Nothing is more groteique than the fancy some Biblical students
have for identifying modern nations with the "lost Ten Tribes of Israel." Mr. Edward Hine seems to have tried to per- suade the people of Woolwich last Tuesday that the English repre- sent these lost Ten Tribes,--a proposition which he appears to have supported by arguments even odder than the conclusion, such as phrases in our Prayer-book, and features in the structure of Eng- lish Churches. It is a harmless form of superstition, this, to revel in the illusion that we may be descended from Reuben, or Dan, or more appropriately perhaps, Issachar, the " strong ass crouching between two burdens,"—but for people to regard it, as they certainly do, as an elevating and pious sort of exercise, to find excuses for connecting their history, by imaginary links, with that of the Bible, is as strange a caprice of idolatry as Mr. Diaraeli's fancy that the mountains of Arabia in some sense exhale inspiration. After all we say against Ritualism, the love of touch- ing sacred things with one organ or another is always breaking out, even in the bitterest anti-Ritualists.
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