's
family, of seventy persons, to a nation of two or three millions, in
Egypt, during the two hundred and fifteen years to which he confines the
bondage. But it is only another case of Cain's wife. The Pentateuch
gives us the list of Jacob's children and their wives, but makes no
formal mention in that place of their servants and retainers. These, in
Abraham's times, amounted to three hundred fencible men, or a population
of fifteen hundred; who would have increased in Jacob's time to several
thousands, capable of defending the border land of Goshen against the
marauding Bedouin. And this population could easily increase to the
three millions of the Exodus, at the same ratio in which the population
of the United States is now increasing; so that it is a mere superfluity
of naughtiness for the bishop to deny what the sacred historian so
emphatically asserts: "That the people were fruitful, and increased
abundantly, and multiplied, and the land was filled with them." But the
bishop utterly ignores the people of the _clan_, and taking his slate
and pencil ciphers out the impossibility of Jacob's _family_ amounting
to so many. And yet it is not impossible that in the four hundred and
thirty years which the sacred historian so precisely asserts as the
period of their sojourn in Egypt, Exodus xii. 40, the family alone might
have multiplied as fast as the family of the famous Jonathan Edwards,
which, in a hundred years after his death, numbered two thousand souls.

Peter Cartwright, the venerable Methodist minister, celebrated his
eighty-seventh birthday on the first of September, 1871, at Pleasant
Plains, Sangamon County, Illinois, surrounded by one hundred and twenty
children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now, if this family of
two persons could so increase in eighty-seven years, why could not
Jacob's family, of seventy persons, increase in equal ratio? In that
case, even in the two hundred and fifteen years to which the bishop
limits the sojourn in Egypt, the Israelites would have amounted to over
eight millions. If it be objected that this was a case of special
blessing, we answer that the Israelites are expressly asserted to have
been specially and wonderfully multiplied. There is, therefore, no
improbability in Moses' numbers.

The bishop ascribes to Moses another of his own blunders; this time,
however, in reading his Bible in plain English, which correctly
translates the Hebrew--Exodus xiii. 2. The Lord comm