 
 
 HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OP THE DIVINE ORIGIN AND 
 AUTHORITY OF THE PENTATEUCH. — 11. THE JEWISH 
 CHURCH. 
 
 The witness borne to the Pentateuch by the unbelieving por- 
 tion of the Jewish Church, since the period of their rejection of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ and the destruction of the temple, is the more 
 valuable, because it shows how deeply rooted was in the Jewish 
 mind the conviction of the Divine origin and authority of their 
 Sacred Scriptures. AVliile they persist in their rejection of Him 
 to whom those Scriptures pointed, and continue in a state of im- 
 penitence for that act of rebellion which has brought upon them 
 their present calamitous condition, their reverence for the ancient 
 documents of their national faith remains unimpaired ; so much so 
 that they unhesitatingly accept that condition as the punishment 
 of some great national sin, and look forward to the day when, ac- 
 cording to the gracious promises contained in them, they shall once 
 more be restored to God's favour as His chosen people. That such 
 a restoration still awaits them, those Scriptures of the New Testa- 
 ment which, along with the mission of Christ and His Apostles, 
 they reject, expressly testify ; declaring at the same time the pur- 
 pose of God in providing out of the very mouth of those that are 
 in rebellion against Him a testimony to the truth of their ancient 
 oracles ; and thereby, indirectly, to the truth of Christianity wliich 
 is based upon them. The same St. Paul, who informs us that when 
 *'the fulness of the Gentiles shall come in," the partial bhndness 
 with which God's ancient people are smitten shall be removed, and 
 *' all Israel shall be saved," also declares that, until that time shall 
 have arrived, " they are, as concerning the Gospel, enemies for our 
 sakes" (liom. xi. 25-20 ; Lul^e xxi. 24). 
 
TESTIMONY OF THE JEWISH CHUECH. 45 
 
 At the period when tliis partial blindness fell upon Israel, and 
 caused their temporary rejection by Him whom, in the person of 
 Christ, they had rejected, the observance of the law the enactments 
 of which the Pentateuch records, and which Dr. Colenso contends 
 never could have been given, was in full force. Since then, indeed, 
 the observance of the greater part of its ceremonial has been sus- 
 pended by the destruction of the place in which alone it could 
 legitimately be kept ; but this inevitable suspension is deplored by 
 the Jewish people as the heaviest of their national afflictions ; at 
 the same time that they continue to yield the most scrupulous 
 obedience to every part of the Mosaic law with which under their 
 present circmnstances it is possible for them to comply. Both 
 their continued obedience, so far as it is practicable, and the im- 
 possibihty of observing the whole, are thus a standing evidence, 
 continued through eighteen centOTies of national degradation and 
 persecution, not only of the historic reality of the Mosaic law, but 
 of its prophetic truth. The cessation of its sacrifices, in accordance 
 with the prohibitory enactments which tied them to "the place 
 which the Lord God should choose to place His name there," is as 
 distinct a compliance with that law' as was the offering of those 
 sacrifices previously to the destruction of the temple. The graphic 
 delineation (Deut. xxviii. 15-68), moreover, of the condition which 
 disobedience to it would entail upon the people on whom it was 
 enjoined, put on record, ages before, in that very law itself, affords 
 the most conclusive evidence of Divine foresight, and consequently 
 of the Divine inspiration of the book which contains that delinea- 
 tion. 
 
 Thus, by the wonderful disposition of the all -overruling Provi- 
 dence of God, the testimony of the Jewish nation, in the character 
 of His pecuhar people, to the truth and reality of His revelation 
 to man, and therewith to the historic veracity and Divine Inspira- 
 tion of the Pentateuch, has been preserved in spite of that nation's 
 rebellion, and under their protracted pmiishment. At this present 
 moment their witness on the subject is as clear and express as it 
 was when the temple of Jeruf^alem stood in all its glory, as the 
 
46 TESTIMONY OF THE JEWISH CHURCH. 
 
 place of resort for worshippers of the True and Living God, not 
 only from every part of the Holy Land, but from every part of the 
 then civihzed world in which Jewish colonies were settied. 
 
 At that period, to have questioned the truth of the enactment of 
 the JNIosaic law, as recorded in the Pentateuch, would have been 
 ^n act of insanity as manifest as would be at this moment the 
 attempt under the roof of the Palace at AVestminster to call i]i 
 question the historic truth of Magna Charta, and of the stream of 
 legislation which has since flowed from it. And if from that period 
 we trace back the public recognition and national conviction of the 
 Divine origin and authority of the Pentateuch, to the remoter 
 periods of the history of God's chosen people, we shall find at every 
 antecedent period of that history the book in question occupying 
 the same position which, on the evidence of the concurrent testimony 
 of both Jew and Christian, it still holds, among the oracles of God, 
 the documents of His revelation to man. The next important 
 event we meet with in this retrospective view is the translation 
 of those docmnents from the language in which they had been 
 originally written, and which had ceased to be a living language 
 among the very Jews themselves, into the then universal language 
 of the civihzed world ; the effect of which was to make their con- 
 tents known far and wide, beyond the hmits of Palestine and the 
 range of the Jewish mind, and thereby to pave the way for the 
 universal promulgation of that mystery of God's counsel of which 
 the Gospel of Christ was the revelation. Going a step further 
 back, v/e reach a point at which the stream of progressive revelation, 
 which had run parallel with the history of the nation of Israel for 
 the space of upwards of one thousand years, ceased to flow ; when 
 the last prophetic utterances accomj)anied the restoration of the 
 people from a less protracted state of punishment, incurred by re- 
 peated though less aggravated disobedience to their law. On the 
 ■occasion of that restoration the collection of the Sacred Books, 
 beginning with the Pentateuch, and adding to it the writings of 
 the prophets who had been raised up after ]Moses, and the national 
 records drawn up by Divinely inspired chroniclers, was completed 
 
TESTI^rONY OF THE JEWISH CHURCH. 47 
 
 in the form in which they have ever since been handed down, 
 under the threefold division of "the law of Moses, the Prophets, 
 and the Psahns" (Luke xxiv. 44), i.e., the hagiographa, of which 
 the Psalms being the first in order, the whole division took its name 
 from them. 
 
 Nor was this collection of them the only recognition which the 
 Pentateuch met \di\\ on the occasion of that restoration. It is 
 expressly recorded that the law of IVIoses was solemnly read in the 
 audience of all the people, and made intelligible to them by the 
 Priests and Levites, who according to the appointment of the law 
 were their authorized teachers ; the people having during their 
 seventy years' captivity acquired an idiom different from that of 
 the Sacred Books, which was their ancient language. Moreover, 
 in obedience to the enactments of the law so revised and brought 
 afresh to their knowledge, the sacrifices and other ceremonial 
 observances of the law were restored in connection with the 
 temple which had been rebuilt after its destruction by Nebuchad- 
 nezzar. 
 
 This solemn attestation of the Divine origin and authority of the 
 law of Moses as contained in the Pentateuch was, we find, on going- 
 still further back in the history, preceded by more than one similar 
 revival, after seasons of neglect, of disobedience, and of Divine 
 punishments inflicted from time to time for the purpose of recalling 
 the people to their allegiance. And at a still more remote period of 
 the history we find, at the culminating point of the nation's pros- 
 perity, the most magnificent arrangements made, by the construc- 
 tion of the first temple, for the joerformance of the whole cere- 
 monial, according to the enactments of that same law of Moses 
 which, as we learn from records of a still earlier date, had been ob- 
 served from the entrance of the people into the land of promise to 
 that day. 
 
Chapter XII. 
 
 HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF THE DIVINE ORIGIN AND AU- 
 THORITY OF THE PENTATEUCH.— HI. THE SAMARITAN 
 —EFFECT OF THE WHOLE EVIDENCE. 
 
 At this point in the history we meet unexpectedly with another 
 and equally surprising as well as conclusive confirmation of the 
 historic truth of the Pentateuch, brought about by a violent dis- 
 ruption of the people to whom the law contained in it was given. 
 No sooner had the wise and great king, to whose power and wealth 
 the erection of so magnificent a structure expressly for the obser- 
 vance of that law, was owing, descended to the grave, than the folly 
 and perverseness of his son drove the majority of the nation, ten out 
 of the twelve tribes who had been encamped around the tabernacle 
 in the wilderness, into revolt. So closely was the law of Moses 
 interwoven with the very existence of the whole people that, not- 
 withstanding the most deliberate and strenuous efforts of the kings 
 who successively bore rule over the severed tribes, to set up a rival 
 worship, and by it to wean the people from their attachment to the 
 law of INIoses, they could not wholly exterminate the old national 
 faith. The document of that faith, the written law, and the 
 Pentateuch which contained it, was preserved among them, while 
 the whole of the writings containing the account of the subsequent 
 dealings of God with His people were repudiated by them. The 
 defection from the Royal House set up by Divine authority, and 
 from the national worship enjoined by INIoses which v/as tied to 
 the temple at Jerusalem, brought about a rapid disorganization of 
 the rebel tribes, which no effort of the prophets raised up by God 
 to warn them could arrest ; and led at an early period to their 
 subjugation by the great military monarchy of Assyria, and to the 
 removal of all but a small remnant of them from their own land. 
 Yet that small remnant, consisting of the lowest classes of the 
 
TESTIMONY OF THE SAMARITAN. 49 
 
 inhabitants, and mingled moreover with a strange population with 
 which their conquerors colonised the vanquished country, preserved 
 among them the record of the law of Moses ; and, although the 
 observance of it in separation from the temple at Jerusalem was 
 impossible, and their exclusion from the restoration of the temple, 
 after its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar^ increased the alienation 
 between Samaritan and Jew to such a degree as to interfere with 
 the common intercourse of life, yet still the Pentateuch continued 
 to be, and by their descendants to this day is, held in the highest 
 veneration, as the authentic and inspired record of the revelation 
 given by God to their ancestors. 
 
 Through the extraordinary provision thus made at this more 
 remote as well as at a later period in the history of the people to 
 whom the law of INIoses was given, which made the very rebellion 
 of man against God's law in both instances instrumental for the 
 accomplishment of His own purposes, — we have thus, from the 
 mouths of three antagonistic witnesses, whom it is impossible to 
 suspect of collusion, a concurrent testimony to the historic truth, 
 to the Divine origin and authority of the Pentateuch, — the testi- 
 mony of the Samaritan, confined to a local tradition preserved, 
 under the most unfavourable circumstances, during a period of 
 nearly three thousand years ; — the testimony of the Jew, cUnging 
 to the law of Moses with a tenacity of faith and hope which 
 eighteen centuries of national dispersion and degradation, and of 
 bitter persecution, have been unable to overcome ; — and the testi- 
 mony of the Christian Church,— resting not only upon the antece- 
 dent testimony of the Jewish Church, but upon the authority of 
 Christ and His Apostles, — the concordance of which, on the part 
 of all the Churches of Christendom, all the divisions among those 
 Churches, and even their contentions about the very Canon of 
 Scripture itself, have never been able to shake, any more than the 
 assaults of infidehty directed against it from time to tune by men 
 of perverse mind. 
 
 Against this overwhelming mass of evidence,— against the belief 
 founded upon it, which is coeval with the annals of the world's 
 
50 DR. COLEXSO'S IIYPOTIIESIS. 
 
 history and co-extensive with its civilisation,— Dr. Colenso advances 
 his hyjjothesis that the Pentateuch is a tissue of fables ; that no 
 such nation as the Israelites, whose earliest liistory it professes to 
 give, ever existed, and no such law as that embodied in it ever Avas 
 enacted. He does so in the teeth of the fact that the Samaritan, 
 an outcast from the community which that law established, bears 
 witness to its truth and Divine origin, — of the fact that the Jew 
 whom it condemns as a reprobate, a rebel against his God, clings 
 to it as the sheet-anchor of his hope which cannot fail him because 
 of the immutability of Him who gave it, — of the fact that the 
 Christian who asserts that the object of its enactment found its 
 fulfilment in the Divine Founder of his own higher and more per- 
 fect Faith, recognizes it as the foundation on which that Faith was 
 built. 
 
 These facts, to which the Bishop of Natal opposes his hypothesis, 
 are living facts, now extant in the world, which is full of them. 
 We challenge the Bishop, in his own favourite phrase, to " look 
 these facts in the face," and to consider what a monstrous absur- 
 dity, wdiat an utter impossibihty his hypotiiesis involves. Accord- 
 ing to that hypothesis the existence of the Pentateuch, the most 
 ancient book in the world, accredited by the veneration of ages and 
 generations, — the existence of the law which it sets forth as given 
 by Divine authority, still exemplified both in the practice and in 
 the actual condition of the Jewish people, and maintained as the 
 foundation of the Faith of all the Churches of Christendom, — the 
 existence of a belief in the Divine authority of that law and the 
 Divine insj)iration of the book in which it is recorded, unshaken by 
 the most adverse cucumstances and the most bitter mutual anta- 
 gonism of the several witnesses who concur in holding and attesting 
 that behef, — is the result of what ? — of a forgery and fraud, suc- 
 cessfully committed upon an entire nation, at some tune of wdiicli 
 not a trace is to be found, by some writer of fiction utterly un- 
 known ! 
 
 Since the existence of the nation of Israel, and the observance by 
 that nation of the law of Moses, cannot be denied, the burden of 
 proof rests upon Dr. Colenso, to shov%' by whom, and at what 
 
WHAT mi. cuj.KNso is holnd to show. 51 
 
 period, that singular forgery was committed ; by whom, at what 
 time, and by what contrivance, a whole nation was,— and that 
 without a single trace of a doubt ever having been entertained by a 
 single individual of that nation,— imbued with the belief in the 
 truth of the extraordinary history which the Pentateuch contains, 
 branding, as it does, with the taint of incest at the very fountain- 
 head the Royal House of David, and the Royal tribe of Judah, and 
 exhibiting the character of the whole nation in a most unfavour- 
 able aspect, at once contemptible and revolting. It is incumbent 
 on hun to show by whom, at what time, and by what contrivance, 
 the nation so vihfied by the author of so strange a romance was 
 induced to put its neck under the yoke of a law of cumbersome 
 ceremonies and costly sacriiices,—" a yoke which" one who held 
 that law in the utmost veneration as of Divine institution, and 
 strenuously contended for its continued observance by the nation 
 to whom it was given, declared that " neither their fathers nor 
 they were able to bear " (Acts xv. 10). 
 
 For the proof of all this, which is clearly and indisputably in- 
 volved in his hypothesis, we challenge Dr. Colenso. As the party 
 challenged he is entitled to the choice of weapons. He is welcome 
 to try his hand upon it with his own favourite weapons, multipli- 
 cation and long division, the rule of three and logaritlims ; or he 
 may have recoiu-se to common logic, if, contrary to appearances, he 
 possesses any skill in the use of that arm. Whatever weapon, in 
 the whole armom-y of the human mind, he may see fit to employ, 
 we defy him to prove,— nay, even to give the faintest colour of 
 probability to,— a thing so immensely absurd, and so utterly im- 
 possible, as such a fraud successfully perpetrated upon a whole 
 nation, propagated through the whole world, and perpetuated 
 through ages and generations. Talk of absurdities and impossibili- 
 ties in the Pentateuch ! AVhat are they to the monster absurdity, 
 to the gigantic impossibility of the theory propounded under the 
 guise of a " critical examination of the Pentateuch, by the Right 
 Rev. John William Colenso, D.D., Bishop of Xatal?" 
 
 E 2 
 
Chapter XIII. 
 
 DR. COLENSO'S THEORY INCOMPATIBLE WITH BELIEF IN 
 THE TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY.— L TEACHING OF OUR 
 LORD HIMSELF. 
 
 So far as our inquiry has proceeded, two points have, we trust, 
 been clearly established, viz., — 
 
 1. That the arguments by which Dr. Colenso has attempted to 
 invalidate the Pentateuch as a historic record, being founded on 
 oversights, mistakes, and gratuitous assumptions, are inconclusive 
 and void ; — 
 
 2. That the evidence in support of the Divine origin and autho- 
 rity of the Pentateuch is overwhelming, and renders Dr. Coleuso's 
 theory of its '' uuhistoric" character absurd and impossible. 
 
 Two weighty questions still remain behind, viz. : — 
 
 1. Hov/ far Dr. Colenso's theory is compatible with belief in the 
 truth of Christianity ; 
 
 2. How far the advocacy of that theory is compatible with the 
 position of a bishop in the Church of Christ. 
 
 With these two questions we next propose to deal. As regards 
 the former, the Bishop of Natal confesses that it is a question to 
 which sooner or later he will have to turn his attention ; and he 
 assigns as the reason why he has not already done so, a latent fear 
 lest the difficulty of reconciling his views with belief in Christianity 
 should shake his confidence in the correctness of his conclusions. 
 Considering how little care the Bishop has taken to guard against 
 the danger of the foundations of his faith being undermined, this 
 excessive caution against a similar danger to the fomidations of his 
 infidehty is singularly characteristic ; and, but for the intrinsic 
 gravity of the issue, highly amusing. IMeanwhile, since, having no 
 confidence whatever in the correctness of his conclusions, we are 
 running no such risk, we feel at perfect liberty to entertain the 
 
WITNESS OF CHRIST TO THE TENTATEUCn. 53 
 
 question from which the bishop so naturally shrinks. A careful 
 examination of the teaching of Christ gives the following results : — 
 
 Christ unequivocally endorses the JMosaic account of man's 
 creation in one parent-pair, male and female (]Matt, xix. 4),* 
 and the Divine authority of the law of marriage founded 
 upon it (Matt. xix. 5, 6). He recognizes, in like manner, the 
 sanctity of the Sabbatb, as a Divine institution (]Matt. xii. 12 ; 
 xxiv. 20 ; Mk. ii. 27, 28 ; Lk. vi. 9 ; xiii. 15, 16 ; Jn. vii. 23). 
 He refers to the murder of Abel by his brother Cain (Matt, xxiii. 
 35) ; and illustrates His own Advent by a parallel taken from the 
 history of the flood, and the salvation of Noah and his family in 
 the Ark (Lk. xvii. 26, 27 ; Matt. xxiv. 37-39). Christianity is 
 thus committed, through the words of Christ Himself, to the accep- 
 tance of that part of the Book of Genesis as historic which relat<2s 
 to the primeval condition of man, and the antediluvian world. 
 
 Further, Clirist recognizes the important position assigned by 
 the sacred narrative to Abraham, the father of the faithful (Jn. viii. 
 39-56). Pie makes reference, on more than one occasion, to the 
 remarkable episode in Abraham's history, connected with the cities 
 of Sodom and Gomorrah, instancing them as signal examples of 
 wickedness and unbelief (Matt. x. 15 ; xi. 23, 24) ; adducing the 
 suddenness of their overthrow, in the same manner as that of the 
 flood, in illustration of the suddenness of His Second Advent 
 (Lk. xvii. 28-30), and making special mention of the incident re- 
 specting Lot's wife (Lk. xvii. 32). In speaking of the covenant 
 of circumcision, as embodied in the Mosaic law. He expressly ad- 
 verts to its patriarchal origin (Jn. vii. 22) ; and He mentions by 
 name Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as the first heirs of the kingdom 
 of heaven (Matt. viii. 11 ; Lk. xiii. 28). By these various re- 
 ferences Christianity is committed, through the mouth of Christ 
 Himself, to the historic character of that part of the sacred narra- 
 
 * With a view not to overcrowd our pages, generally only one pas- 
 sage out of several will be referred to upon each point, except where by 
 the concurrence of sevcnil quotations additional light may be thrown 
 upon the subject. 
 
54 WITNESS OF CHRIST TO THE PENTATEUCH. 
 
 tive which relates to the events intervening between the call of 
 Abraham and the time of the Exodus. 
 
 The history of the Exodus, the mission of Moses, and the giving 
 of the law, are constantly adverted to by Christ in a variety of 
 ways, and always in a tone implying both the historic reahty of 
 the facts and events referred to, and the Divine authority of Moses 
 and his writings. Thus, we find Him at one time appealing to the 
 words addressed by Jehovah to Moses out of the flaming bush in 
 proof of the doctrine of the resurrection (IVIk. xii. 26, 27) ; at another 
 time, appropriating to Himself the significant appellation "I Am," 
 (Jn. viii. 58), by way of asserting His own Divine character. His 
 Celebration of the Passover with His disciples, on the eve of His 
 Passion, and, in connection with it, the institution of the Eucha- 
 ristic Sacrament (Lk. xxii. 15-20), is an adoption of the Mosaic 
 account of the origin of the Paschal feast far more forcible than any 
 merely verbal declaration of its historic truth could have been. In 
 illustration of the great mystery of the gift of Himself as a spiri- 
 tual sustenance, He alludes to the provision of manna in the wilder- 
 ness, as to a historical event (^Jn, vi. 31-33, 49-51) ; and, in 
 adumbration of the manner of His Death, and of its purpose, He 
 adduces the miracle of the brazen serpent (Jn. iii. 14). Too 
 numerous to be instanced in detail are the references made by Him- 
 self, or admitted by Him when made by others, to the Mosaic law, 
 as an authoritative standard in matters of faith and practice. The 
 ten commandments are brought under discussion, on a variety of 
 occasions, and for a variety of pm^poscs (Matt. v. 21-39 ; xv.4 ; xix. 
 17-19, &c., &c.). The summing up of the spirit and purport of the 
 law, as comprehended in love to God and love to om' neighbour 
 (Matt. xxii. 36-40), implies the recognition of the Divine authority of 
 the whole ; while references, sometunes direct and often incidental, to 
 special enactments abundantly identify the entire code, as contained 
 in the Pentateuch. Examples of such references are, — to the moral 
 law, respecting the due performance of vows (Matt. v. 33) ; the reve- 
 rence due to parents (Matt. xv. 4) ; the principle of retribution, 
 superseded l)y the higher morality which enjoins the love of 
 
WITNESS OF CHRIST TO THE PENTATEUCH. 00 
 
 enemies, and the retiu-n of good for evil (Matt. v. 38-45) ; — to the 
 judicial law, respecting the requirement of two witnesses (Jn. viii. 
 17) ; the first stone to be cast by the accuser (Jn. viii. 7) ; 
 the writing of divorcement (IMatt. v. 31) ; — to the ceremo- 
 nial law, respecting circumcision (Jn. vii. 22) ; the Sabbath (Matt, 
 xii. 11 ; Jn. vii. 22) ; the offering of gifts and sacrifices on the 
 altar (Matt. v. 23 ; xxiii. 19) ; the shewbread (Matt. xii. 4) ; the 
 treatment of leprosy (Matt. viii. 4), &c., &c. 
 
 Besides these detailed references to particular points, in which 
 not only the historic truth of the enactments of the Mosaic law, 
 but its Divine authority, is clearly implied, there are many general 
 statements leading to the same inference ; as, for instance, the 
 question addressed to one, — ""What did Moses command you?" 
 (]\Ik. X. 3) ; the reply to another, " This do and thou shalt live" 
 (Lk. X. 28) ; the reproach addressed to the Scribes and Pharisees 
 for their neglect of the weightier matters of the law (]Matt. xxiii. 
 23) ; the recognition of the authority of those " sitting in ISIoses' 
 seat " (Matt, xxiii. 2) ; the declaration that " the law must not be 
 broken" (Matt. v. 19 ; Jn. vii. 23) ; that "not one jot or tittle 
 of it shall fail " (^latt. v. 18) ; to which may be added the obser- 
 vance of the law by Christ Himself, as exemplified by His atten- 
 dance at the feasts (Lk. ii. 41-43 ; Jn. ii. 23 ; vii. 2-10, &c., &c.) ; 
 and evidenced by His challenge to the Jews, and afterwards before 
 the Sanhedrim, to convict Him of any transgression ; which would 
 have been easy if He had not been a careful observer of the law in 
 His own person (Jn. viii. 46 ; xviii. 23) ; as well as His express 
 assertion that " He was come, not to destroy, but to fulfil the law" 
 (Matt. V. 17). To the same category belong the appeals made to 
 " the Scriptures " (Matt. xxii. 29 ; Jn. v. 39), in which term the 
 Pentateuch is included ; or, more explicitly, to " the law and the 
 prophets " (Matt. vii. 12 ; xxii. 40), to ISIoses as the Divinely-com- 
 missioned lawgiver (Jn. vii. 19), and author of the Pentateuc 
 (Jn. V. 46, 47 ; Lk. xx. 37). 
 
Chapter XIV. 
 
 DR. COLENSO'S THEORY INCOMPATIBLE WITH BELIEF IN 
 THE TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY.— IL REPLIES TO THE 
 TEMPTER; PROPHECY; TYPES. 
 
 Not the least remarkable of the proofs that the writings of Moses 
 were held by Christ to be of Divine authority, is the fact of His 
 repelling the assaults of the Tempter, — who upon that occasion 
 evinced, however grudgingly, a respect for the Word of God far 
 exceeding that exhibited towards it by Bishop Colenso, — ^by three 
 several quotations from the Pentateuch, introduced by the em- 
 phatic formula, — " It is written." All the three quotations, more- 
 over, are directly connected with the history which the Bishop 
 contends is to be considered in the hght of a romance. " Man 
 shall not live by bread alone ; but by every word that proceedeth 
 out of the mouth of God " (Deut. viii. 3 ; Matt. iv. 4), is 
 the moral of the whole story of the wandering in the wilder- 
 ness, as pointed out by Moses ; — " Thou shalt not tempt 
 the Lord thy God " (Deut. vi. 16 ; JNIatt. iv. 7), a prohibition 
 called forth by the conduct of the people, as recorded in that story ; 
 — " Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt 
 thou serve" (Deut. vi. 13 ; Matt. iv. 10), an injunction suggested 
 by the proneness to idolatry, exhibited by the people according 
 to the same story ; whence it follows that not only the Divine 
 authority of the words themselves, but the veracity of the liistory 
 of which they form part, is im.phed on the occasion in question. 
 
 But further still. The appeals of Christ to the Pentateuch were 
 not confined to such references as involved a general acknowledg- 
 ment of its Divine origm and authority, and of the consequent 
 obligation of the enactments, as well as truth of the historical state- 
 ments, contained in it. He constantly asserted its proj^hetic 
 character in reference to Himself. " Search the Scriptures, for 
 
THE PENTATEUCH PROPHETIC OF CHRIST. 57 
 
 they are they which testify of Me" (Jn. v. 39). " Had yc beheved 
 Moses, ye would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me ; but, if ye 
 believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words ?" (Deut. 
 xviii. 15-19 ; Jn. v. 45-47) — a question, by the way, which Dr. 
 Colenso would have done well to have considered as addressed 
 personally to himself. Nor was it in arguing with the unbelieving 
 Jews only that He appealed to the prophetic testimony of the 
 Scriptures, and of Moses in particular. His instruction to His 
 disciples proceeded on the same foundation, as we learn from the 
 reference made to it by Himself after His resurrection. " These 
 are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, 
 that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the laiv of 
 Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning Me" 
 (Lk. xxiv. 44). What those things " written in the law of Moses" 
 concerning Him were, we may, to some extent at least, collect 
 from such incidental notices as fell from His own lips, and from 
 the teaching of the Apostles and Evangelists, who, besides repro- 
 ducing the substance of His own teacliing, had the additional help 
 of the Holy Ghost for the interpretation of ancient prophecy in 
 apphcation to Christ. 
 
 These ancient testimonies concerning Christ, recorded by Moses, 
 reach back to the very commencement of man's history. The 
 Divine sentence after the fall of man was accompanied by the 
 promise that " the woman's seed should bruise the Serpent's head" 
 (Gen. iii. 15 ; Matt. i. 23 ; Lk. i. 34, 35 ; 1 Jn. iii. 8). A fuller 
 and clearer revelation was given to Abraham, in the call for the 
 sacrifice of his son (Gen. xxii. 2 ; Heb. xi. 17, 18) ; in the substi- 
 tution for his son of the ram caught in the thicket as a vicarious 
 victim (Gen. xxii. 13 ; Heb. xi. 19) ; in the promise that in 
 Abraham's seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed (Gen. 
 xxii. 18 ; Gal. iii. 16) ; while the descent of Christ is traced from 
 Abraham through that very family of Judah, and his son Pharez 
 (Matt. i. 3 ; Lk. iii. 33), on which Dr. Colenso fixes the stigma of 
 fiction. Xext follows Jacob's prophecy of the coming of Shiioh 
 (Gen. xlix. 8-10 ; Jn. xi. 52, xii. 20-32 ; Kcv. v. 5) : after which we 
 
58 TYPES OF CHKIST IN THE PENTATEUCH. 
 
 have the Exodus, typical of the calling of Christ out of Egypt (Ex. iii. 
 7-12 ; IIos. xi. 1 ; Matt. ii. 15) ; with the Passover, typical of the sacri- 
 fice of Christ (Ex. xii. 21-27 ; Jn. i. 29 ; 1 Cor. v. 7) ; the Star out 
 of Jacob prophesied of by Balaam (Numb. xxiv. 17 ; INIatt. ii. 2) ; 
 the serpent in the wilderness, typical of Christ upon the Cross ( Jn. 
 iii. 14); the manna, typical of Christ the " true bread from heaven" 
 (Jn. vi. 32). Of another kind again are the types involved in the 
 ceremonial enactments of the law, pointing, all of them, more or 
 less distinctly, to Christ ; as, for example, the scapegoat, bearing 
 away the sins of the congregation (Lev. xvi. 10, 21, 22 ; Jn. i. 29) ; 
 the sin offering, especially that of the day of atonement (Lev. xvi. 15, 
 27 ; Heb. ix. 19-22) ; the provision that not a bone of the Passover 
 lamb should be broken (Exod. xii. 46 ; Numb. ix. 12 ; Jn. xix. 
 36) ; the tabernacle, a type of the body of Christ (Jn. ii. 19, 21 ; 
 Heb. ix. 11) ; the vail, a type of His flesh (Heb. x. 20) ; Aaron 
 and his successors, types of the true High Priest (Heb. vii. 11-28 ; 
 ix. 24-26) ; the blood of the sac];ifices, types of the Blood of 
 Christ (Heb. ix. 12-23). These and other typical and prophetic 
 I'oreshadowings and foreshowings, — some distinctly expounded as 
 such by the inspired wi^iters, others so plain as not to require any 
 express authoritative interpretation, — all converging in the person 
 of Christ, establish betv\reen the manifestation of the Son of God at 
 the Incarnation, and the antecedent revelation given by Moses, 
 not only the closest analogy, but a perfect identity of origin and 
 unity of purpose. 
 
Chapter XV. 
 
 DR. COLEXSO'S THEORY IXCOMPATIBLE WITH BELIEF IX 
 THE TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY.— HI. WRITERS OF THE 
 NEW TESTAMENT— FACTS OF THE UNSEEN WORLD- 
 ALTERNATIVE CONCLUSIONS. 
 
 In addition to all the foregoing evidence, connecting Christ with 
 Moses by so many and various links, — and in consequence of it, — we 
 find the preaching and the writings of the Apostles replete with re- 
 ferences to the Pentateuch, no less than to the other Scriptures of the 
 Old Testament. To enumerate all these in detail would be an endless 
 task, far exceeding the limits of our present object. It would be, 
 moreover, an unnecessary labour, since every reader of the New 
 Testament is familiar with the fact ; and, assuredly, one filhng the 
 office of a bishop in the Church might be presumed to be so. We 
 need only advert in general terms to the speeches of St. Peter, 
 St. Stephen, and St. Paul, inserted in the narrative of the Acts of 
 the Apostles ; or to such Epistles as those of St. Paul to the Ro- 
 mans, to the Galatians, and to the Hebrews ; or those of St. James, 
 St. Peter, and St. Jude,— in proof of the statement that there are 
 large portions of the New Testament, the argument of which is 
 mainly built upon facts recorded in the Pentateuch ; so much so 
 that, if we were to excise from them all that is founded on, or in 
 some way comiected with, its contents, but little of them would re- 
 main, and the Volmne of the New Testament be reduced to less 
 than haK its size. 
 
 Lastly, it should, in tliis survey of the close connection of the 
 Pentateuch with the New Testament, not be forgotten, that some 
 remarkable statements in the latter, in wliich the vail is partly 
 drawn aside from the mysteries of the unseen world, presuppose 
 the reality of facts and personages introduced in the history of the 
 Pentateuch. In the world of disembodied spirits we have Abra- 
 ham presented to its by Christ Himself, as presiding o^er the place 
 
60 THE UNSEEN WOULD AND THE PENTATEUCH. 
 
 of rest and comfort (Lk. xvi. 22) ; and the Spirit of the Lord Jesiis 
 in the interval between His death and His resurrection visiting 
 the spirits of those who were disobedient in the days before the 
 flood (1 Pet. iii. 19, 20) ; we find Moses appearing on the INIount of 
 Transfiguration (JNIatt. xvii. 3) ; while his body, the mysterious 
 disappearance of which is mentioned at the close of the book of 
 Deuteronomy, is declared by St. Jude to have been the subject of 
 a contest between Michael the Archangel and Satan (I)eut. 
 xxxiv. 6 ; Jude 9). And in the book of Revelation, while in the 
 announcement of his final doom the latter is distinctly identified as 
 " the Old Serpent," whose agency in bringing sin into the world is 
 recorded in the book of Genesis (Gen. iii. 1-15 , llev, xii. 9; xx. 2, 3, 
 10) the victorious hosts that have prevailed in the terrible conflict of 
 the last days are represented as joining in their jubilant praises the 
 " Song of Moses " with the '' Song of the Lamb " (Rev. xv. 3). 
 
 It is once more our turn to challenge Dr. Colenso, in his own 
 favourite phrase, to " look these facts in the face ;" and to say 
 how he can reconcile belief in the truth of Christianity with his 
 theory of the fictitious character of the Pentateuch. The misera- 
 ble expedient of a revival of the Nestorian heresy, to which he has 
 recourse by way of evading the conclusion which, in spite of 
 liimseK, and on a most superficial view of the question, he 
 cannot help susj)ecting, will not relieve liim of the enormous 
 difficulties which, on that theory, a complete view of the close and 
 intimate connection between the Pentateuch and the Xew Testa- 
 ment presents. 
 
 Either it is true that Christ is God, and the Holy Ghost, 
 through the instrimientahty of Inspired Writers, the author of the 
 New Testament ; or it is not true. In the latter supposition there 
 is no further difficulty, to be sure, except the enormous one which, 
 on that hypothesis, the very existence of the Clu-istian Church, of 
 the Jewish nation, and of the Bible presents, which no infidel has 
 ever yet resolved ; and to which, since Dr. Colenso has not 
 attempted its solution, we need not further advert on the present 
 occiision. The New Testament is, hi that supposition, nothing 
 
WHAT DR. COLENSO'S THEORY INVOLVES. 01 
 
 more than a further enlargement of the original romance of the 
 Pentateuch ; but,— let the Bishop of Xatal note this,— there is in 
 that supposition also an end of all Christianity as a system of truth ; 
 and any profession of belief in it is nothing more than a trans- 
 parent sham, of which " a man of truth " ought to be ashamed ; 
 and which the Bishop, by virtue of the title he so claims, is bound 
 utterly to renounce and repudiate. 
 
 If, on the contrary, it be true that Christ is Very God, that the 
 books of the New Testament contain a true account of His hfe and 
 doctrine, penned under the inspiration of God the Holy Ghost, 
 then, in the face of the facts of which the above is a brief and rapid 
 summary, one of two conclusions is inevitable upon the hypothesis 
 of the fictitious character of the Pentateuch put forward by Dr. 
 Colenso. 
 
 To maintain that hypothesis, it must be assumed, either that, 
 Christ being God, and the writers of the New Testament inspired 
 by the Holy Ghost, they were ignorant of the fictitious character 
 of the Pentateuch, and referred to its contents in perfect good faith, 
 beheving them to be true ; or that, with the full knowledge of its 
 fictitious character, they endorsed it as the word of truth, the Word 
 of God Himself given by Moses. Now, where does either of these 
 suppositions land us ? 
 
 The former involves the monstrous absurdity and impossibility of 
 God Himself being, in the person of Christ, in error, and in the 
 person of the Holy Ghost leaving in error those whom He had 
 promised to guide into all truth ; and that upon points material to 
 their very calling as messengers, heralds, and teachers of the truth. 
 But even if tliis supposition were not as absurd and impossible as it 
 manifestly is ; if it were conceivable, wliich it is not, that the God- 
 man, that men inspired by the Holy Ghost, could be thus ignorant 
 and in error, the supposition would be equally conclusive against 
 belief in ChrLstianity. For what reliance could possibly be placed 
 upon statements made by persons thus hable to error ? How could 
 they possibly be accepted as authorities upon any subject, more 
 especially upon subjects involving the deepest questions touching 
 man's spiritual nature and the purposes of God ? Not a single 
 
'62 TVIIAT DE. COLENSO'S TIIEOEY INVOLVES. 
 
 proposition advanced by them can, in that case, be accepted as 
 true ; not a single fact stated by them as real, on the evidence of 
 their word. And what, then, in that case, becomes of belief in 
 Christianity ? There is clearly an end of that, and of all belief in 
 revealed truth. 
 
 The second supposition leads to a conclusion, which not only is 
 still more monstrously absurd and impossible, but is absolutely and 
 fearfully blasphemous ; — the conclusion, namely, that God in the 
 person of Christ, the Holy Ghost through the instrumentality of 
 the Inspired Writers, pahned off as truth upon the world, and upon 
 His Church, through a succession of ages, an absurd and ridiculous 
 fiction ; that He who announces HimseK as " the Truth," He 
 whose office it is to "guide men into all Truth," has for ages im- 
 posed upon the faith, or rather the credidity, of His devout wor- 
 shippers and servants a tissue of fables, until at last, — the pen 
 almost refuses its office in setting down so shocking a blasphemy, — 
 the impostm-e was detected and exposed by Dr. Colenso, the " man 
 -of truth " Kox l|op(^05z/, truer than the God of Truth Himself ! Far 
 better, because simpler and less offensive, to say with the fool, 
 " There is no God," than to say that the God of Truth is the pro- 
 mulgator of fables, the author of lies. If that be possible, there is 
 an end, not only of revealed truth, but of all truth whatever. 
 - There is no other alternative for Dr. Colenso, but either to ac- 
 cept one or other of these conclusions, absurd and impossible as 
 they are, which inevitably follow from his theory of the Penta- 
 teuch maintained in conjunction with professed belief in Chris- 
 tianity ; or to surrender his claim to the character of a behever in 
 Christianity, and to the very name of a Christian, — to proclaim 
 himself boldly, in oi^position to the God of Truth, as "a man of 
 truth," who, being a fountain of truth to himself, is an unbehever 
 in "the oracles of God," an " alien from the commonwealth of 
 Israel," a " stranger from the covenants of promise, having no 
 hope, and without God in the world." Whether such an one be 
 a fit person to hold the office of a Bishop in tlie Church of Christ, 
 is the only one remaining to be considered of the questions which 
 Dr. Colenso's book has raised. 
 
Chapter XVI. 
 
 DR. COLEXSO'S THEORY IXCOMPATIBLE WITH THE ORDI- 
 NARY FUNCTIONS OF A PRIEST OR DEACON. 
 
 We should gladly have avoided the discussion of the only remain- 
 ing question, how far the advocacy of Dr. Colenso's theory is 
 compatible with the position of a bishop in the Church of Cln-ist. 
 Dr. Colenso, however, has left us no o^Dtion in the matter. At 
 an earlier stage of his proficiency in unbelief he appears himself to 
 have felt the inconsistency of his filling an office in the discharge of 
 which it would be necessary for him to require from others a de- 
 claration of " mifeigned belief in all the Canonical Scriptures of the 
 Old and New Testament," while he himself found it impossible so 
 to believe in them. Dr. Lusliington's judgment, however, has re- 
 lieved the Bishop's mind on this point ; which is, to say the least of 
 it, singular ; as it seems to indica.te that the difficulty which he felt 
 arose, not from any conscientious scruple, but from his construction 
 of the law, which, naturally enough, it never entered his imagina- 
 tion to suppose could be strained to the extent to which the Dean 
 of the Arches has succeeded in straining it. Reassured by the in- 
 terpretation of that learned functionary, as to the facility with 
 which a declaration of unfeigned belief in the Canonical Scriptures 
 may be frittered down into one of mere " honCiJide belief that they 
 contain everything necessary to salvation," — which may be much or 
 little, according to the views entertained by the party making the 
 declaration, — the bishop takes high ground, and puts in a bold 
 claim for the privilege of holding and promulgating infidel opinions a& 
 an incident of the Episcopal Office. The timidity of the culprit, who 
 fears it may go hard with him, is exchanged for the tone of injured 
 innocence. According to the new insight which, mider Dr. Lush- 
 ington's tuition. Dr. Colenso has gained into the rights and obli- 
 gations of the Episcopal Office, it would be a positive grievance if 
 
64 DR. COLENSO'S THEORY OF THE EPISCOPATE. 
 
 " the strange phenomenon should be witnessed of a bishop of the 
 Protestant Church of England being precluded by the law of that 
 Church from entering upon a close, critical examination of the Scrip- 
 tures, and from bringing before the great body of the Church (not 
 the clergy only, but the clergy and laity), the plain, honest results 
 of such criticism." lie feels at liberty to express, '.' as a bishop of 
 that Church," his " entire dissent from the principle laid down by 
 some that such a question as that discussed in his book," — viz., as 
 to the veracity of the Pentateuch, — "is not even an open question 
 for an English clergyman ; " " that the clergy are bound by solemn 
 obligations to maintain certain views on the points involved to their 
 Hves' end, or at least to resign their sacred office in the Church, as 
 soon as ever they feel it impossible any longer to hold them." 
 
 So far from recognizing any such obligation. Dr. Colenso "holds 
 that the foundations of our National Church are laid upon the 
 Truth itself" — as distinct from the Bible — "and not upon mere 
 hmnan prescriptions ; and that the spirit of our Church, as de- 
 clared in the days of the Reformation, fully recognizes his right to 
 use all the uiei gilt of that office with u'hich the Providence of God 
 has invested him^ in declaring the Truth," — i.e., in pronouncing a 
 portion of " the Holy Scriptures given," if the Apostle St. Paul is 
 to be believed, " by inspiration of God," fabulous and fictitious. 
 N"ot only he claims the right to do so, but he " believes that he 
 owes it as a duty to the Church itself, of which he is a minister, 
 to do his part to secure for the Bible its due honour and authority, 
 and save its devout readers from ascribing to it attributes of per- 
 fection and infallibility which belong to God only, and which 
 the Bible never claims for itself. More than all others^ he believes, 
 a bishop is hound to do this, if his conscience impels him to it." 
 And this, the assailing of the authority and veracity of Holy Scrip- 
 ture, he calls " renouncing the hidden things of dishonesty, not 
 walking in craftiness, nor handling the Word of God deceit- 
 fully !" 
 
 There is a direct challenge here to show, if it can be shown, that 
 it is not consistent with the office of a bishop to do what Dr. Co- 
 
DH. COLENSO S TIIEOUY AND THE CHURCH SERVICE. G5 
 
 lenso has done. And as of the possibiUty of showing this we have 
 not the sUghtest doubt, we feel constrained to take up, on behaK 
 of the Episcopal Office, the gauntlet so jauntily thrown down to it 
 by the renegade Bishop. In doing this we do not intend to enter 
 upon the legal question, which, we apprehend, will at the proper time 
 and place likewise be discussed, with a result, possibly, widely dif- 
 ferent from that w^hich Dr. Colenso anticipates. With that, how- 
 ever, we have no concern. Our business is to prove that, whatever 
 latitude the Court of Arches may allow him, he cannot, in common 
 honesty, as "a, man of truth," perform the functions appertaining 
 to a bishop, or even to a simple priest or deacon. 
 
 A homely proverb says, i' the proof of the pudding is in the 
 eating ;" and, perhaps, there is no simpler way to test the question 
 of the compatibihty of Dr. Colenso's opinions with clerical and 
 episcopal functions, than by following him, mth those opinions 
 kept steadily in view, into the discharge of those functions. Let 
 us, then, imagine Dr. Colenso officiating in the ordinary Services 
 of the Church, and watch the undercurrent of his thoughts as he 
 goes along. 
 
 He is, we will suppose, standing in the reading-desk, about to 
 read Morning Prayer. Let us supply in italics the thoughts which 
 must pass through his mind while his lips utter the prescript form 
 of Service. Having made choice of an unexcepti(toable sentence 
 or two, he commences the Exliortation : — " Dearly beloved 
 (devoutly ignorant) brethren, the Scripture (a rare compound of 
 truth and a^.^my/iV^J moveth us in sundry places .... yet ought 
 w^e most chiefly so to do when we assemble and meet together .... 
 to hear His most holy Word (and the lecjendary rubbish mixed up 
 iciili it)^ &c. Passing on, he comes to the Canticle " Venite," and 
 in it to the words — " Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, 
 and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness (an allusion to 
 an absurd and impossible fable); when your fathers tempted me, 
 proved me, and saw my works (all fabulous). Forty years long 
 (a ridiculous legend) was I grieved with this generation (which never 
 had any existence), &c. 
 
 F 
 
06 DR. COLEXSO'S THEORY AND THE CHURCH SERVICE. 
 
 Or, if it chance to be Easter Day, his thoughts will run some- 
 what in this fashion : — " Christ our Passover (an allusion to an 
 incredible and impossible ceremony) is sacrificed (a carnal notion 
 icholhj unworthy of God) for us : therefore let us keep the feast (the 
 commemoration of an event u'hich never happened)^ &c. The 
 Psalms come next in order. We will suppose it to be the twenty- 
 first morning of the month, with the hundred and fifth Psahn, 
 recounting "the TLm:YQ]io\\?i (marvellous, indeed, being altogether 
 incredible !) works which He hath done ;'' every verse giving fresh 
 occasion for the inward exclamation, " all stuff and nonsense .'" 
 
 It will now be his duty to read the first lesson. From Septuagesima 
 to Trinity Sunday,— that is, during nearly one half of the year, — 
 this will be a narrative from the "imhistoric" Pentateuch. Say, 
 for example, on Easter Day : " Here beginneth the twelfth chapter 
 of the Book of Exodus " (a story full of incredible statements). 
 " And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt 
 
 (where it is doubtful if any such ptersons ever zuere) Speak ye 
 
 unto all the congregation of Israel (an impossible command)^ 
 saying :— In the tenth day of this month {a perplexing and con- 
 tradictory date), they shall take to them every man a lamb (quite 
 
 impossible) And ye shall keep it until the fourteenth day 
 
 (another perplexing, contradictory date) of the same month; and 
 the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shaU kill it in the 
 
 QYernng (there ivas not even time to let them all know) And 
 
 the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about 
 six hundred thousand on foot that were men (quite monstrous! there 
 could not have been according to the story itself as many as five 
 thousand), besides children ; and a mixed multitude went up also 
 with them {fancy a dense column more than twenty-two miles long !!) ; 
 and flocks and herds, even very much cattle (another vast column 
 lengthened out for many long miles; what did this enormous multi- 
 tude of cattle feed upon ?) Thus did all the children of Israel ; 
 
 as the Lord commanded Moses and Aaron, so did they (how could 
 they, ichen everything said to have been commanded and done in- 
 volves an impossibility ?) And it came to pass the selfsame day that 
 
DR. COLENSO'S THEORY AND THE CHURCH SERVICE. G7 
 
 the Lord did bring tlie children of Israel (ivlto never existed)^ out 
 of the land of Egypt by their armies." — " Here endeth the first 
 lesson" (a tissue of incredible and impossible circumstances^ such as 
 could never have taken place). 
 
 Suppose the Morning Prayer ended, with its painful accompani- 
 ment of infidel comments and inward ejaculations. The Com- 
 munion Service now begins, and after the Lord's Prayer, and the 
 Collect " that we may worthily magnify Thy Holy Name," he 
 turns to the people and proclaims : "God spake these words and 
 
 said :" (Not true I God never spake in this way at all) " Thou 
 
 shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" (/ have been 
 doing little else, recounting all those fabulous stories in which God is 
 introduced acting and speaking., and of ivhich I do not believe one 
 word). After the Collect for the Queen, he may chance to have 
 to read the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent : " Blessed 
 Lord, who hast caused all Holy Scriptures {containing no end of 
 
 fictions) to be written for om* learning that by patience and 
 
 comfort of Thy Holy Word (ichen ice shall have succeeded in picking 
 it out from all the nonsense with which it is mixed up)^ &c. 
 
 But enough of this ! The heart sickens at the thought that 
 any man should ever contemplate standing up in the pubhc con- 
 gregation, in the name of God, and in the character of His minis- 
 ter, and give solemn utterance to so much that he does not believe, 
 ■with a running comment of gainsaying passing through his mind. 
 But ought these thoughts of unbelief to remain concealed in his 
 own breast? Is he not " a man of truth?" Is it not his special 
 duty to " save the people" from beUeving in all the untruth he is 
 rehearsing in their eai^, and to dehver them from the ridiculous 
 notion of the Scripture being "the Scripture of truth," given 
 " by inspiration of God?" Must he not utterly despise himseK, if 
 he keeps these thoughts to himself ? jSIust not those who know 
 that he has, or suspect hun of having, such thoughts, eye him with 
 disgust, as a profane hypocrite, uttering under the guise of a reli- 
 gious Service what he behevcs to be falsehoods, for a morsel of 
 bread and the dignity (! !) of his position ? Or, if he does his duty 
 
68 DR. COLENSO'S THEORY AND THE CHURCH SERVICE. 
 
 " as a man of truth," and gives utterance with his lips to the 
 thoughts of his heart, audibly interlarding his ministrations with 
 the comments appropriate to the state of his mind, what but the 
 reverence which men feel for the House of God will save him from 
 being hooted out of it with a shout of execration, provoked by the 
 intrusion of such an unbeliever into the ministry of the God of 
 Truth, and the gross outrage offered to the religious feelings of the 
 people ? 
 
 We have only to realize the extent to which one who denies, as 
 Dr. Colenso does, the inspiration of the Bible, who disbelieves not 
 the Pentateuch only, but by necessary consequence half the 
 Gospels, and by his own showing some of the leading doctrines of 
 the Christian Faith, constitutes himself, by the pubhc use of the 
 formularies of the Church, and the reading of the appointed lessons, 
 from day to day, a living and a walking lie, to be quite sure of this 
 one thing, that he who can consent to remain in that position is 
 not, cannot be, "a man of truth." There is no arithmetical im- 
 possibility here, we admit. But what a gigantic moral impossi- 
 bility ! What a falsification of the whole inner mind of the man 
 himself ! What a profanation of all that he touches, by word or 
 act, in the name of religion ! What a grievous scandal to every 
 honest and believing soul ! 
 
Chapter XVII. 
 
 DR. COLENSO'S THEORY I^XOMPATIBLE WITH THE POSI- 
 TION OF A BISHOP.— I. THE UNBELIEVING BISHOP AND 
 THE BELIEVING CANDIDATE FOR ORDERS. 
 
 Hitherto we have followed Dr. Colenso into the most ordinary 
 functions of the ministry ; showing that even these, which as a 
 simple priest or deacon he would have to perform, are utterly incom- 
 patible with the opinions which he has awowed. Let us now follow 
 liim into the more special functions of the Episcopal Office. Let 
 us picture him engaged in a preliminary conference with a candi- 
 date for the Christian ministry,— some young man, we will sup- 
 pose, belonging to an emigrant family, who, having in the mother 
 country imbibed a love for Christ's Holy Church, and resolved to 
 devote himself to the work of the ministry, has appHed to Dr. 
 Colenso as his diocesan for ordination, all unconscious of the strange 
 opinions which that erratic member of the Episcopate has pro- 
 pounded. In the course of the conversation, the young man, whose 
 studies have been interrupted by the circumstances which occa- 
 sioned the emigration of his father to the colony, expresses his ap- 
 prehension that possibly his knowledge of Holy Scriptiu-e may not 
 be as perfect as it ought to be, and requests liis lordship's indulgent 
 consideration of the disadvantages under which he has laboured. 
 
 " You are tolerably well up, I suppose," the Bishop observes, 
 " in the four Gospels ? Do you think you could pass an examina- 
 tion in them ?" 
 
 "Oh, certainly!" replies the candidate, much relieved ; "not 
 the four Gospels only ; but the whole of the New Testament, I 
 hope, I could give a good account of,— in English at least " 
 
 " You mean to say that your Greek is somewhat rusty ? Well : 
 we must see about that. There is no need of our being all Bibhcal 
 
 critics." 
 
 " I am "-lad to find you take so lenient a view of the matter. It 
 
70 DR. COLENSO AND THE BELIEVING CANDIDATE. 
 
 was not, however, my Greek that I was thinking of, thoiigli pro- 
 bably in that too I shall be found less proficient than I could wish 
 to be." 
 
 " Then where is your difficulty ? Seeing the earnestness of your 
 desire to be useful, and the sincerity of your love for the truth, I 
 shall be happy to smooth your way as much as I can. Where 
 do you expect that you are likely to fail in your examination ?" 
 
 "To be quite candid, my lord," replies the aspirant to the 
 ministry, encouraged by the Bishop's kind manner, " I know less 
 of the Old Testament than I feel I ought to know. I am not 
 thinking of Hebrew. That, I understand, you do not require ; 
 luit I mean the English Text. Not only have I read but very 
 little of the prophets, beyond some remarkable chapters in Isaiah, 
 and the book of Daniel, but I fear that my knowledge of Old 
 Testament histoiy is rather limited. Even the five Books of 
 Moses " 
 
 " Oh ! let not that trouble you," interrupts the Bishop with a 
 significant smile, " the less joii know of them the better." 
 
 The candidate, with a look of surprise, — " I am not sure that I 
 take your lordship's meaning." 
 
 " I mean what I say. By knowing httle about the Pentateuch, 
 you will escape many difficulties, by which, if you had studied those 
 books, you might have been perplexed. ' Where ignorance is bliss, 
 'tis folly to be wise.' " 
 
 The candidate, more and more mystified : — " I beg your lord- 
 ship's pardon; but I do not quite fathom the drift of your 
 remarks. I thought a knov^dedge of the history of God's ancient 
 people, and especially their early history " 
 
 "History! Bosh! all bosh! I perceive, indeed, how much 
 your education has suffered from untoward circumstances. How- 
 ever, I have no right, to be sure, to be hard upon you, seeing I 
 myself was labouring, up to a very recent dcite, under the same 
 prejudices." 
 
 "I am wholly at a loss, my lord, to understand " 
 
 "Of course you are; quite excusable in a ycujig man situated 
 
DK. COLENSO AND THE BELIEVING CANDIDATE. 71 
 
 as you have been. The incubus of a dogmatic education is not so 
 easily shaken off. I know that to my cost. And what I mean to 
 say is, that your ignorance of the Pentateuch, for which you apolo- 
 gize, is an advantage rather than otherwise." 
 
 " You astonish me, my lord ! I should have thought a know- 
 ledge of the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament essential. In- 
 deed, the consciousness of my deficiency on this point has kept me 
 back for some time from applying to you, and I have been 
 
 endeavouring " 
 
 "Make yourself quite easy, my young friend. If you have 
 learned little even of the Pentateuch, as you say, tant inieux ! You 
 will have less to unlearn." 
 
 '' Unlearn, my lord ! You surprise me more and more ! Might 
 I venture to ask your lordship to explain your meaning more 
 fuUy?" 
 
 " Certainly ! Your want of acquaintance with Bibhcal criticism 
 has, it appears, left you in ignorance, — happy ignorance, I may well 
 call it, in one sense, — of the fact, ascertained by those who have 
 studied the Pentateuch more deeply than you have done, that 
 although it contains a good many stories, there is little of history 
 in it." 
 
 " Little of liistory ! I thought it was all history ; except, to be 
 sure, there is the law, which, I now remember, occupies a good 
 many chapters." 
 
 "Tlielaw! ingenuous youth ! What you call the law, let me 
 tell you, for the easing of your mind, is little more than a compound 
 of absurdities." 
 
 '' A compound of absurdities, my lord ! How can that be ? Does 
 not our Lord Himself refer to it ? ' What is written in the law ? 
 How readest thou ?' " 
 
 "A very natural question for Him to put to a person who had 
 been brought up in the belief that the law had actually been given 
 from God by Moses." 
 
 " But did not oiu* Lord Himself believe it to have been so given ? 
 I think I remember His saying somewhere, ' Did not Moses give 
 you the law?" " 
 
72 DR. COLEXSO AND THE BELIEYIXO CANDIDATE. 
 
 " Very true, very true ! But that doss not prove that our Lord 
 really entertained that opinion. He may have done so, I admit ; 
 but, if so, He was mistaken ; which is easily accounted for by the 
 prejudices of His Jewish education." 
 
 " I really beg your pardon, my lord, but I was under the im- 
 pression that our Blessed Lord was superior to all human preju- 
 dices ; that, being God as well as Man, He was not liable to 
 error." 
 
 ^' jSTot as God, of course ; but as man He was probably subject to 
 the same limitations of knowledge as all other men." 
 
 " Indeed ! This certainly has never occurred to me. But now 
 I think of it, was it not after His resurrection that He expounded 
 the Scriptures to His disciples, ' beginning at Moses ?' " 
 
 " So it is said in the Gospel, no doubt ; but we cannot tell how 
 far the limitation of His knowledge, as a man, might extend even 
 to that state." 
 
 " Do I understand your lordship rightly, that what our Saviour 
 said to His disciples, not only before but after His resurrection, is 
 not to be relied on as being perfectly true and free from error or 
 mistake of any kind ? " 
 
 '' Well, of course, it comes to that, if you choose to push the 
 inquiry that length ; which, however, appears to me quite unne- 
 cessary." 
 
 '' Pardon me, my lord, will you excuse my asking you a plain 
 question ?" 
 
 " By all means, my young friend ! I love plain questions 
 above all things, and you shall have a plain answer." 
 
 " I have come to your lordship with the intention of seeking 
 Ordination at your hands ; which I understand to mean that 
 by laying on of your hands with prayer, I shall obtain certain 
 
 gifts of the Holy Ghost " 
 
 " The Service for the Ordination of Priests says as much ; and 
 even with regard to the Ordination of Deacons, that is, no doubt, 
 more or less, the hypothesis of the Prayer Book." 
 
 " The hypothesis of the Prayer Jiook ! I have noUiing to do 
 
DR. COLEXSO AND THE BELIEVING CANDIDATE. 73 
 
 with that. What I wish to know, if you will permit me to ask 
 you, is whether I may really look to receive the gift, — some gift, 
 if you will, — of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of yoiu* hands. 
 Is it your lordship's belief that there is such a gift?" 
 
 " We are led to suppose so, certainly ; our Lord Himself pro- 
 mised it to His disciples, upon various occasions, both before His 
 death and after His resurrection, — indeed, immediately before His 
 ascension." 
 
 " But might not our Lord have been mistaken in regard to this 
 likewise ? Ji He was liable to fall into error concerning the past, 
 how much more concerning the future." 
 
 The Bishop, somewhat embarrassed, and shrugging his shoulders, 
 — " I never thought of that, certainly ! But do you really think that 
 there is any need to dive into such mysterious questions as these ?" 
 
 " Indeed I think there is. To be quite candid with your lordship, 
 I must beg the favour of your considering my application as with- 
 drawn, or at least suspended. I must look further into this matter. 
 As far as I can see at present, there are only two courses open to me, 
 — either to give up all thoughts of seeking Ordination ; or, — I trust 
 you will excuse my candour, — to seek it elsewhere." 
 
 This, though a very natural, is scarcely, as Dr. Colenso himself 
 must admit, a satisfactory conclusion of his interview with a young- 
 candidate for Orders, full of rehgious zeal and earnestness, and, 
 though indifferently versed in Greek, — which we suspect is the 
 Bishop's own case, — and wholly ignorant of Hebrew, as well 
 as of Biblical criticism, more than a match for the acute 
 intellect and obtuse faith of the Bishop of Natal. 
 
Chapter XVIII. 
 
 DR. COLENSO'S THEORY INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE POSI- 
 TION OF A BISHOP.— II. THE UNBELIEVING BISHOP AND 
 THE DOUBTING PRIEST— CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE 
 MATTER. 
 
 We have seen the effect of Dr. Colenso's opinions, propounded 
 by a Bishop, upon a beheving mind. Let us now proceed to test 
 his quahfications for the office which, his book and its opinions 
 notwithstanding, he is resolved to retain, if the law will let him, 
 in an opposite direction. Let us imagine some priest of his diocese 
 coming to him for counsel under great tribulation of mind and 
 conscience. The good priest who is, at bottom, an honest man, 
 has gone through many internal conflicts, and has at last, in 
 ignorance of Dr. Colenso's peculiar opinions, come to the resolution 
 to " open his grief " to his bishop. 
 
 " I have come to your lordship with a heavy heart," he begins : 
 " my mind is sore troubled, and has been so for a long time. 
 Matters have come to a crisis with me ; and, unless it be in your 
 power to ease my mind, I fear there is nothing left for me but to 
 resign my office, highly as I prize it, and to give up the work to 
 which I have devoted the best years of my life." 
 
 " I am truly grieved to hear you speak in so desponding a tone, 
 my dear sir. What can have happened to affect your spirits to so 
 painful a degree ?" 
 
 " Nothing particular has happened, my lord. Indeed, nothing 
 at aU ; but a conviction has grown up within me for some time 
 past, — very gradually, which makes it all the worse, — that there 
 is a mistake somewhere, either in the Bible, or in my own mind ; 
 either of which will be fatal to my continuance in my present 
 dialling." 
 
 '' How is tJiat ? Surel}'' a man that has for so maiiy years been 
 
DR. COLENSO AND THE DOUBTING PRIEST. 75 
 
 actively engaged in the work of the ministry should be above snch 
 morbid feelings." 
 
 " Well, I dare say, the fault is all my own. But that, un- 
 happily, does not mend the matter. And as a last resource I have 
 bethought myself of coming to you, my spiritual father, for ' ghostly 
 counsel and advice.' " 
 
 " You have my warmest sympathy, and it will give me sincere 
 pleasure to aid you with my advice. Pray, unburden your mmd 
 freely. You may do so with all confidence." 
 
 " From my very heart I thank you, my lord. I will avail myself 
 of your kind permission, and make a clean breast of it. Doubts, 
 my lord, — horrid, perplexing doubts, — have arisen in my mind, I 
 scarcely know how, about the inspiration of the Bible. I have 
 thought much about it ; and, the more I think, the less clearly do 
 I seem to see my way." 
 
 " Oh ! is that all ? Surely, that now-a-days is a small difficulty. 
 The theory of inspiration has been given up by most thoughtful 
 and honest men ; and the time is not far distant, I think, when it 
 will be exploded altogether. So take comfort, my good sir." 
 
 " Comfort, my lord ! What do you mean ? "What comfort can 
 I find, tossed as I am on the sea of doubt, — my mind like a ship 
 without rudder or compass ? What comfort is it to me to hear 
 of others being in the same predicament with myself? That 
 rather makes the matter worse, since it tends to confirm my sus- 
 picions." 
 
 " Suspicions, do you call them ? I am afraid you have lived too 
 much in your work, and too much out of the world ; else you 
 would know that what you seem only to suspect, has been proved 
 with the certainty of mathematical demonstration, — that the doc- 
 trine of the inspiration of the Bible is nothing more than a theolo- 
 gical figment, to which, in another generation or two, no one will 
 be silly enough to give credence." 
 
 " A theological figment! Good heavens! And what then be- 
 comes of the Faith ? — of that Faith which has been the stay of my 
 mind and heart all niy life ; and AAhich 1 accounted it im unspcak- 
 
76 DK. COLENSO AND THE D0UBT1N(> PKIEST. 
 
 able privilege to be permitted and enabled to impart unto others ? 
 The whole purpose of my existence is cut away from under me. 
 If the earth were to give way under my feet, I could not feel more 
 deeply alarmed and distressed." 
 
 " I can quite enter into your feelings. I have experienced some- 
 thing of the kind myself. Like yourself, — like many other men, I 
 imagine, less candid than you and I, — I began to doubt whether 
 I had not been overhasty in accepting the Bible as an infallible 
 revelation from God. Whereupon I set myself to examine into the 
 matter ; and, beginning at 'the beginning,' — /T'li^K")!!, you know, 
 — I soon came to the conclusion that, so far as the Pentateuch is 
 concerned, at any rate, there is nothing to stagger a man's faith. 
 Why ! the stories in that book surpass in marvel and absurdity 
 the ' Arabian Nights.' The book, in fact, refutes itself by the 
 utter impossibilities and palpable self-contradictions with Avhich 
 it literally swarms." 
 
 " I should not have put the case quite so strongly ; but I have 
 my doubts, my serious doubts, I own ; and I am sorry to find them 
 more than confirmed by your lordship ; for it is those very doubts 
 that stagger my faith." 
 
 " Of com-se they do, so long as you will persist in chnging to 
 that miserable notion of inspiration. You bury your mind in 
 the letter, instead of rising on the pinions of the spirit, and 
 soaring aloft in the infinite expanse of free inquiry." 
 
 " I can hardly follow you, my lord ; but that may be my fault, — 
 my infirmity, perhaps, you will say. But, as at present ad\-ised, I 
 seem to stand in need of faith, — faith in something which I can 
 depend upon, — which can never deceive me, never fail me." 
 
 " Quite right, good sir ! But, if you look for that something in 
 the Bible, you are looking in the wrong direction." 
 
 " How so, my lord ? Have we not been taught, does not the 
 Church daily repeat in our ears, that the Bible is God's Word, 
 and therefore must be true ? Do you not remember, — I am sure I 
 do, — how, when we were made deacons, we were required to declare 
 that we ' believed unfeignedly in all the Canonical Scriptures of 
 
DR. COLENSO AND THE DOUBTING PRIEST. 77 
 
 the Old and New Testament ? ' How can I reconcile that declari- 
 tion with my present state of mind, and my present state of mind 
 with my continued tenm^e of my ofl&ce ?" 
 
 " Aye, aye ! Dr. Lushington has settled all that. Your ' un- 
 feigned behef ' in all the Holy Scriptures means nothing more, so 
 says the learned Dean of Arches, than a general belief that there 
 are in the Bible, as in most other books, some things which are 
 true ; — that, whatever else it may contain, it contains ' all things 
 necessary to salvation.' " 
 
 " But how am I to know what those tilings are? — hoAv much 
 or how little of what I read in the Bible is necessary to salvation ? 
 That is precisely my difficulty." 
 
 " Clearly so ; because you will persist in looking to the Bible, 
 instead of looking to that inward revelation of the Spirit which is 
 given to every man, — to Heathen men as well as to Clu-istians, — ■ 
 speaking in all oiu" hearts, lliat surely wiU not deceive you, nor 
 fail you. Only take courage ; and, as ' a man of truth,' have 
 faith in yourself." 
 
 " Faith in myseK ! God forbid ! Low as I fear I have fallen, I 
 am not come to that yet, and I hope I never shall. I am sorry, 
 truly sorry, to have troubled you, my lord. 1 will go home and 
 think and pray over the matter again, if perchance it may please 
 the Lord to take my feet out of the mire. One thing I am quite 
 clear about : if I want sjDiritual comfort, — you must excuse my 
 honest bluntness, — it is not to you or such as you that I must 
 come. I must seek it elsewhere. Fare you well, my lord." 
 
 The Bishop, taken aback and looking after him, — " Poor fellow ! 
 — lie, at any rate, is ' a man of truth,' if he only knew it. But 
 what am I ? Faugh ! — that is an ugly question. Had I not better 
 give up bishopping ? It does not seem to work particularly well. 
 There must be a hitch somewhere. Where can it be, I wonder." 
 
 Some such^ sohloquy were, assuredly, the fittest termination of 
 Dr. Colenso's Episcopate. To cease to be a bishop would seem 
 to be the 'only chance of his becoming what at present he vainly 
 a man of truth." 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Letter I.— MIRACLES. 
 
 flo the Editor of the " Church Review. '") 
 
 Sir, — Bishop Colenso's Book will not merely be a nine clays' 
 wonder. It will furnish conversation for the profane as well as 
 the godly ; it will occupy the reviews and periodicals for some 
 months ; and aifect, it is to be feared, a few unstable souls through- 
 out eternity. But it will have httle eifect on the Church as a 
 body, except to knit together more closely in one those who believe 
 in God's Word. 
 
 I am glad that you have taken upon yourself * to answer in de- 
 tail some of the cavils reproduced by tliis sceptical Bishoj). With 
 your kind permission, I will advert to one or two principles which, 
 so far as I know, have not been put forward as they should be. 
 
 The first principle or canon for understanding the Bible which I 
 would suggest for consideration is this, — That ichensoecer God wills 
 to work a miracle He also icills all the necessary accomjxmiments 
 of it. 
 
 Let me explain my meaning by reference to the miracle of the 
 sun ; or, as I suppose we all beheve, the earth standing still in the 
 days of Joshua. 
 
 *' If," says Bishop Colenso (p. xi.), by way of objection to the 
 miracle, " if the earth's motion were suddenly stopped a man's feet 
 would be arrested while his body was moving at a rate (on the 
 equator) of 1,000 miles an hour — or rather 1,000 miles in a 
 minute— since not only must the earth's diiu-ual rotation on its 
 
 * To avoid possible misapprehension from this incidental reference 
 to the foregoing pages, it is right to state that the Author of them is 
 not the Editor of the Church lievieu: 
 
80 MIRACLES. 
 
 axis be stoi^ped, but its annual motion also through space ; so that 
 every human being and animal would be dashed to pieces in a 
 moment, and a mighty deluge overwhelm the earth, unless all this 
 were prevented by a profusion of miraculous interferences, — 
 i. e.^ unless God willed it otherwise. Why, of course it required 
 what the Bishop calls " a profusion of miraculous interferences." 
 It was God's will that time should be given for the Israelites to 
 complete their victory, and also to encourage them in their enter- 
 prize by a wonderful proof of His good will and power, as well as 
 to furnish an example to after ages of His absolute sovereignty. 
 Is it not, then, perfectly puerile to imagine even that, when He 
 willed to arrest the earth's motion. He should not have foreseen 
 and provided against the possibility of the soldiers of Israel being 
 cast down suddenly by the shock, and destroyed as well as their 
 enemies, or the waters of the Dead Sea suddenly submerging the 
 whole territory, and drowning all the combatants together ? If 
 He willed the earth to stop, could He not will the sea to stop also, 
 and all that was in the earth and sea ? For a learned man to 
 make the possibility of such a failure of the miracle a ground for 
 disbelieving the miracle itself, really seems an instance of perverse 
 fatuity quite unaccountable. It may be admitted at once that to 
 arrest the earth's motion would be a shock to all creation ; that the 
 whole matter of the earth itseK, and probably of distant spheres 
 and systems, would be affected by the sudden cessation of the 
 force. But could not He who first created the material world, and 
 generated the force by which it is impelled, — could not He, by the 
 same power, change or stop its course, and provide for every con- 
 tingent circumstance? So far from modern science suggesting 
 difficulties to such a miracle, the knowledge of what it involves 
 does but increase our belief in the Infinite Goodness and Power of 
 the Almighty Ruler. 
 
 This principle will, I think, explain a very great number of 
 fancied difficulties. The Universal Deluge is a difficulty with the 
 Bishop, and others of the same turn of mind. AVhere, say they, 
 could all the water have come from ? How were all the animals 
 
MIRACLES. 81 
 
 collected together ? But surely all these difficulties are imaginary. 
 If we have on inspired record the fact that God destroyed the 
 whole world except eight persons by a deluge, it is idle to inquire 
 how it was done, beyond what God has revealed to us. We are 
 quite sure that He could do it. He who created the earth could 
 also destroy it at His will. Any difficulty about the manner of His 
 doing it is perfectly irrelevant when Doer of the deed is omnipo- 
 tent. If He willed the Miracle, He could also will all the neces- 
 sary ac-companiments of it. 
 
 Many of Bishop Colenso's difficulties will be found to vanish if 
 this canon is accepted as true, and it seems to be seK-evident. He 
 finds great difficulty in conceiving how the flocks and herds of the 
 Israelites were preserved in the wilderness. He supposes that a 
 vast number of lambs were absolutely required for each passover, 
 whether the Israelites had them or not ; and that so many lambs 
 imply a great many sheep to produce them, which is undeniable. 
 And he argues that no provision was made for the feeding of so 
 large a flock. But we know from Scripture evidence that provision 
 was made for the siisteutation of the Israelites themselves. Not 
 only their daily food, but their clothing was provided for. If 
 therefore God required of them to oifer to Him a vast quantity of 
 beasts in sacrifice, during their sojourn in the wilderness, surely we 
 may take for granted that He provided them with the means of doing 
 so. There seems no absolute reason why the flocks and herds of the 
 Israehtes should not have been sent out under the care of shep- 
 herds to feed in such pastures as the wilderness afforded. If the 
 natural pastures failed, could not God cause the herbage to spring 
 up more plenteously, or in some way or other provide for the 
 necessary flocks to supply the sacrifice ? Or, to take the opposite 
 side, if He did not provide for the sustenance of the flocks and herds, 
 may we not suppose that He would not require the same amount of 
 sacrifice, seeing that the Israelites were unable to render it, else He 
 would be lil^e their old Egyptian taskmastei-s. 
 
 It seems a wilful perverseness to collect together a number of 
 supposed difficulties, and brijig them forward as proofs of the un- 
 
82 MIKACLES. 
 
 trustworthiness of the history, when so many ways may be devised 
 whereby an Omnipotent God might meet them. 
 
 All Christians verily believe that the Books of Moses contain a 
 true narrative of a series of most marvellous events ; and why do 
 we believe so ? Because the truth of Moses is vouched for by the 
 Son of God Himself. And how do we know that Jesus was indeed 
 the Son of God? Because the history of His life and death, — the 
 mighty deeds which He wrought, the holy doctrine which He 
 taught, is handed down to us by a greater concurrence of historical 
 evidence than almost any other part in the world's history, — 
 because the Church of God has, for eighteen hundred years, re- 
 ceived the same as truth, — because we have within us the testi- 
 mony of the Spirit confirming the truth of the Gospel. What 
 therefore God Himself has thus declared to us as truth, shall we 
 give up on account of some vague and imaginary difficulties, which 
 our reason itself might teach us are no difficulties with Him ? Shall 
 we suppose that God could not provide food for the flocks of the 
 Israelites, when he provided it for themselves ? — or that He Who 
 made the earth and sea could not drown the earth for want of 
 water ? — or that He Who could stay the motion of the earth could 
 not provide against the puerile dfficulties which we, in our folly, 
 suppose that such a miracle would involve ? 
 
 I hope to treat of another branch of the same subject in another 
 letter ; but, meanwdiile, I should really be obliged to any of your 
 correspondents if they would point out any flaw in the argument 
 which would invalidate my supposed first canon of miracles, — that 
 when God wills to work a miracle^ He wills also all the necessarij 
 accompaniments of it. Or would any one put the canon in a better 
 form ? It really seems to me to be undeniable, and to give a con- 
 clusive answer to all those difficulties which are supposed to arise 
 from the physical consequences of disturbing the order of Nature. 
 God is absolute Lord over every department of Xature, and can by 
 His will adjust every altered circumstance which may be involved 
 in any departure from the settled order of things. Whatever 
 amount of disturbance may be caused by a miracle. He can, and 
 
MIRACLES. 83 
 
 must of necGSsity, by the very nature of the case, provide for tlie 
 consequences of that disturbance. 
 
 I will only advert to one more circumstance which has struck 
 me, and must strike others, in reading Bishop Colenso's work, — 
 I mean the decided spirit of scepticism which runs through every 
 part of it. The prominent features of the book are certain arith- 
 metical difficulties, which he supposes to be involved in the jNIosaic 
 narrative. With a certain air of candom- he professes himself to 
 be perplexed by those difficulties, and seems to imply that he does 
 not class himself with those who deny the whole of Revelation ; 
 but there are many indications in the book that, far from being the 
 candid inquirer which he professes to be, the Bishop is, so to speak, 
 a thoroughgoing prejudiced septic, — one who has allowed himself 
 to view everything only in the light of unbelief, and to see nothing 
 which makes for the Truth. In addition to the instances already 
 quoted, take only the following : — As a proof against the credibi- 
 lity of the Deluge, he alleges (p. viii.), " that volcanic hills exist, 
 of immense extent, in Auvergne and Languedoc, which must have 
 been formed ages before the Xoachean Deluge, and which are 
 covered with light and loose substances, pumice-stone, &c., that 
 must have been swept away by a Flood, but do not exhibit the 
 slightest sign of having ever been distm^bed." This the Bishop 
 relies on as a proof of the inaccuracy of the Mosaic record. But 
 surely he must be aware that geologists generally consider the 
 Noacbean Deluge to have been, not a mighty rushing torrent, but 
 the quiet submerging of the earth, and subsidence again of the 
 waters. At any rate, the disturbance need not, probably could 
 not, have extended everywhere. Have you ever watched the inun- 
 dation of some valley, — suppose the valley of the Cam or Isis ? 
 The phenomenon which presents itself is a tm-bid stream rushing 
 down the water- coiu-se ; but the large expanse of waters is com- 
 paratively quiet, — merely rising and subsiding again, without dis- 
 turbing the land, or removing the soil. The notion that the non- 
 removal of the pumice from the hills of Auvergne is a proof of the 
 untrustworlhincss of the account of the Xouchean Ddugc is such a 
 
84 SCRIPTUKE DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 far-fetched and obviously prejudiced attempt to wrest facts, and 
 make them do service in supporting a preconceived theory, that, 
 taken with other similar instances of the sort, it greatly invalidates 
 our belief in the candour of the Bishop, and the value of his arith- 
 metical objections. 
 
 W. G. 
 
 Letter II.— SCRIPTURE DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 (To the Editor of the " Church Revieic.'") 
 Sir, — I ventured to propose in a former letter what appears to 
 nie an undeniable canon for the interpretation of Holy Scripture, — 
 namely, tliat ichen God idlls to irork a miracle^ He also wills all the 
 necessary accompaniments of it. For instance, if He wills to drown 
 the whole world by a flood He will of course provide water enough 
 for the purpose 5 or, if He decrees that the earth should stand still 
 in its course, He will certainly take care that those for whose bene- 
 fit the miracle is wrought should not, as Bishop Colenso imagines, 
 be thrown down and dashed to pieces by the shock. 
 
 I would now beg to suggest another proposition not very new, 
 but important to be considered, — namely, that there must lie diffi- 
 culties in Scripture ; it could not be otherwise. Suppose for a mo- 
 ment that there were no difficulties. Suppose the Bible were all 
 plain and easy to be understood from beginning to end, written in 
 the clear intelligible style of modern times, — suppose it began with 
 a philosophical description of the solar system, and the generation 
 of the forces necessary to cause the revolution of the planets, and 
 went on to describe the various geological formations ; then, in re- 
 cording the birth of the first man, went off suddenly into the style 
 of biography thus: — "• The subject of the present memoir was born 
 on the 6th of Janunry, in the year one of the antediluvian sera. 
 Little is known of his early years, but what is known is just such 
 as we should expect." Or, suppose it was written in the style of 
 l)e Foe, and presented to us some Robinson Crusoe, cast with his 
 wife upon a desert island, and told us of all the shifts which they 
 made for food and clothing-, and how at last thev built a nice cottage. 
 
SCKIPTURE DIFl- IC ULTIES. 
 
 85 
 
 with roses and woodbines climbing uptlie walls, and flower gardens 
 in front, and, after living together very happily for some time, 
 how astonished and alarmed they were on getting up one morning' 
 to find the print of a cloven foot on one of the flower borders ; oi% 
 even suppose the Scripture narrative to be clear and straight- 
 forward history like Xenophon or Tacitus, Clarendon or Grote, 
 would not any person of common understanding at once perceive 
 that it could not be the production of the age or ages when it is 
 believed to be written ? Should we not say that it was impossible 
 that a book composed in so remote a period of the world, and by 
 so many different ^A^iters, preserved for thousands of years only in 
 manuscript, copied often by illiterate and possibly untrustworthy 
 persons, and liable to so much damage from time, and other cir- 
 cumstances, that such a book should not be full of error in trans- 
 cription, archaisms of language and style, allusions to circumstances, 
 and habits, and modes of life, the memory of which has now passed 
 away,— in short, would not any educated man expect the Bible to 
 be much what it is, full of difficulties ? If there were no difficulties 
 in the Bible, would not that very fact be in itself the greatest diffi- 
 culty of all ? 
 
 It would be puzzhng to some modern Sceptic or Ideologist if he 
 were asked to write a few chapters in the sort of style which, 
 with his modern intelligence and power of criticism, he would con- 
 sider ought to be the style of the Bible, and the character of its 
 incidents. For my own part, I cannot but think that a probable 
 history of the world, Avritten three thousand years ago, would be 
 much what we have in the Bible. And yet no one can read the 
 Bible and for a moment sui3pose that it was concocted by some 
 skilful impostor, and the difficulties introduced for the very purpose 
 of deception. 
 
 The difficulties of the Bible are more perplexing to learned men 
 than unlearned. An unlearned person would read the first chapter 
 of Genesis and find no difficulty at all. He would suppose that it 
 all related to events which took place some six or seven thousand 
 yeai-s ago. as it wa,s generally suj^poscd. Rut now that geoloo-v 
 
86 SCRIPTUKE DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 lias become the fashion, the merest sciolist knows that the materials 
 of which the earth consists have been in existence for millions of 
 years. He perceives, therefore, that he must have read the first 
 chapter of Genesis wrongly, and a reference to the Hebrew original, 
 — nay, even to our own translation, — will show him that the first 
 verse of the Bible, so far from speaking of a recent period of six 
 thousand years, relates to any period of indefinite remoteness, and 
 simply asserts the fact that "God created the heaven and the earth," 
 at what time it is not said. 
 
 Learning, again, imperfect as all human learning must be, is one 
 of the causes of difficulty. Take, for instance. Acts xiii. 7, which 
 speaks of "the deputy of the country, Sergius Paulus," — a plain 
 man reading his Bible sees no difficulty in these words. The 
 scholar knows that the word translated deputij means more accu- 
 rately proconsul ; and he fancies that the deputy or governor of 
 Cyprus was only Si prxto7\ and had no claim to the title of procon- 
 sul. Here is a Scripture difficulty. St. Luke seems to have made 
 a mistake inconsistent with his supposed inspiration. Bishop Co- 
 lenso Avould at once jump at the conclusion that St. I/ake was not 
 truly inspired. A more humble and intelligent man would suspend 
 his judgment, or rather would feel sure that there was, if he did 
 but know it, some way of explaining the difliculty, even though he 
 might never find it out in this world. But happily the difficulty 
 has been solved, not by human learning, but by the accidental or 
 providential discovery of a medal on which the title proconsul is 
 assigned to the governor of that province. Now, may we not take 
 these two instances as examples of the way in which the learned and 
 scientific may, by their very learning and science, be deceived ; and 
 how much more reasonable is it to befieve that the difficulty arises 
 in truth from our partial knowledge or real ignorance ? I w^ould 
 suggest, therefore, another canon of interpretation, — namely, that 
 tchenever a seeming dlfficultij or even impossibility occurs in Holy 
 Scripture^ it is demonstrably evident that there must be some mistake, 
 some mistake in the translation or transcription, or the method of 
 computation, or in our understanding. 
 
SCRIPTURE DIFFICULTIES. H7 
 
 Bishop Colenso's book is full of fancied impossibilities, in which 
 it is abundantly manifest, on the face of them, that there must be 
 some mistake. He imagines (page 128) that there were only three 
 priests for two million of persons ; and that, considering the num- 
 ber of children likely to be born in such a number of persons, if 
 the Jewish mothers brought, as they were ordered, two young 
 pigeons for an offering, which were to be for the priest to eat, he 
 would have had to eat eighty-eight pigeons every day. Does it 
 not occur to the right reverend v/riter of this most irreverent state- 
 ment that there must be of necessity some mistake ? Either there 
 must have been a sufficient number of assistant priests, or at any 
 rate the priests were not required to eat of these offerings more 
 than sufficed for them. Where does the Bishop find that they were 
 required to do so ? Indeed, jNIoses accepted the reason assigned by 
 Ithamar and Eleazer (Lev. x. 16) for not eating the sin-offering 
 on an occasion of affliction, which shows that the rule was not 
 absolute. Sm-ely, then, the fiict, if it were so, of there being eighty- 
 eight pigeons might have been considered a sufficient excuse, 
 though it was expedient that the law should not be altered ; be- 
 cause, though the pigeons were too much for their present need, 
 they were not more than would suffice for the maintenance of the 
 priesthood in after generations. Again (page 38), the priest is 
 commanded (Lev, iv, 11, 12), to carry the refuse of the sacrifice 
 without the camp into a clean place, and burn it there on the wood 
 with fire. This, considering that there were only three priests for 
 two miUion of people would, he thinks, be an impossible task. He 
 imagines the priest having himself to carry on his back, on foot, 
 as far as from St. Paul's to the outskirts of the Metropolis (so the 
 Bishop chooses to represent it) "the skin and flesh and inwards 
 and dung, even the whole bullock." It seems never to have oc- 
 cm-red to the Bishop, that the priests might possibly have servants, 
 and carts, and horses, or perhaps rather oxen, to perform this duty 
 for them ; for there is positively nothing in the passage of Scripture 
 which forbids the priest to do through others what he could not 
 possibly do himself. It would be as absurd as to say that, because 
 
88 SCKTPTUIM-: DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 the churchwardens of a parish were bound to keej) the church clean 
 and in good repair, they were required to do the cleansing and 
 repairs with their own hands, and might be seen, one with a broom 
 in his hand, and the other with a hod of mortar on his back. 
 
 Again : the Bishop of Natal finds great difficulty in the assem- 
 bling together of all the congregations, which he computes at two 
 million of souls, to v/itness certain ceremonies which were com- 
 manded (see Lev, viii, 14 ; Joshua viii. 34, 35). Ha thinks that if 
 they all stood Hterally as directed on one occasion at the door of the 
 tabernacle, there must have been a sort of queue of twenty miles in 
 length ; and that the reading of the law could never have been 
 heard for the squalhng of the babies. If read at all, it must have 
 been a dumb show, which probably it vv^as. 
 
 I remember once to have visited a camp in France, and in the 
 midst of it to have observed a sort of booth or open tent in an 
 elevated position, at which I was informed Mass was performed at 
 regular times in the sight of the whole army, who were draw up in 
 due order to v/itness the ceremony. Of course the army was not 
 nearly so numerous as the congregation of Israel, if by the congTC- 
 gation we are to understand the whole nation. Still, considering 
 that the site of the tabernacle was marked by the pillar of fire and 
 pillar of the cloud which rested upon it, it is not incredible that 
 the whole of the camp of Israel assembled in some concave vaUey, 
 or amphitheatre, in the rocky wilderness, and being duly apprised 
 of the time of the ceremony might in a manner take part in it; just 
 as the population of a whole city might oif er up prayers at the toll- 
 ing of a bell for pubhc worship, 
 
 I cannot think that the supposed impossibihties of this arithme- 
 tical Bishop, the notion of the priest having to eat eighty-eight 
 pigeons, or travel six miles with the carcase of a bullock on his 
 shoulders, — or even the queue of twenty miles, — ought to have one 
 feather weight to shake our belief in the truth of God's Holy Word, 
 which is assured to us by the conviction of our understanding, and 
 confirmed by the feeling of our hearts. 
 
 W. G. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOE, 
 
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