temporary,
and the Anakim lived centuries later. This may stand for a specimen of
the alleged anachronisms of the Pentateuch.

But now comes Bishop Colenso with his slate and pencil to demonstrate to
us that, no matter who wrote it, or by what external authority it is
commended, the Pentateuch is so full of arithmetical errors, and of
impossible narratives, in its accounts of common affairs, as well as in
its miraculous stories, that not only is it not the Word of God, but
that it is not even a truthful history, and stands self-convicted of
being a collection of fables. Of course, if that can be proved, there is
an end of the matter, though it would still seem strange that it should
have been left for the bishop to discover Moses' ignorance of
arithmetic, and of camp-life among the Arabs. Nevertheless the very
novelty of a bishop assaulting the Bible in such a style has secured
for him a large number of readers, many of them ignorant enough to
believe his assertions, though too indolent to test his calculations, or
even to read the passages he criticises. This renders some notice of his
criticisms necessary according to our plan of considering objections
according to their popularity, rather than according to their merit.
For, on examining the bishop's objections to the Bible, they are all
found to arise from want of science, want of sense, or ignorance of
Scripture--an inability to read the Scriptures in their original Hebrew,
or even to cite them correctly in English. In some criticisms he
contrives to compile these three kind of blunders into a single chapter,
making a mosaic of very amusing reading indeed.

Of course we can only give specimens of his peculiar style of attack on
the Bible; for to expose all his blunders would require some volumes as
large as his own. But we shall select illustrative instances of the
bishop's blunders from each of the departments indicated above.

As a specimen of the bishop's blunders in science, let us take the first
which he offers--his attempt to convict Moses of a contradiction to
geology in his account of the deluge.

Bishop Colenso declares that the Bible teaches that the deluge was
universal, and that this is contradicted, among other things, by certain
geological discoveries, in Auvergne, of volcanic cones of light cinders,
which would have been swept away by any such flood.

Aye, if they had only been there at that time! But Eli de Beaumont, a
learned geologist, not con