books sustaining their veracity in a hundred other ways, for such questionable reasons? The Hebrew delighted in round numbers. We find it so in the New Testament as well as the Old. We Americans do the same. This will account for some of the apparent discrepancies. The Hebrew copyist, seeing a difference in the numbers, may have sought to reconcile them with each other, and by the adjustment made them too large or too small. He may have erred, but it is difficult for us to go behind him and correct him by comparing his labors with older manuscripts. The oldest Hebrew manuscripts now known to be extant, dates A. D. 1106. Others are supposed to be older, but only by conjecture. Of private manuscripts none are older than five centuries. We have extracts from the "eight exemplars," celebrated for their correctness and value, but they are nought but extracts. We have several Greek versions of the Old Testament, but they are of little aid in the point now under consideration. No one pretends that the text of the Old Testament is free from mistakes. No theory of inspiration demands that it be immaculate when put into our hands at this day. The copyists might be deceived by their eyes, their ears, or their memory, and yet nothing essential, nothing vital be lost to us. Every one who has tried to write Hebrew has been convinced of this. And still we would say that it is, as it is, marvellously pure. We only say, that in a matter so slightly important as numbers and names, where the liability to error is so strong, we wonder that the Argus-eyed Bishop has not encountered more serious trouble than what he has brought forward. And we wish to add, while on this subject, that neither he nor we can go beyond the manuscripts now in our possession. We are shut up unto this faith. If we had as many, and in proportion to the age as early, versions of the Old Testament as we have of the New, possibly we might remove some of these apparent discrepancies. Undoubtedly with respect to chronological dates, further historical research may shed some light upon the darkness. We must, however, take things as they are, and not be shaken by zephyrs.

To illustrate what we have said, let us look at an hypothesis

which may answer the Bishop's difficulty as to the number of "harnessed men" who went up ont of Egypt at the time of the Exodus. He says: "The twelve sons of Jacob had between them 53 sons, that is, on the average, 41 each. Let us suppose that they increased in this way from generation to generation. Then in the first generation, that of Kohath, there would be 54 males (according to the story, 53, or rather only 51, since Er and Onan died in the land of Canaan, without issue); in the second, that of Amram, 243; in the third, that of Moses and Aaron, 1,094; and in the fourth, that of Joshua and Eleazar, 4,923; that is to say, instead of 600,000 warriors in the prime of life, there could not have been 5,000." This is very good arithmetic but not very good sense. A young apple tree has borne four apples this year, therefore next year it will bear 16, the next 64, and in the fourth year 216. Its bearing capacity is to be measured by its youth rather than by its age. He assumes that a generation must be no more than 50 years, in the face of the best authorities that it included a century; he assumes that the time of the sojourn was 215 years, in the face of Ewald, who allows it to have been 430; he assumes that there were no servants in these patriarchal households, whose rate of increase may have been as great as their masters certainly, in the face of the contrary statements as to the families of Abraham and Isaac, copied most likely by Jacob and his children; he assumes that no Egyptians joined themselves to these people of God, either for the sake of marriage or religion; he assumes that God is not faithful to his promises, in the face of the divine assertion that the descendants of Abraham should be fruitful beyond all national precedents; and then, on the grounds of these assumptions, establishes his hypothesis, that the number of warriors who went up out of Egypt could not have exceeded 5,000.

Now let us look at the estimate of Keil with reference to this very subject; certainly a man who had no very strong predilections to make out a case, but a scholar who is disposed to give history its due. He says: "If we deduct from the seventy souls who went down into Egypt, the patriarch Jacob, his twelve sons, Dinah, and Serah, the daughter

of Asher, and in addition, the three sons of Levi, the four grandsons of Judah, and Benjamin (Asher ?), and those grandsons of Jacob who probably died without male offspring, inasmuch as their descendants do not occur among the families of Israel (see Num. xxvi.), there will remain forty-one grandsons of Jacob (besides the Levites), who founded families. If now, according to I. Chron. vii: 20, etc., where ten or eleven generations are named from Ephraim to Joshua, we reckon forty years to a generation, the tenth generation of the forty-one grandsons of Jacob would be born about the 400th year of the residence in Egypt, and consequently be about twenty years old at the Exodus. Supposing that in the first six of these generations every married couple had, on an average, three sons and three daughters, and in the last four generations each married couple had two sons and two daughters, there would have been in the tenth generation, about the 400th year of the descent into Egypt, 478,224 sons, who could be over twenty years of age at the Exodus, whilst 125,326 men of the ninth generation might be still living, and consequently 478,242+125,326—603,550 men over twenty years old could leave Egypt," an hypothesis if it be but an hypothesis, amply sufficient to meet the exigencies of the case, and sufficient, at any rate, to prove with regard to the Bishop that "quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat." Nearly all of the remaining difficulties of Colenso can be answered as satisfactorily. We had noted others, but our paper is already too long.

There is one, however, which is worthy of attention. The Bishop is troubled about the supplies for people and cattle, while sojourning in the desert. Rejecting in heart, if not in words, the idea of the miraculous, this is not surprising. We credit the miraculous, because we think there is ample proof of it, and because it is woven into the entire fabric of the narrative. Miraculous food, miraculous drink, miraculous life, miraculous death, miraculous law and miraculous guidance meet us on almost every page. We have little faith, however, in the supposed changes which have been wrought in the neighborhood of Sinai by the progress of time, so that

what would once have supported a large and thrifty people cannot do it now. We rather incline to the belief that the There may

now.

land in the main was desert then, as it is have been some change, though not much. They were taken there for trial. Their absolute needs were supplied. They were to indulge in no luxuries. They were to live "from hand to mouth." Had they been faithful to God, their admission into Canaan would have been earlier. As it was, they were swept away by natural laws, under the scourge of God. It was a dry and thirsty land where no water was, and in passing through it by such a lingering, meandering route, they melted away, visited for their own sins, by the pinching poverty of

the land.

We confess that when this book first appeared before the American public, and it received so rapid a sale, a cursory reading impressed us with the fear that it would do much harm. We feared it would shock a certain class of timid and yet reverent minds, causing them to believe that the foundations of truth were about to fall; while it would cause the sceptical to become still more sceptical. Our fears have subsided daily, like the waters of the flood, as we have repeatedly perused it, and examined the passages on which rests its theory. It was begotten like a house-plant. It will die like a mushroom. It will accomplish a purpose—a far nobler one than its author intended. In his former diocese it will be refuted step by step, and the poor ignorant Zulus will become wiser than their teacher. Around the Cape of Good Hope it is now inspiring the clergy to cast out the old leaven of unrighteousness, and put in the new leaven of faith and good works. It is causing men in high places to think upon sacred topics as never before: to find out what they do believe, and gather up their ammunition and supplies for a fresh attack. In the old world and the new it will furnish a starting-point whence the credentials of the Old Testament will be sifted and settled as thoroughly as possible. The battle has been raging around the New Testament for a long time. The foe has been met and conquered. Its authority rests upon a more solid basis to-day than ever before. De

niers have become converts. Believers hold up their heads. And now the scene of the contest changes, but the victory is as sure. Hengstenberg said, years ago, "that the next conflict with the doctrines of revelation would be waged around the earlier books of the Bible." He probably spoke from personal experience. His first academical performance was a thesis in which he undertook to show that to look for Christ in the Old Testament was the merest folly. His recantation from this folly is written in the very title of his great performance, "CHRISTOLOGY, or the doctrine of Christ as taught in the Old Testament." Many more as well as he are now preaching the faith they once destroyed. This is God's plan with individuals, his Church, and the nations. He shakes them, terribly shakes them, that they may know that there is no foundation so solid as his Rock. If the orations of Cicero which Wolf rejected are now received as genuine-if the same has been true with portions of Plato's writings,-if the eighth book of Thucydides, which was set aside as spurious, on account of a diversity of style and spirit, has been vindicated by Niebuhr, upon grounds which would triumphantly restore Deuteronomy to its place with Genesis, we have no fear but that these earliest documents, containing the only reliable history of the world, will pass through its present ordeal, having this seal upon it, that "God is true." On the whole, therefore, we believe that these labors of Bishop Colenso will do, in the end, more good than harm.