CURRENT LITERATURE.
Bishop Colenso's Examination of the Pentateuch Examined. By G. S. Drew, M.A , author of "Scripture Lands," &c. (Bell and Daddy.)— The Bible in the Workshop. By Two Working Men. (Kent and Co.)— These two volumes are among the earliest drops of the controversial By Thaddmus William shower which Bishop Colenso's book on the Pentateuch could not fail
to provoke. The author of the first of them is a clergyman, who has
himself visited the scene of the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert, and has already recorded in a separate work his impression that the actual localities afford strong evidence of the truth of the Scripture narrative. After laying down the postulate that the Bishop has com- mitted "a logical error" in applying to the Pentateuch the ordinary canons of historical inquiry, he proceeds to examine the various objec- tions in detail. His answer to the Bishop resolves itself mainly into the usual charges of misquotation, mistranslation, and misinterpreta- tion. The numerical difficulties, however,—which, he reminds the Bishop, have already been anticipated by Tom Paine, in the "Age of Reason "—he is inclined to attribute to mistakes in the transcrip- tion of the Scripture narrative.- The second of these books pro- fesses to be the production of two working men, a printer and a bookbinder, one of whom is a Jew and the other a Gentile. It is pro- bably to the former that we owe the critical portion of the work, while we must attribute to the latter the occasional allusions to Christianity with which his colleague could scarcely be expected to sympathize very warmly. Their line of argument is, on the whole, very similar to that adopted by Mr. Drew ; though, perhaps, they deal somewhat less in attempts at explanation, and somewhat more in direct denial. Both clergyman and laymen, however, display a remarkable unanimity in their appreciation of the motives which led Bishop Colenso to publish his work; regarding him, not as a sincere, though possibly mistaken, inquirer after truth, but rather as a deliberate infidel, who, in his eager- nass to destroy the authority of Scripture, does not scruple to use argu- ments which are evidently worthless, and to make statements which are manifestly untrue. We cannot envy the state of mind of such Christian Malignants.
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