d
tutor at Cambridge, master at Harrow, author of various valuable
text-books in mathematics; and as long as he exercised his powers within
the limits of popular orthodoxy he was evidently in the way to the
highest positions in the Church: but he chose another path. His
treatment of his subject was reverent, but he had gradually come to
those conclusions, then so daring, now so widespread among Christian
scholars, that the Pentateuch, with much valuable historical matter,
contains much that is unhistorical; that a large portion of it was
the work of a comparatively late period in Jewish history; that many
passages in Deuteronomy could only have been written after the Jews
settled in Canaan; that the Mosaic law was not in force before the
captivity; that the books of Chronicles were clearly written as an
afterthought, to enforce the views of the priestly caste; and that in
all the books there is much that is mythical and legendary.

Very justly has a great German scholar recently adduced this work of a
churchman relegated to the most petty of bishoprics in one of the most
remote corners of the world, as a proof "that the problems of biblical
criticism can no longer be suppressed; that they are in the air of our
time, so that theology could not escape them even if it took the wings
of the morning and dwelt in the uttermost parts of the sea."

The bishop's statements, which now seem so moderate, then aroused
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
Israelites, "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 thought to convert, suspic