BISHOP COLENSO AND VERBAL INSPIRATION.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume II, Issue 124, 15 June 1863, Page 3

BISHOP COLENSO AND VERBAL INSPIRATION.

[From the (London) Daily Telegraph.'] [ Conchided], As grave a difficulty is presented to his mind by the account of the institution of the Passover. Again, he lias to believe that a community, certainly large, aud said to he thus enormous, could be summoned abruptly and iu one night to the celebration of a rite, the due performance of which could alone obviate destruction. The lowest estimate of the lambs required for the feast must be 150,000, which renders necessary a yearly flock of 2,000,000 sheep, with 400,000 acres of good pasturage. The same celebration recurring annually, where, he asks, could the sacrificial victims be found, and whence could the flock be pastured in the wild wadies aud granite rocks about Sinai and the Red Sea ? And here arises that perplexing question as to the mode of life of such a vast nomadic horde “ for forty years long” in the wilderness. Those who have seen the ground of these drear wanderings can answer to the truth of Canon Stanley’s description : We were, undoubtedly, [he writes], on the track of the Israelites ; by Marali, and the two valleys, on of which must almost certainly—both perhaps—be Elim. For the most part the desert was absolutely bare. But the two rivals for Elim are fringed with trees and shrubs, the first vegetation we have met in the desert. First, there are the wild palms, successors of the “ three-score and ten,” not like those of Egypt or of pictures, but either dwarf, that is, truukless, or else with savage, hairy trunks, and branches all dishevelled. Then there are the feathery'tamarisks here assuming gnarled boughs and hoary heads, on whoso leaves is found what the Arabs call manna. Thirdly, there is the wild acacia, but this is also tangled by the desert growth into a thicket—the tree of the burning bush aud the shittim wood , of the Tabernacle A stair of rock brought us into a wady, enclosed between red granite mountains. I cannot too often repeat that these wadys are exactly like rivers, except iu having no water; and it is (his appearance of torrent bed and banks, and clefts in the rocks for tributary streams, and at times even rushes and shrubs fringing their course, which gives the whole wilderness a doubly dry and thirsty aspect —signs of “Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” Sucli is the wilderness, where miracles were naturally “ indicated” to sustain the Israelites. But quails, Dr. Colenso thinks, did not feed the flocks which furnish 200,000 male lambs per year; nor would manna sustain the cattle which bore so many tents aud equipages. It is either all, he would say, a miracle from beginning to end, and the narrative need no more have stooped to arithmetic than the story-teller wuo enumerates the. number of the army of Camhuscan, and the virtues of the “ ring of brass or it is simply a history of mythical and sub-mythi-cal times, and therefore not free from the faults of post-factum compilations. On either theory it appears to Dr. Colenso that breath is wasted in maintaining the “ absolute inspiration” of such statements as that 2,000,000 sheep and oxen could be fed iu the few and insignificant wadies, which a drove of a hundred short-horns would trample to grit in an hour, seeking their sparse herbage. If these objections appear isolated and captious, it is fair to admit that he refers to a vast number of other difficulties. The sacrifice of purification after childbirth demanded at least one turtle-dove. A fair calculation would give 250 of these birds as daily requisite for the altar, to say nothing of the difficulty of three priests attending to these offices as well as to all others in the camp. Again, these same priests had to cat all that was offered, and if the Bishop is right, sympathy is involuntarily excited at such a course of ioujours perdrix. In short, the conclusion at which Bishop Colenso has arrived, and which he urges upon public attention with all the force of his condition and his high office, is that these Mosaical books

—so?grand in their general outline, so admirable in their legislative and practical uses—bristle with errors in their details. It is not only that Jochebed was either 78 or 256 years old when she bore Moses ; or that as all the Kohathites fvide N. iv, 36} numbered 2,750 in Eleazer’s generation, the six sons of Izzar and Uzziel must have ‘had between them about 5,300 children- —a phenomenon which the orthodox Kurtz? himself quails before. It is not, he intimates, that figures and computations given throughout the Old Testament confute themselves when they are conceivable, and are demonstrably impossible when they are imaginative: but it is—and this is the conviction of a bishop who avows the deepest reverence for the sacred volume, and whose service to the truth which God loves and will have from his worshippers is paid with prayer and pain—it is that throughout the Jewish history, and notably up and down the section ascribed to Moses, he encounters signs that prove to him either that the Pentateuch is' such a composition as that of Zoroaster, Menu, or ‘Confucius (only higher in scope, wisdom, aud fthe “ gift of God”) or that the Almighty has “ absolutely inspired” blunders, and sealed the errors of a human pen for his own awful veracities.

The time is past when we could'shirk this enquiry; and, thank God! the decision of the Court of Arches, and the esample of such truthful spirits as his who penned the present imperfect volume, will enable the Church to face it as a Church. What, after all, need real religion suffer by the touch of Reason and Science? Are they not rather .angels, who, like Ithuriel, strike the toad, Ignornorance, that squats at the fair ear of the sleeping Church, forcing it to quit its dan-' gerous place, and to take away its insidious visions. The Zulu and the Brahmin are forcing us to “ search, the Scriptures.” Shall we have lost their precious aid and hope, 'if finally we may find that, being written, transcribed, printed and translated, by the finger of man, they bear the soil of the dust of which he is compounded ? A thousand times no ! t while one test out of their many, one lesson of their varied and divine teachings, remains to convict us of God, while we simply hear or read them, the Bible is the Bible. While revelations so sublime and pitiful as that prayer which free of doctrine, free of assertion, bids all men call God “Father”—while such a compendium Jof codes Divine and human as the “ good Master’’’gave to “ one who came unto him” —while ethics so perfect, so sufficient, so self-comprised as those in it, the Bible is the Bible. To render throughout our use of it “to Caesar the things that are Cmsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” is hio* irreverence, but a duty enjoined upon all who hear Christ. For good and all, then, Jthis reproach against free enquiry must be taken out of the mouths of those who still oppose it. Shallow and silly people, indeed may use their new liberty unworthily—“ the churl will be a churl, and the filthy will still be filthybut the heart that is really touched with truth will think his Bible, thus thoroughly grasped, nearer, not farther from, his life and love. It is those who will not suffer compromises and shuffles about the Book they obey who really honour it. We cannot part with the Bible. In its sweet and stately Saxon we were born and have lived. The sentences of its lofty promises were whispered over our infant foreheads; the maxims of its Divine philosophy guided’our growing minds; the sanction of its gentle beneficence has hallowed Aur oaths of life-long human love ; the consolations of its forgiving messages have sustained souls that were hopeless and hapless; and its grand and jubilant defiance of death rings and has rung over the grave. It is blended with our ideas, with our words, with our daily life; we speak it in the street—we borrow from it at our labour—we cull out of it themes for sorrow and thoughts for happiness. By it there has passed into our cold Northern latitudes the opulence and the fervour of Eastern fields and Eastern faiths. It has been to us a thing so precious, that the world before it seems a blank, and the world without it an inconceivable void. We learned it at our mother’s knee; our wives teach it to our young ones, and the same tender text that they are lisping of the “ little children coming to me ” will be prattled, please God, when this age and its doubts are all forgotten and laid. Truth is immortal, unchangeable, impregnable; and because this book—most wonderful and gracious as it is —certainly contains the truth, it shall endure. It must endure even the more unshakeably when its truth is sifted out of it pure and apart —when the gems are known from the casket —when not the altar, but “He who sitteth upon the alter,” is worshipped in its eternal pages.