578 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



horror. Especial wrath was caused by some of his arithmetical 

 arguments, and, among them, those which showed that an army 

 of six hundred thousand men could not have been mobilized in a 

 single night; that three millions of people, with their flocks and 

 herds, could neither have obtained food on so small and arid a 

 desert as that over which they were said to have wandered during 

 forty years, nor water from a single well; and that the butchery 

 of two hundred thousand Midianites by twelve thousand Israel- 

 ites, " exceeding infinitely in atrocity the tragedy at Cawnpore, 

 had happily only been carried out on paper." There was nothing 

 of the scoffer in him. While preserving his own independence, 

 he had kept in touch with the most earnest thought both among 

 European scholars and in the little flock intrusted to his care. 

 He evidently remembered what had resulted from the attempt to 

 hold the working classes in the towns of France, Germany, and 

 Italy to outworn beliefs; he had found even the Zulus, whom he 

 had thought to convert, awakened to the legendary character of 

 the Old Testament, and with his clear, practical mind he realized 

 the danger which threatened the English Church and Christian- 

 ity the danger of tying its religion and morality to interpre- 

 tations and conceptions of Scripture more and more widely seen 

 and felt to be contrary to facts. He saw the especial danger of 

 sham explanations ; of covering up facts which must soon be 

 known, and which, when all was revealed, must inevitably bring 

 the plain people of England to regard their teachers, even the 

 most deserving, as " solemnly constituted impostors " ; ecclesiastics 

 whose tenure depends on assertions which they know to be un- 

 true. Therefore it was that, when his catechumens questioned 

 him regarding some of the legends in the Old Testament, the 

 bishop determined to tell the truth. He says: "My heart an- 

 swered in the words of the prophet, ' Shall a man speak lies in the 

 name of the Lord ?' I determined not to do so." 



But none of these considerations availed in his behalf at first. 

 The outcry against the work was deafening ; churchmen and dis- 

 senters rushed forward to attack it. Archdeacon Denison, chair- 

 man of the Committee of Convocation appointed to examine it, 

 uttered a noisy anathema. Convocation solemnly condemned it ; 

 and a zealous colonial bishop, relying upon a nominal supremacy, 

 deposed and excommunicated its author, declaring him "given 

 over to Satan." On both sides of the Atlantic the press groaned 

 with " answers," some of these being especially injurious to the 

 cause they were intended to serve, and none more so than sundry 

 efforts by the bishops themselves. One of the points upon which 

 they attacked him was his assertion that the reference in Leviticus 

 to the hare chewing its cud contains an error. Upon this Prof. 

 Hitzig of Leipsic, probably the best Hebrew scholar of his time, 



