LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

BISHOP COLENSO.

LTO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]

SIR,—I shall be permitted, I hope, to point out in your columns that a wrong impression, as it seems to me, is likely to be con- veyed by some of the expressions employed by you in your review of the labours that a week ago were brought to a close in Natal.

in referring to the influence which the writings of the late F. D. Maurice are supposed to have had upon my father's mind, you say that,—" With the essential genius of those writings Dr. Colenso can never have had any deep sympathy, since his own mind was much more impressed by such matters as the blundering numeration of the Book of Exodus, than the moral revelation it contained. Later on, he developed the rationalism—or shall we say the mathematical matter-of- factness ?—of his Scriptural criticism in the book which excited so much more interest than it deserved, and which really only proved what all genuine scholars knew,—that the historical part of the Pentateuch is a human composi- tion, by ne means exempt from error." Is the above quite con- sistent with the account given by my father himself of the motives which led him to investigate the history of the com- position of the Pentateuch?

The following passage is taken from the "Introductory Re- marks" prefixed to the People's Edition of the first five parts of his work :—

"There was a time in my own life when I

could have heartily assented to such language as the following, which Burgon (` Inspiration,' Scc., p.89), asserts to be the creed of orthodox believers, and which, probably, expresses the belief of many English

Christians at the present day The Bible is none other than the Voice of Bins that sitteth upon the Throne ! Every book of it—every chapter of it—every verse of it—every word of it—every syllable of it—(where are we to stop ?) every letter of it—is the direct utter- ance of the Most High ! The Bible is none other than the Word of God—not some part of it more, some part of it less, but all alike the utterance of him who sitteth upon the Throne—absolute—faultless- unerring—supreme.' Such was the creed of the school in which I was educated. God is my witness! what hours of wretchedness have I spent at times, while reading the Bible devoutly from day to day, and reverencing every word of it as the Word of God, when petty contradic- tions met me, which seemed to my reason to conflict with the notion of the absolute historical veracity of every part of Scripture, and which, as I felt, in the study of any other book, we should honestly treat as errots or misstatements, without in the least detracting from the real value of the book ! But, in those days, I was taught that it was my duty to fling the suggestion from me at once, as if it were 'a loaded shell, shot into the fortress of the soul,' or to stamp out desperately, as with an iron heel, each spark of honest doubt, which God's own gift, the love of Truth, bad kindled in my boson,. And by many a painful effart I succeeded in doing so for a season. But my labours, as a translator of the Bible, and a teacher of intelligent converts from heathenism, have brought me face to face with ques- tions from which I had hitherto shrunk, but from which, under the circumstances, I felt it would be a sinful abandonment of duty any longer to turn away. I have, therefore, as in the sight of God Most High, set myself deliberately to find the answer to such questions, with, I trust and believe, a sincere desire to know the Truth, as God wil's us to know it, and with a hunible dependence on that Divine Teacher who alone can guide us into that knee ledge, and help us to use the light of our minds aright. The result of my in- quiry is this, that I have arrived at the conviction—as painful to myself at first as it may be to my reader, though painful now no longer, under the clear shining of the Light of Truth—that the Pentateuch, as a whole, cannot possibly have been written by Moses, or by any one acquainted personally with the facts which it professes to describe, and, further, that the (so-called) Mosaic narrative, by whomsoever written, and though imparting to us, as I fully believe it does, revelations of the Divine Will and Character, cannot be regarded as hietorically true."

He then diAinguishes between the class of difficulties which in the end determined his conclusions and difficulties of another sort, such as those which are created by the numerous petty variations and, contradictions in the Old-Testament narrative,— those arising from the consideration of its miracles, or when we regard "the ttivial nature of a vast number of conversations and commands ascribed directly to Jehovah, espe&ally the multiplied ceremonial minutire laid down in the Levitical Law ;" and finally, such as "must be started at once in most pions minds, when such words as these are read, professedly coming

from the Holy and Blessed One, the Father and Faithful Creator' of all mankind" :—

" If a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and be die under his hand, he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if be continue a day or two, be shall not be punished : for he is his xxi., 20-21.

With regard to this text, the Bishop wrote :-

"I shall never forget the revulsion of feeling with which a very intelligent native, with whose help I was translating these last words into the Zulu tongue, first heard them as words said to be uttered by the same great and gracious Being whom I was teaching him to trust in and adore. His whole soul revolted against the notion that the Great and Blessed God, the Merciful Father of all Mankind, would speak of a servant or maid as mere ' money,' and allow a horrible ecime to go unpunished, because the victim of the brutal usage had Barvived a few hours !"

The moral difficulties last indicated, however, brought his mind "to a stand." As he wrote in 1872 (" Lectures on the Penta- teuch," second edition, p. 112)

Bat the fact that such barbarous commands as those we have heard to-day, were here attributed to the Fountain of all Goodness, was painfully forced upon my mind while engaged in translating the Book of Exodus into Zulu. I felt that it was absolutely impossible to believe this, without abandoning all trust in a righteous and perfect Being, whose children we arc, and whose moral excellencies are faintly reflected in our own. From that time, I resolved that, cost what it might in time and labour, ny, and in other things which men bold dear, I would, God helping sue, search into the mystery, and master, if possible, the history of the composition of the Pentateuch.

And if I have helped in any way to relieve your minds and the minds of others, as well as my own, from the misery of finding such laws as I have quoted, and other like laws, ascribed to the God of Truth and Love, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in a Book which traditionary teaching represents as divinely infallible, I feel that I shall not have lived in vain."

I do not know where, if not in the columns of the Spectator, one would look for a recognition of the two great facts that underlie the Bishop's writings,—the fact, namely, that at the time when he published his work on the Pentateuch, whatever the conclusions to which lay scholars had conic, the bulk of his fellow-clergy deeply resented any criticism, however devout, which did not accept Bishop Wilberforce's vie* of inspiration ; and the fact that it was Bishop Colenso's reverence for the moral revelation contained in the Old Testament, and nowhere more impressively dwelt upon than in the most recent of his many sermons, which forced him to enter upon the investiga- tion that led to his throwing off what be felt to be the intoler- able yoke of the traditionary teaching in vogue twenty years