'After reading that article, I felt more hopelessly than ever how hollow is the ground, upon which we have so long

25,-"The accomplishment of this [miracle] is supposed by some [N. B.] to have been by the arresting of the earth in its rotation. In what other words, then, could the miracle have been expressed? Should it have been said, 'So the earth ceased to revolve, and made the sun appear to stand still in the midst of heaven?' This is not the language we should use, even in these days of scientific light. Were so great a wonder again to appear, would even an astronomer, as he looked into the heavens, exclaim, 'The earth stands still!'? Would he not be laughed at as a pedant? Whereas, to use the language of appearances, and thus to imitate the style of the Holy Scriptures themselves, would be most natural and intelligible.'

It will be observed that Archd. PRATT does not commit himself to maintaining the above view: he says, 'it is supposed by some' to have been accomplished thus. But he argues as if this explanation were possible, and not improbable; that is to say, he lends the weight of his high position and mathematical celebrity to the support of a view, which every natural philosopher will know to be wholly untenable. For,-not to speak of the fact that if the earth's motion were suddenly stopped, a man's feet would be arrested, while his body was moving at the rate (on the equator) of 1,000 miles an hour, (or, rather, 1,000 miles a minute, since not only must the earth's diurnal rotation on its axis be stopped, but its annual motion also through space,) so that every human being and animal would be dashed to pieces in a moment, and a mighty deluge overwhelm the earth, unless all this were prevented by a profusion of miraculous interferences,-one point is at once fatal to the above solution. Archd. PRATT quotes only the words, 'So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day;' and although this is surely one of the most prominent questions, in respect of which it is asserted that 'Scripture and Science are at variance,' he dismisses the whole subject in a short note, and never even mentions the moon. But the Bible says, ' The sun stood still, and the moon stayed,' Jo. x. 13; and the arresting of the earth's motion, while it might cause the appearance of the sun 'standing still,' would not account for the moon 'staying.'

It is impossible not to feel the force of Archd. PRATT's own observation, p. 30, 'The lesson we learn from this example is this: How possible it is that,

been standing, with reference to the subject of the Inspiration of Scripture. I see that there is a very general demand made upon the clerical authors of 'Essays and Reviews,' that they should leave the Church of England, or, at least, resign their preferments. For my own part, however much I may dissent, as I do, from some of their views, I am very far indeed from judging them for remaining, as they still do, as ministers within her pale,-knowing too well, by my own feelings, how dreadful would be the wrench, to be torn from all one has loved and revered, by going out of the Church. Perhaps, they may feel it to be their duty to the Church itself, and to that which they hold to be the Truth, to abide in their stations, unless they are formally and legally excluded from them, and to claim for all her members, clerical as well as lay, that freedom of thought and utterance, which is the very essence of our Protestant religion, and without which, indeed, in this age of advancing science, the Church of England would soon become a mere dark prison-house, in which the mind both of the teacher and the taught would be fettered still with the chains of past ignorance, instead of being, as we fondly believed, the very home of religious liberty, and the centre of life and light for all the world. But, whatever may be the fate of that book or its authors, it is surely impossible to put down, in these days, the spirit of honest, truthseeking investigation into such matters as these. To attempt to do this, would only be like the futile endeavour to sweep back the tide which is rising at our very doors.

even while we are contending for truth, our minds may be enslaved to error by long-cherished prepossessions!'

This is assuredly no time for such trifling. Instead of trying to do this, or to throw up sandbanks, which may serve for the present moment to hide from our view the swelling waters, it is plainly our duty before God and Man to see that the foundations of our faith are sound, and deeply laid in the very Truth itself.

'For myself, if I cannot find the means of doing away with my present difficulties, I see not how I can retain my Episcopal Office, in the discharge of which I must require from others a solemn declaration, that they 'unfeignedly believe all the Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament,' which, with the evidence now before me, it is. impossible wholly to believe in.*

'I need not say to you that, whatever support and comfort I may feel in the consciousness of doing what appears to be right, it would be no light thing for me, at my time of life, to be cast adrift upon the world, and have to begin life again under heavy pressure and amidst all unfavourable circumstances, to be separated from many of my old friends, to have my name cast out as evil even by some of them, and to have it trodden under foot, as an unclean thing, by others, who do not know me, not to speak of the pain it would cause me to leave a work like this, which has been committed to me in this land, to which my whole heart and soul have been devoted, and for which, as it seemed, God had fitted me in some measure more than for others, a work in which I would joyfully still, if it please God, spend and be spent.

* This was written before the recent decision of the Court of Arches, by which, of course, the above conclusion is materially affected.

'But God's Will must be done. The Law of Truth must be obeyed. I shall await your reply, before I take any course, which may commit me in so serious a matter. And I feel that I shall do right to take time for careful deliberation. Should my difficulties not be removed, I shall, if God will, come to England, and there again consult some of my friends. But then, if the step must be taken, in God's Name I must take it; and He Himself will provide for me future work on earth, of some kind or other, if He has work for me to do.'

The above letter I wrote, but did not forward, in the early part of 1861. I had not then gone so deeply into the question as I have done since. And, as I do not wish to be misunderstood by some, whom I truly esteem and love,to whom I owe all duty and respect, but allegiance to the Truth above all,-I may here say that, at the time when I took counsel with my Episcopal Brethren at the Capetown Conference in January, 1861, I had not even begun to enter on these enquiries, though I fully intended to do so on my return to Natal. Then, however, I had not the most distant idea of the results to which I have now arrived. I am sensible, of course, that, in stating this, I lay myself open to the objection, that the views, which I now hold, are comparatively of recent date, and, having been adopted within less than two years, may be found after a while untenable, and be as quickly abandoned. I do not myself see any probability or possibility of this, so far as the main question is concerned, viz. the unhistorical character of the story of the Exodus, which is exhibited in the First Part of this work. But, however this may be, I have thought

it right to state the simple truth. And, though these views are, comparatively speaking, new to me,—and will be new, as I believe, to most of my English readers, even to many of the Clergy, of whom, probably, few have examined the Pentateuch closely since they took Orders, while parts of it some of them may never really have studied at all,—yet I am by this time well aware that most of the points here considered have been already brought forward, though not exactly in the present form, by various continental writers, with whom the critical and scientific study of the Scriptures has made more progress than it has yet done in England.*

Some, indeed, may be ready to say of this book, as the Quarterly says of the Essayists, 'the whole apparatus is drawn bodily from the German Rationalists.' This, however, is not the case; and I will, at once, state plainly to what extent I have been indebted to German sources, in the original composition of this work. Having determined that it was my duty, without loss of time, to engage myself thoroughly in the task, of examining into the foundations. of the current belief in the historical credibility of the Mosaic story, I wrote to a friend in England, and requested him to send me some of the best books for entering on such a course of study, begging him to forward to me books on both

* HENGSTENBERG is very fond of representing almost all his opponents as followers of DE WETTE:-'They supply themselves very freely from his stores, and have made scarcely the least addition to them.' Pent. ii. p. 3. This, if true, would tend to diminish the force of their multiplied testimony, and to reduce it to the single voice of DE WETTE. But the same difficulties, if they really exist, must, of course, occur to all, who bring a fair and searching criticism to bear upon the subject, however they may differ in their mode of stating them.