/-.- 
 
 rV FEW REMARKSV^^^^ 
 
 93isi)op Coleuso ou t\)t ^entateucl). 
 
 REV. W. H. FOAVLE, 
 
 CURATK OF ASHBRITTLE, AND LATE CHAPLAIN OF PORT Ef-IZAUKTH, 
 CAPE OF GOOD HOPE. 
 
 "What if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the 
 FAITH of God of none effect ? God forbid : yea, let God be true, but 
 
 every MAN a liar ; THAT ThOU MIGHTEST BE JUSTIFIED IN ThY SAYINGS, 
 AND MIGHTEST OVERCOME WHEN ThOU ART JUDGED." RoM. III. 3, 4. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 JOSEPH MASTERS, ALDERSGATE STREET, 
 
 AND NEW IJOND STREET. 
 
 MD«CCLXIII. 
 
LONDON 1 
 
 )'HINTK11 BY JOSEPH MASTERS AND CO. 
 
 ALDERSGATE STREET. 
 
A FEW REMARKS 
 
 ON 
 
 BISHOP COLENSO ON THE PENTATEUCH. 
 
 We who believe in the Word of God, and look for the fulfil- 
 ment of its predictions, believe that Antichrist shall come; that 
 is, that before the end, some gigantic form of evil shall arise, 
 which in its development shall more and more assume the form of 
 direct opposition to the kingdom of Jesus Christ. We infer also, 
 from Scripture, that this opposition shall not be open but covert ; 
 that the instrument whereby Satan shall work his final act of 
 opposition to Him who hath " bruised his head,'' shall be, not 
 so much by open denial of the truth, as by secretly undermining 
 it— the " deceiver being himself deceived,^' — that those who 
 shall fall beneath the power of this great evil, shall not be so 
 much open blasphemers, as " believers in a lie,'' drawn aside 
 from the truth, by " a strong delusion." 
 
 It becomes us not to speak positively as to the particular 
 form which tJie Antichrist shall assume ; we may not ])oint the 
 finger at this person or that, this thing or that thing, and say 
 positively, '' there is the Antichrist'' Yet the Scrii)tures, pre- 
 dictive of this evil, certainly seem to stamp it with one charac- 
 teristic mark — an opposition to the inspired word of God, and 
 the truth as handed down and interpreted hij the Church. Thus 
 the Apostle, in 2 Thess. ii., after speaking of Antichrist, that 
 man of sin, says, ''All shall be damned who believe not the 
 
truth.'' And he then goes on to '' give thanks to God in behalf 
 of the Thessalonians, because He had from the beginning chosen 
 them to salvation of the Spirit, and belief of t lie truth ." And 
 he then bids them "hold fast the traditions which they had 
 been taught, whether by word or epistle/' 
 
 Without presuming then, to denominate this or that thing 
 the Antichrist, we cannot witness the efforts being now made, 
 not by openly professed unbelievers, but by men holy in life, 
 and alleged earnestness for the truth — v,'e cannot, for instance, 
 take up " Colenso on the Pentateuch," at the same time con- 
 sidering that he is an angel, or Bishop of the Church of Christ, 
 without many painful sensations and fearful surmisings, that for 
 our own days has been reserved that revelation of " the mystery 
 of iniquity," which hath ''already worked" in partial denials of 
 the truth, but which now being '' no longer let," shows its bold 
 unblushing form in an open denial of the inspiration of the 
 Word of God. And if what the Bishop says, in the work be- 
 fore us, be indeed true, (p. xxvi.,) that " not a few among the 
 more highly educated classes of society in England, and multi- 
 tudes among the more intelligent operatives, are in danger of 
 drifting into irreligion and practical atheism, under this dim 
 sense of the unsoundness of the popular view;'' (the popular 
 view, thank God ! being the infallibilitij of the Bible,) if this be 
 true, as the Bishop states, we can no longer doubt that '' the 
 mystery of iniquity doth already work ;" and, if it be true, as 
 is also stated, (p. xxiii.,) that " a very wide spread distrust does 
 exist among the intelligent laity in England, as to the sound- 
 ness of the ordinary view of Scripture inspiration,'^ then we have 
 no hesitation in saying, that '' even now are there many Anti- 
 christs." And if, as the Bishop states further, (pp. xxiii., xxiv.) 
 that " the greater body of the more intelligent students of our 
 universities, no longer come forward to devote themselves to the 
 service of the Church," because " the condition of a young- 
 man's entering the ministry of the Church of England, is, that 
 he must solemnly bind himself for life to believe unfeignedly 
 in all the canonical Scriptures ;" then we confess that the leaven 
 has worked indeed, and is likely to work. 
 
 We would, however, in passing, express our thanks to God 
 
that the above statement, if diselosing a lamentable fact as 
 regards the rising generation, bears its testimony to the faith- 
 fulness of our bianch of the Church of Christ, which as yet 
 excludes them from her orders ; and we would recommend to 
 the " more intelligent students of our universities/' the declara- 
 tion of the Apostle to the youthful Timothy, ''AH Scripture is 
 given by inspiration of God;" a declaration which certainly 
 referred to the Old Testament, those Scriptures which '' Timothy 
 had known from a child." And we would recommend to Bishop 
 Colenso, to consider the command given by S. Paul to Bishop 
 Timothy and Bishop Titus, to "speak the things which become 
 sound doctrine," and instead of pandering to the uusanctitied 
 acumen of the young men of our universities, to heed the admo- 
 nition which the Apostle gave to Timothy and Titas, to exhort 
 "young men to be sober minded," (Titus ii. 6,) and the deacons 
 that " they hold the mystery of the faith," (1 Tim. iii. 9,) with 
 many exhortations to the same eflfect. However, thank God ! 
 we are not compelled to take all Bishop Colenso says for gospel, 
 whether it relates to his expositions of Scripture, or his alleged 
 facts. We are not obliged to believe his ipse dixit about " the 
 educated classes," or " the intelligent operatives," being scared 
 at the idea that the Bible is inspired ; nor what he says about 
 the students at the universities "shrinking from the ministry." 
 Nor are we obliged to tremble for the Church of England, 
 merely because he says she " must fall through her own internal 
 weakness, by losing her hold upon the growing intelligence of 
 all classes, unless some remedy be soon applied to the present 
 state of things," (p. xxiv). 
 
 We can take the Bishop's statement most feelingly in another 
 sense, and we do tremble at the thought that the Church of 
 England must fall by her own internal weakness, by losing her 
 hold upon all that is worthy of being called " the intelligence of 
 all classes," unless some remedy be very soon applied to the 
 present state of things; a state of things, indeed, in which a 
 Bishop of tlie Church, "sitting in the temple of God," and, we 
 may add, "opposing himself to all that is called God, or that is 
 worshipped," is allowed to hold his post, and disseminate errors 
 contrary to his ordination and consecration vows. 
 
Not all the Bishop^s protestations of " sincerity in searching 
 after the Truth/-' his ^' sense of obligation to declare the Truth," 
 nor even our respect for his untiring zeal and self-denying 
 labours in the missionary cause, will induce us to forbear de- 
 nouncing him as a heretic. We wait for no authoritative sen- 
 tence, though we trust that such will emanate; but we place 
 his book beside the Book of Life, and we pronounce it a mon- 
 strous, unblushing piece of heresy. We repeat our hope, and 
 trust that, ere long, some judicial condemnation will emanate 
 from those who have authority given them to decide in such 
 cases. We really marvel at the Bishop forcing to his aid the 
 Protestant character of the Church. Hear this, ye ghosts of 
 the Reformers and Martyrs for the sake of the Truth ! '^ I can- 
 not but believe that our Church, representing, as it is supposed 
 to do, the religious feeling of a free, Protestant nation, requires 
 us now, as in the days of the Reformation, to protest against all 
 perversion of the Truth, and all suppression of it, for the sake 
 of peace, or by mere authority." (P. xxxiii.) 
 
 If Protestantism can be stretched to this extent, let us by all 
 means give it up in name and in practice. We trust, however, 
 that the Bishop^s view of the character of our Protestant nation 
 and our Reformed Church will not screen him from a protesta- 
 tion of the Church against his own errors. Shall it be that, in 
 things pertaining to God^s unchanging Truth alone, men can be 
 false to their colours, without being denounced as traitors to 
 Him Whose heralds they are ? Shall it be that the promulga- 
 tion of his own private and unauthorized opinions, on a recent 
 occasion, recalled from his presidency an able and most useful 
 servant of his Sovereign ; and shall one whose office it is to pro- 
 mulgate God's Truth and teach His Word, and look to it that 
 others do the same, be permitted, in the garb of the Church, to 
 give the weight and authority of his high office to the dispensa- 
 tion of heresy ? For the Truth's sake, for the sake of the 
 Church which is " a witness and keeper of Holy Writ," for 
 the great missionary cause, we hope and trust it will not be 
 so. We who subscribe to the cause of the Church's missions, 
 and cast our money into the treasury of God, with the oft- 
 repeated prayer that He would "take from all Jews, infidels, 
 
and heretics contempt of His Word'' we do not much approve 
 of a state of things in which we must use the prayer for the 
 teacher as well as the taught, the missionary as well as the 
 heathen. We have always given our subscriptions in the hope 
 and belief that our missionaries, more especially our Bishops, 
 are men sound in the faith, and that we are aiding to extend, 
 in heathen lands, that " Church in which the pure Word of 
 God is preached/' In the present instance, alas ! we believe a 
 solitary one, we find ourselves deceived. We find the missionary 
 field has only been a hot-bed for forcing into fruit the seeds 
 of heresy which had been sown before. " It has happened,'^ says 
 the Bishop (p. vi.,) " that in translating the Scriptures into the 
 Zulu tongue, I have been brought face to face with questions 
 which caused me some uneasiness in former days.'' And again 
 (p. vii.,) '' I have been brought face to face with the very 
 questions which I then put by." 
 
 And what shall we say to such a passage as the following ? 
 (p. vii.) : "Whilst translating the story of the Flood, I have had 
 a simple-minded, but intelligent native, — one with the docility 
 of a child, but the reasoning powers of mature age, — look up 
 and ask, 'Is all this true ? Do you really believe that all this 
 happened thus ? — that all the beasts, and birds, and creeping 
 things upon the earth, large and small, from hot countries and 
 cold, came thus by pairs, and entered into the ark with 
 Noah V '' 
 
 Such was the question — a very natural one — of an uncon- 
 verted heathen, but one, we should have thought, not very 
 difficult for his spiritual teacher to answer. The Bishop, how- 
 ever, instead of directing his inquiring mind to the truth, "Is 
 anything too hard for the Lord V turns to his geological know- 
 ledge and love of figures, and returns an answer to his own 
 mind, which he flatters himself is not " speaking lies in the 
 Name of the Lord." 
 
 The above passage from the Prophet Zechariah (xiii.,) which 
 the Bishop quotes, seems to us to be somewhat a propos of the 
 position which he has chosen for himself in the Church of 
 Christ. For, be it observed, the Prophet is speaking of those 
 teachers whose doctrine tended to draw away men from the 
 
Truth of God. And he says (verse 3), " It shall come to pass 
 that^ if any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother 
 that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live, for thou 
 sjieakest lies in the Name of the Lord ; and his father and his 
 mother shall thrust him through when he prophesieth/' A 
 suggestion this which we trust the Church, the Bishop^s spiri- 
 tual parent, will not be slow to adopt ; and w^e would fain enter- 
 tain the hope that the penitent state of the false prophet here 
 described may be that of the Bishop, who, beneath the wounds 
 of ecclesiastical censure, will be brought to acknowledge that 
 "the wounds are those which he received in the house of his 
 friends," who, by severe discipline, were instrumental in bring- 
 ing him to a confession of his error. (See Zech. xiii. 3 — 6.) 
 
 We blush for the Church of England when we read of one of 
 her Bishops at a loss to answer in the Name of the Lord, " a 
 simple-minded, intelligent native, without being startled by a 
 ghost of his own imagination." We are not told what answer 
 '^ satisfied" the poor heathen inquirer " for the time, without 
 throwing any discredit upon the general veracity of the Bible 
 history." But we should have thought the task not very diffi- 
 cult. One endued with the " reasoning powers of mature age," 
 coupled with ^' the docility of the child," is no unapt pupil. Such 
 an one in the school of Christ is the perfection of a Chris- 
 tian. The Bible speaks of such, but they are trained in an- 
 other, and far different school to the Bishop^s. Such are they 
 for whom our Lord " thanked His heavenly Father that to 
 them He had revealed things which were hidden from the more 
 wise and prudent" in their own eyes. 
 
 The Bishop possesses (it were well in this instance if he had 
 less) abundance of the reasoning powers of mature age ; we 
 would recommend him to temper it with "the simple-minded- 
 ness and child-like docility of his intelligent native.'^ 
 
 Were we disposed even to approach a jest on so serious a sub- 
 ject, we should style the Bishop's work — " the Bible tested by 
 the rules of arithmetic, and found wanting; by Bishop Colenso, 
 author of various other books of Arithmetic." The fact, how- 
 ever, is, and we grieve to say it, that the work throughout con- 
 tains not one particle of faith: it is " salt which has lost its 
 
savour, and wherewith, then, shall it be seasoned ? It is, thence- 
 forth, fit for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot 
 of men." Alas ! we fear it will not universally meet with its 
 just reward. We fear there are hundreds in these days " re- 
 markable for fearlessness," as the Bishop says, and, as he hopes, 
 "for sincerity, in the pursuit of truth"— we should have said 
 remarkable for a fearless handling of divine truths-there are 
 hundreds, we fear, who will, hereafter, (God grant it be not too 
 late to amend !) trace their "stumblings on the dark mountains 
 of error, to the deceitful landmarks which the Bishop set for 
 them, who, while they looked for light, turned it into the 
 shadow of death, and made it gross darkness." 
 
 But, although, as we fear, the Bishop's work will do untold 
 mischief to many in this present age of doubt and scepticism 
 we are rather amused at the confidence with which he speaks ot 
 his own powers. He really seems to think the whole fabric of 
 faith will totter and fall beneath the weight of his arithmetic. 
 Nay, so thoroughly is he embued with the sight of his own 
 figures, and so confident in the power of his arithmetical calcu- 
 lations, that he seems verily to believe, that even as in a division 
 sum the quotient, multiplied by the divisor, will produce the 
 dividend, and so prove the sum correct; even so, the whole 
 Pentateuch history must fall to the ground by the magic wand 
 of a Cambridge wrangler, who brings God's dealings with His 
 ancient people to the test of addition, subtraction, and multi- 
 plication. Thus the history of the Exodus must fail in the 
 same way, as m the eyes of posterity, the history of the move- 
 ments of our armies to the Crimea would be considered a myth, 
 if in the Commissariat department, so many unaccountable 
 number of tents were assigned to so few means of carriage, or 
 such a small amount of forage was said to have sustained so 
 
 many horses. , . , , t>- i 
 
 Yes it is by such miserable sophistry as this that the Bishop 
 seems 'to take for granted that the faith of many will be shaken. 
 So we gather, at least, from such passages as the to llowuig : 
 "The result of my inquiry is this, that I have arrived at the 
 conviction, as painful to myself, at first, as it may be to my 
 readers, that the Pentateuch, as a whole, cannot possibly liavc 
 
10 
 
 been written by Moses, or by anyone acquainted personally 
 with the facts, and further, that the (so-called) jNIosaic account, 
 by whomsoever written .... cannot be regarded as historically 
 true." (p. 8.) Again : " I trust I shall be preserved from say- 
 ing a single word that may cause unnecessary pain to those who 
 now embrace, with all their hearts, as a primary article of faith, 
 the ordinary view of Scripture inspiration. Pain^ I know, I 
 must give to some." 
 
 Again : those who are presupposed to be affected by this work, 
 are '^ meek, lowly, loving souls, who are walking daily with God, 
 and have been taught to consider a belief in the historical vera- 
 city of the story of the Exodus, an essential part of their religion, 
 upon which, indeed, as it seems to them, the whole fabric of 
 their faith and hope in God is based." (p. 12.) 
 
 In the name of the faithful, " meek, lowly, loving souls, who 
 are walking daily with God," we think we can relieve the Bishop 
 from his fears. Pain he will cause, beyond doubt, but we weep not 
 for ourselves, but for him. We think we can assure him, that his 
 work -will not shake one soul endued with the " grain of mustard- 
 seed faith." He has so considerably overshot the mark — he has 
 so entirely sunk all faith in a sea of figures, that his work cannot, 
 we should say, possibly do more than help the sceptic on in his 
 scepticism, and the infidel in his infidelity, whilst it will leave 
 unscathed the child of God, who walks by faith. And when we 
 read such a miserable piece of divinity, amounting to blasphemy, 
 viz., that our Blessed Lord '^ was not acquainted more than any 
 educated Jew of the age with the mysteries of modern science ; 
 nor that He knew more about the age and authorship of the Pen- 
 tateuch than the pious and learned of His own age," — when I say, 
 we find this to be the best subterfuge for escaping from the weight 
 which he evidently felt under the passages of Scripture to which 
 this is an answer (pp. xxx., xxxi.), we feel that we may apply to 
 the Bishop that proverb " Quos Deus vult jjcrdere, prius de- 
 77ieniat." It really seems as though, at this very point of his 
 work, the Spirit of Him who inspired the Bible, removed for a 
 mon^ent the outward beauty of the sepulchre, and displayed to 
 the eye which might be dazzled by its fair appearance, '^the 
 dead men's bones and all uncleanness," the imbecility and the 
 
11 
 
 maze of false reasoning into wliich be is led, who presumes m 
 shoes of earth to tread on holy ground. In bis better moments, 
 when unbiassed by the favourite view which he has here under- 
 taken to defend — when he takes up his Bible, not for the pur- 
 pose of argument and discussion about its inspiration, but as 
 one who looks for comfort under the burthen of sins, and whose 
 ofHce it is to direct the darkened heathen to the Divine Saviour 
 — when in this frame of mind, which we trust is his in his less 
 argumentative moments, the Bishop takes up that passage, "Had 
 ye believed Moses ye would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me/' 
 with his own remarks upon it, we cannot believe but that he will be 
 startled by his own words. Is the Bishop aware when it was that 
 our Lord spake those words — that it was at the close of His minis- 
 terial office, not when, as a child. He was said to ''increase in 
 wisdom as in stature,^' — that it was at the close of a discourse, 
 in which He had spoken of Himself as equal with the Father, as 
 the future Judge of quick and dead, as, " the Son whom 
 men should honour as they honour the Father V This w^as 
 the time at which He referred to Moses, as testifying of Him, 
 and writing of Him ; and yet this is the period of our Lord's 
 ministry, in which the Bishop speaks of Him as limited in His 
 knowledge concerning His own revealed Word, and in the very 
 hearing of our Lord's declarations of His Divine power and 
 knowledge, the Bishop says, as it were, " Is not this the Son 
 of Joseph, whose father and mother we know ? How then is 
 it that He saith, I came down from heaven V 
 
 And whilst, by anticipation, the Bishop throws down our 
 fabric of faith, by anticipation also, he promises to build up 
 another. By anticipation he comforts those who mourn over 
 the destruction of the first Temple, by a comfortable hint that 
 the glory of the latter Temple shall be greater than the glory of 
 the former : only, unfortunately, the promise in this instance, 
 lacks the only thing which, in the original, gave it all its force, 
 \'\z., '' saith the Lord.'' In this instance we have only, '^ thus 
 saith Bishop Colenso." '' I cannot but feel,'' says he, (p. 147,) 
 *' that having thus been compelled to take an active part in dis- 
 playing the groundlessness of that notion of Scripture inspira- 
 tion, which so many have regarded as the very foundation of 
 
12 
 
 their faith and hope, a demand may be made upon me for some- 
 thing to supply the loss, for something to fill up the aching void, 
 which will undoubtedly be felt at first, where that faith which 
 has been built only or mainly upon the basis of the historical 
 truth of the Pentateuch, must be in danger of collapsing, toge- 
 ther with its support/^ 
 
 We must again express our amusement at the Bishop^s con- 
 fidence in his own powers to plant and to pull up, to throw down 
 and re- build at his pleasure. In the name of the faithful we think 
 we can again relieve him from his fears, and assure him that he is 
 mistaken about "the aching void,^%vhich he supposes his powerful 
 arithmetic will create. We do not anticipate an aching void in 
 the soul of a single simple-minded docile, faithful child of God, 
 and if there were such we should pity the soul which looked to 
 the Bishop to fill up the void. For ourselves, we can truly say, 
 we should find no sort of comfort in the imaginative Bible which 
 would be substituted. We should have no sort of comfort in a 
 Bible of which our own hearts should be allowed to judge as to 
 what was true, and what was false. If that which has been 
 hitherto esteemed the Word of God were found to fail, we should 
 find no comfort in God's voice within our conscience, for we 
 should have lost that sure Word which taught us to know God: 
 we should be at sea without chart or compass. If one portion 
 of the Bible be proved to be false, where with certainty could v.e 
 put our hand upon that which is true ? Indeed, it would be, 
 many men, many minds — many minds, many different kinds of 
 Bibles. 
 
 Who shall stay the torrent of error, when the barriers of cer- 
 tain, defined, revealed Truth have been broken down ? What 
 would remain for us but to drift with the tide ? We should 
 have no confidence in the voice of the conscience after the voice 
 of the Bible had ceased to give a certain sound. In the absence 
 of Revelation, S. Paul tells us (Rom. i.) that the light of natural 
 reason was God^s voice to the Gentile world ; but it was not to 
 take the place of direct Revelation. Had we no revealed Word 
 of God, He would still not be " without witness, in giving us rain 
 from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with joy 
 and gladness/^ but then this only holds good in the absence of 
 
13 
 
 the written Word. No; the Bible as it has been handed down 
 and witnessed to from the beg.nning-this, or nothmg. We 
 have no sueh accommodating consciences as the Bjshop ant.c- 
 pates (p. 153), which would lead us to recognise the third and 
 Lth hapters of Exodus as inspired, whilst ntervcning chap- 
 ters or any other portion, are the writings of an impostor or 
 fallible person. We must have something tangible,- something 
 which we can lay our hand upon and say, ' Between these two 
 covers lies the Word of God. To this I bow with reverence ; to 
 this I succumb my own puny understanding, and adore where 1 
 
 cannot understand.' „u„„l,l 
 
 And what arc we of the present age, that the Bishop shou d 
 imagine-an idea in which he seems to revel-that we should 
 be Especially chosen by Gon to prove that to be false whic 
 hithcL has'been held most reverentially to be true ? Wha 
 there in the present age to lead the Bishop to suppose that 
 !< th time is come, in the ordering of Goo's Providence when 
 such a work as this (the submitting the Word of Gon to human 
 crittism,to pronounce what is true, and what false) must be 
 iTn "hand ?" What are we, I say, of this age, that sueh a 
 i should be especially reserved for us ? Are we so mueh 
 holier in our lives and conversation than those saints of past 
 :ys,who have gone down to their graves with the Bi We en- 
 graven on their hearts as God's unerring Word Is t the ab- 
 sence of the childlike spirit, the walking by sight, and no by 
 f kh ? or the aptness to scoff at things Divine Is it the adula- 
 tl of the human understanding and mental acuteness which 
 so distinguish our own days, when in matters of religion eve 
 In " erteems his own things, and not the things of others 
 or is it the multitude of " Ites" and " /W' mto wb.ch Ch- 
 tians are divided, hardly any two agreeing toge her ?-o is it the 
 ve of many waxing cold, which our LoKO fo-t^ld should b 
 contemporary with " false Christs and false prophets, who shall 
 dec ve many ?-Is it any one of these characteristics of our 
 d yT r all of them together, which the Bishop thinks marks 
 the' ;resent age as designed by Providence for such a work as 
 criticising the infallibility of His Word ? 
 
 Anl what benefit does the Bishop hope and expect will accrue 
 
14 
 
 to the Church of Christ, when the missionaries shall no longer 
 be restrained from making the Word of God bow down to the 
 natural reason and intellect of the Zulu or the learned Hindoo, 
 and when " the stories of the Bible shall be held to be only on a 
 l)ar with their own traditions/^ and *' when we shall be able to 
 meet the Mahommedan, and Brahmin, and Buddhist, on other 
 and better terms than we do, being no longer obliged to main- 
 tain ever}^ part of the Bible as an infallible record of the 
 past, and every word as the sacred utterance of the Spirit of 
 God ?" 
 
 And what compensating result does the Bishop expect, when 
 he and every other Bishop shall be allowed to admit to the Dia- 
 conate any person who, instead of being tested as to his sound- 
 ness by the Articles and Formularies of the Church, shidl answer 
 the requirements of each Bishop who holds that to be God's 
 Word which recommends itself to his own imagination ? Was 
 this the way in which this country was evangelized by Augus- 
 tine and his followers ? or is this the way in which the Gospel 
 is still making its way in heathen lands ? We trow not. It 
 was bad enough, we learn, when, in the Corinthian Church, 
 each one had "a doctrine, had a psalm, had an interpretation/' 
 How much worse will it be when each Bishop has his own 
 Bible ? The Apostle would hardly call this doing things '^ de- 
 cently and in order/^ 
 
 The Bishop, we learn from his work (p. xxix.,) intends here- 
 after to examine into the question, in what way the interpretation 
 of the New Testament is affected by the unhistorical character 
 of the Pentateuch. If the "Old Testament be not contrary to 
 the New," we should suppose it very easy to show that it must 
 be very considerably effected. We are only sorry to see that 
 the recent decision in the Court of Arches has relieved the 
 Bishop from the weight, which he had before felt, of his ordina- 
 tion and consecration vows. (P. xii.) We still hope, however, 
 that when the attack is made upon the New Testament, the 
 work wall come out under the title, "A work by Colenso, late 
 Bishop in the Church of England.'' 
 
 It may be we shall continue hereafter our remarks upon 
 the Bishop's work, and shall hope to show how the letting in 
 
15 
 
 of the light of faith will disperse the hcaj) of rubbish beneath 
 which he has endeavoured to bury the Word of God. In the 
 mcantiuic we commend the Bible more and more to the reader's 
 prayerful, faithful meditation ; and in proportion as he thus 
 exercises himself, the more will that Word become, not a mark 
 for the cavilling spirit, but ''a lantern unto his feet, and a light 
 unto his paths/^ 
 
 JOSEPH MASTERS ANL> CO., PRINXEBS, ALOEBSGATE 8TBEET.