t of the day of which he
was speaking, as the slightest reflection on the context shows.

In Chapter XI. the bishop assumes the functions of Major-General, and
masses his army--rank, and file, wagon train, hospital, commissariat,
contrabands, droves of cattle, and camp followers--into a mass of fifty
front and twenty-two miles long. Very naturally he gets into a
tremendous jam, out of which we have no intention of extricating him;
merely remarking that bishops do not make good generals, and that Arab
Sheikhs do not march in that way. They scatter themselves and their
cattle over the whole country for forty or fifty miles, and have no
confusion; and attend moreover to Moses' sanitary camp regulations, in
their several encampments.

In Chapter XII. he exerts himself to starve the cattle for want of
pasture and water; garbling Moses' account of the wilderness for that
purpose, Deuteronomy viii. 15, "Beware that thou forget not Jehovah, thy
God, who led thee through the great and terrible wilderness, wherein
were fiery serpents, and scorpions, _where there was no water_." Here he
stops, as if this was all that referred to the subject. But when we turn
to the passage, we find that he omits the most material part of the
speech. For Moses goes on to say, in the hearing of all Israel, who
could certainly have contradicted him had the fact not been well known
to them, "Who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint." Moses'
account is quite self-consistent, and the bishop's garbling of it is
dishonest. There were districts of Arabia so dry and sterile that but
for this miraculous supply both men and beasts had perished; but the
greater part of the country was simply uninhabited pasture land,
sufficiently productive even now to support several Arab tribes; and
much better wooded and watered then. The monuments of Egypt abundantly
testify the number and power of its shepherd kings, who pastured their
flocks upon it in their successive invasions of Egypt.

The bishop says, Chapter XIII., that the climax of inconsistencies
between facts and figures is reached when we come to the notice by the
Lord to Israel, contained in Exodus xxiii. 29, "I will not drive them,
the Canaanites, out from before thee in one year, lest the land become
desolate, and the beasts of the field multiply against thee." The
argument is that a population of two millions was assigned to a
territory of only eleven thousand square miles; and consequently