and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground" (Gen. xix. 24, 25). The Dean sees no precise special means of destruction in the Lord raining fire and brimstone, but theologians and geologists find a vexed question in it and join the patriarch and the Dean in gazing on the results; as if Abraham and they are scientist tourists unacquainted with their Bible.

One more indication of the fact that the Old Testament might die out as a portion of God's Word if it were left in the hands of the learned, who pervert it into fables as the Greeks perverted the religion of the ancient Church. We have already given the interpretation of the following text. "And the Lord said unto Moses in Midian, Go, return into Egypt. And Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an ass, and he returned to the land of Egypt: and Moses took the rod of God in his hand. And it came to pass on the way at the inn that the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a flint, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and made it touch his feet, and she said, Surely a bridegroom of bloods art thou to me, so he let him alone. Then she said, A bridegroom of bloods because of the circumcision" (Exodus iv. 19-26).

"On

On this event Dean Stanley comments as follows:the journey a mysterious and almost inexplicable incident occurs in the family. The most probable explanation seems to be that at the Caravanserai either Moses or his eldest child was struck with what seemed to be a mortal illness. In some way, not apparent to us, this illness was connected by Zipporah with the fact that her son had not been circumcised -whether in the general neglect of that rite among the Israelites in Egypt, or in consequence of his birth in Midian. She instantly performed the rite, and threw the sharp instrument, stained with the fresh blood, at the feet of her husband, exclaiming in the agony of a mother's anxiety for the life of her child, 'A bloody husband thou art, to cause the death

of my son.' Then, when the recovery from the illness took place (whether of her son or her husband), she exclaims again: A bloody husband still thou art, but not so as to cause the child's death, but only to bring about his circumcision'" (Ibid. pp. 116, 117).

The reader is referred to pp. 35-37 above respecting this event. The Dean again ignores Jehovah and guesses His seeking to kill Moses into a common case of illness, eliminating every trace of the divine and supernatural from it. He makes Zipporah throw the flint knife at Moses' feet, instead of touching his feet with the foreskin. In a note he designates the almost inexplicable incident as a story.' He invents circumstances, puts words into Zipporah's mouth, and makes her call Moses' husband' when the Hebrew for a purpose says bridegroom."

Of course he discredits the witch of Endor calling up Samuel to Saul, although myriads of such cases occur at the present day. His pages are full of the virtue of the Jews, and of their deserts as the chosen people. The invisible God is acknowledged as in them, and they are near by promise and performance to a Christianity which is a continued, established, and endowed Church of Judaism. Both Testaments are ignored. The Book may not unfairly be regarded as a well-oiled systematic Pantheism wrestling with. two revealed religions, and bent upon casting them to the ground.

XLVI-ETHNOLOGY.

If we find no recognition of the peculiar character of Judaism as it is written of in the Old Testament in works of so-called Theology, so neither does Ethnology, which ought to treat of all the great causes that determine the character and history of races, admit as an explanation the Divine interference recorded in the Scriptures. Oscar Peschel's learned work, The Races of Man, treats the Jews as a self

developed people. The theory of Evolution is what accounts for their Monotheism. They were once savages in a remote past, and worked up through polytheism to one God in long ages. And after the Captivity those who chose to return brought back from Babylon enlightenment about immortality, and a modified temper purged of some of the cruelty and revenge which were signal in their ancestors. They were brought nearer to Christ by these additions to their knowledge and their morals. That a purpose even of this kind was served for the best of the race need not be doubted; it was chiefly due to the "blessing of adversity": but the destruction of Jerusalem, and the final dispersion after the Crucifixion of Christ, forbids us to think that the race itself was influenced towards Christianity. And the obduracy of the Jews to-day proves that the core of Judaism is unmodified. Oscar Peschel follows the writers of the Old Church in not taking the Jewish Dispensation for granted; and in ignoring the miraculous march of it, which seems to be the easiest account, and the only account, of whatever has concerned, and still concerns, that interesting, and to the most of thinkers, that mysterious people.

XLVII.-ARCHÆOLOGY AND THE

MONUMENTS.

Professor Sayce, that untiring Archeologist, to whom we owe so much light on ancient history and rediscovered languages, cannot be reckoned among the defenders of the Old Testament as an objective revelation, or as part of a special Divine Word. His thesis is that the Bible of the Old Testament has been hitherto at a disadvantage in standing alone there has been no other known record to compare with it an unfair glamour has surrounded it, and prevented the same study and attention being given to our Scripture as to any other book. Reverence for its presumed holiness has closed it against true appreciation, which can only be

If you

attained where strong prepossession is absent. approach it from the first as awful and divine, you are not likely to dare to understand it, at least not in the learned

Professor's way.

The cause of this paralysis of attention is now removed;. the mind need not cower henceforth in Bibliolatry. The Old Testament no longer stands alone: a number of other documents belonging to religions more ancient than the Jewish, and perhaps ante-dating the Pentateuch, have been brought to light; the cuneiform and hieroglyphic in which they were written are deciphered, and read by many learned men ; and so we may be said to have a shelf of Bibles of which Moses and the Prophets are a modern part.

History stretches new arms of power through these great and curious discoveries, and comparative Bibliology comes in view, as comparative anatomy and physiology, comparative philology, comparative mythology, and comparative religion, have already been inaugurated. Soon therefore we shall be comparatively well-informed all round, on subjects hitherto stunted by lacking the tests of relationships.

The gain to history is indubitable and historians may exult in it. We shall probably learn before long great landmarks and many details respecting the Holy Land and Mesopotamia before the Israelites conquered Canaan. The Bible will be illustrated as regards its geography and its earliest and least historical events. It is good to be learned,. and good to be historical, good in a limited, and not in an absolute sense good according to the use you make of your knowledges.

Now to quote the Professor himself, and do him no injustice. "The Old Testament has hitherto stood alone. Its Books could be interpreted and explained only by themselves. They were what logicians would call 'a single instance.' There was nothing similar with which they could be compared: no contemporaneous record which could throw light on the facts they contained. From 'a

single instance' no argument can be drawn."—Of the last sentence we ask, if it were not good to find some instances beyond argument. Something like Ego and freewill that stands alone however many of it there are. Central principles are such. To argue about them is not to perceive them: when conscience knows them as right and wrong, true and false, arguing is historical but dangerous.

But in the Professor's meaning, does the Old Testament stand alone, awaiting a family of brothers and sisters from the monuments, to tell us who is who and what is what, in our Scriptures? On the contrary, according to received opinion which has every warrant, the Bible contains earlier books than those attributed to Moses. In this case we have in the covers of the Book itself, the Sacred Books of three different Religions already, and with the New Testament of one Theophany and four Religions. Here the argument of the "single instance" disappears, and we find a multiplicity in the Old Testament itself, which forecloses the need of any other series to furnish grounds of comparison and illustration. In supplement to this argument, and as a greater multiplicity, the Bible is a congeries of Booklets reaching in nominal authorship over thousands of years; and the consistency and the difference they offer from great distances of time and place is such as must be absent from the "single instance," but is many-voiced in the Bible, and suggests endless comparisons, textual and real; and a Unity as of one God in all.

We need not then go to Babylon and Assyria to increase the pregnant wealth of Bible truth, by which we mean now, self-certification as a basis for further conception. The Books indeed can be explained and interpreted only by themselves, but they are so many and so various, that upon each point of themselves that needs it, the testimony suffices to justify an interpretation sanctioned by the whole. The historical facts contained in the Bible can be attested by the monuments, and can be received without such attestation.