and Israel, whose souls had been quickened from above with spiritual life, had been striving with their perverse and stolid fellow-countrymen, and labouring to raise their minds to higher views of the Divine Nature, and to nobler conceptions of the meaning of that Name which they were daily profaning. And, if such was the state of things in Jerusalem itself, it is plain what practices must have existed everywhere throughout the cities of Judah and Samaria. The religious notions of the people at large must have been of a very debased and gross character, and their worship utterly confused and disorderly.

380. Just so in Zululand we are now teaching the natives to invest their own name for the Supreme Being, UNKULUNKulu, 'the Great-Great-One,'-corresponding, therefore, in meaning to ELOHIM,-with a higher, more spiritual meaning than they have ever thought of attaching to it. Yet many yearsperhaps, centuries-may pass, before the Zulus generally will separate the Name from all the absurd notions and legendary stories, which they may now in their wild heathen state connect with it. We must long expect to find that, while some few of higher mind, or more favoured with opportunities of learning, will embrace that Name, in all the deep significance which Missionaries attach to it, as the Name of their Great Creator, Father, and Friend, in Whom they live and move and have their being,' yet the great mass of the people will continue to use it ignorantly and irreverently even as now.

381. So, too, in Northern Europe, for many centuries after Christianity had been preached among the Scandinavian tribes, the orgies of the Feast of Yule must have often contrasted painfully, side by side with the joys of the Christmas Festival. Or, at least, if the latter was more duly observed in towns, where the clergy were at hand to stimulate and guide the devotions of the people, yet in the country districts the Name of CHRIST must have been long profaned, and the new religion desecrated, as it is now, in fact, by the semi-Christians of

China and New Zealand,—by the admixture with it of heathen rites and most incongruous preachings and practices.

382. In fact, the state of Israel may be compared with that which, in the view of many ardent Protestants, exists even now in some Roman Catholic communities. The people in such cases worship the same God as English Protestants: they call themselves Christians, as servants of the same Lord. Yet there is much in their religion, which not a few English travellers regard as profane and idolatrous, and denounce as gross abominations. The desire, however, of such persons would be, not to teach these (so-called) 'idolaters' to use another name as the name of ‘their King,' but to teach them to use the same name worthily. They call them idolaters, not because they bow at the name of Jesus, but because they worship images, adore the Host, and mix up, with the honours due to their one true Lord, the worship of Saints and Virgins innumerable, which, though, like the Baalim and Ashtaroth of old, supposed to shadow forth under various aspects the glory of the great Life-Giver,* have come at last to be regarded as separate divinities, and stand, as such, between the worshipper and the LORD, the Living God.

* OORT, de D. der B. in I., p.41, thinks that Hosea by 'the Baal,' ii.8, xiii.1, refers to the worship of the Tyrian Baal,' introduced by Jezebel, of which some remains were still existing in his time in Israel. But surely this had been rooted out by Jehu, 2K.x.18-28. And 'the Baal,' here and elsewhere, as Jer.ii.8, vii.9, xi.13,17, xii.16, xix.5, xxiii.13,27, xxxii.29,35, Zeph.i.4, refers rather to JHVH, the Syro-Phoenician Baal,-(comp. Hos.ii.16, where Israel is described as saying of Jehovah' my Baal')-of whom the various Baalim were only representatives, as the various Our Ladies' in different parts of the world, all represent 'the Virgin.

805

CHAPTER XXII.

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

383. We have thus completed a thorough examination of the Book of Genesis; and we have now before us the above results, based upon unquestionable facts. Other critics may differ as to some of the details: they may not approve all the conelusions, which have appeared to follow with good reason from the existence of these facts: they may not agree with me as to the precise ages, in which the different parts of Genesis were most probably written: they may not interpret, exactly as I have, the signs of time' which have been detected. I believe that the inferences which I have drawn, as to the ages of the different writers, from the indications before us, are just and sound, and, at all events, tenable and probable. But I lay no stress on this particular point, as to the chronological order of the different documents, or portions of documents, of which the Book of Genesis is composed. The two main conclusions for which I contend, and which I believe have been here so plainly established, that they will scarcely be denied,—are the facts of the non-Mosaic authorship of Genesis, and the unhistorical character of a great portion of its contents.

384. I assume it, then, to be certain that the Book of Genesis is a composite narrative, the work of several different authors, who lived in different ages and under different circumstances, removed, all of them, considerably from the time of the Exodus It is certain also that many portions of this narrative-as the

accounts of the Creation, the Fall, the Deluge, the separate origin of the tribes of Israel from those of Canaan, &c.—stand in direct contradiction to well-known facts of Science, and cannot therefore be regarded as historically true. But we have seen disclosed the mode in which the whole story has been composed, by the successive insertions of separate portions, written at different times from very different points of view, and often, as we have noted, distinctly at variance with each other. This being the case, it is impossible to place implicit confidence in any of these records, on whatever traditions they may have been based, as conveying to us in all their details unquestionable facts of veracious history; for we have not here the personal testimony of eyewitnesses to the reality of facts, which, on grounds internal or external, are in themselves inherently incredible. Still less can we receive these statements, as secured from all possibility of error, as being divinely, infallibly, true.

385. And, what is true of Genesis, is true, as we have seen, of the rest of the Pentateuch. Deuteronomy was written at a very late age, by the same writer who has composed more than half of the Book of Joshua, and who is shown by this alone to have lived long after the death of Moses, and who, in point of fact, lived in the days of the later kings. And we have traced, as we believe, the hand of the Deuteronomist making insertions also in Genesis, as we may trace it hereafter in the other Books of the Pentateuch. But, however this may be, certain it is that the section of most importance in the whole story of the Exodus, that about which, as a centre, that story, as it were, revolves, I mean, E.vi.2-7, which contains the account of the revelation of the name 'Jehovah' to Moses,-is due to the very same author, who wrote the first accounts of the Creation and the Deluge, the Elohistic writer of Genesis, who cannot have lived before the time of Samuel.

386. Hence we may infer that Exodus, Leviticus, and Num

bers must also be mainly the products of a later age than that of Moses, though (as far as we see at present) they may yet be found to contain some portions of Mosaic matter, or at least some notices of Mosaic institutions. But even these last must be limited in extent, if it be true, as we have seen reason to believe, that the name Jehovah' itself is a name of later introduction into the religious worship of Israel, and that there are no trustworthy signs of any Levitical priesthood having existed in Israel before the days of David and Solomon,rather, that there are very plain indications of the contrary.

387. Yet, for all this, the very existence of such a narrative as that of the Elohist is, as we have argued, a very strong proof that it was based on real traditions, as to some former great event in the nation's history. Bishop BROWNE, indeed, says, p.78:

Everything, then, tends to prove that the history of the Pentateuch must be in its main facts true. The people without question came out of Egypt, sojourned in the wilderness, conquered Canaan, and must have been both numerous and welltrained, or such a conquest would have been impossible. This is exactly what the Pentateuch says, and what Bishop COLENSO denies!

To the assertion, which closes the above paragraph, I can only give a direct and emphatic contradiction: nor can I understand how Bishop BROWNE, as a Christian controversialist, could have allowed himself to make such a statement.

388. Except as regards the multitude of the Israelites,-and then only as regards the vast numbers given in the Pentateuch, which Deans MILMAN and STANLEY, Dr. VAUGHAN, and a number of other devout commentators, have also supposed to be excessive,-I have not denied any single one of the points, which Bishop BROWNE has quoted above, as summarising the 'main facts of the history of the Pentateuch.' Rather, I have distinctly assumed the fundamental truth of each of them, in the following words of a passage, to which Bishop BROWNE himself refers, p.68:

There may have been, as we have said,

...

many legendary stories of their