Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/594

578 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 had thought to convert, awakened to the legendary character of the Old Testament, and with his clear, practical mind he realized the danger which threatened the English Church and Christianity—the danger of tying its religion and morality to interpretations and conceptions of Scripture more and more widely seen and felt to be contrary to facts. He saw the especial danger of sham explanations; of covering up facts which must soon be known, and which, when all was revealed, must inevitably bring the plain people of England to regard their teachers, even the most deserving, as "solemnly constituted impostors"; ecclesiastics whose tenure depends on assertions which they know to be untrue. Therefore it was that, when his catechumens questioned him regarding some of the legends in the Old Testament, the bishop determined to tell the truth. He says: "My heart answered in the words of the prophet, 'Shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord?' I determined not to do so."

But none of these considerations availed in his behalf at first. The outcry against the work was deafening; churchmen and dissenters rushed forward to attack it. Archdeacon Denison, chairman of the Committee of Convocation appointed to examine it, uttered a noisy anathema. Convocation solemnly condemned it; and a zealous colonial bishop, relying upon a nominal supremacy, deposed and excommunicated its author, declaring him "given over to Satan." On both sides of the Atlantic the press groaned with "answers," some of these being especially injurious to the cause they were intended to serve, and none more so than sundry efforts by the bishops themselves. One of the points upon which they attacked him was his assertion that the reference in Leviticus to the hare chewing its cud contains an error. Upon this Prof. Hitzig of Leipsic, probably the best Hebrew scholar of his time,