The fourth and last stanza is addressed in all reverence to the Royal lady for whom every English heart has thrilled with such true and loyal love and sympathy throughout these domestic and national festivities, which must to her have been so intimately blended with deep though chastened sorrow; and we are sure that every English heart will fervently echo the loyal prayer and wish which Mr. Hyde expresses with deep feeling in these closing verses, that the mourning wife may be won to smile again in the joy of the happy mother, and that so, after sore trial, peace, even as the peace of a summer evening, may descend and ensphere to its close the life of our beloved Queen :— "And like a Summer evening closing round, With fragrance steeped, the air as calm and still "So be the evening of thy happy reign, As full of peace to us, of joy to thee! A lingering Summer evening may it be— Flooded with beauty, freed from care and pain!" We trust that our readers will thank us for drawing their attention to this Marriage Ode of Mr. Hyde's; and also that this may not be the last poetical composition of his that we may have the pleasure of noticing in our pages. We may add that copies of this Ode have been presented to, and graciously acknowledged on behalf of, Her Majesty and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. M. C. H. BISHOP COLENSO ON THE PENTATEUCH.-No. III. (Continued from page 134.) HAVING placed before our readers the exact position of the Bishop of Natal, both in its hopeful and its objectionable aspects, we will proceed to notice the allegations he makes against the truly historical character of the Israelitish history as recorded in the Pentateuch and the Book * We must beg Mr. Hyde to excuse the trifling liberty we have taken with this line. If it be not by a typical error that it stands otherwise in the original, we suggest that it ought to have been; and there are some other slight verbal emendations we might recommend,—as, for instance, the omission of the unpleasing word "wanton" from the thirteenth line of the first stanza,—in case of republication. of Joshua. We may, however, in passing, remark that the phenomenon exhibited by the Bishop is by no means an uncommon one. We have often observed cases in which a seeker after truth, having found the literal character of the early chapters of Genesis quite untenable, has supposed that the same allegorical character applies to the whole Word, and only by more detailed examination ascertained that true history commences with the life of Abraham, and thenceforward through the Word the events are real, but are related for the sake of the spiritual sense which they were so ordered as to contain and to teach. In them, these real events were still, as Paul says, "an allegory." (Gal. iv. 24.) How grateful to the Lord should the New Church be that, by means of his chosen servant Swedenborg, not only has the great law of Correspondences been revealed anew to men, but with those applications, explanations, and limits, which enable us to tread safely where, without such guidance, we might have needlessly wandered far, and toiled wearily to work out a road for ourselves. The New Jerusalem having come down from the Lord out of heaven, the nations of them that are saved can walk in its holy light. (Rev. xxi. 24.) May we never forget this blessing, and use it largely! It is of the utmost importance to preserve the literal sense of the Word as the basis of its spiritual sense. Without that firm foundation, our perceptions of its higher meanings must be vague and dreamy,—only by a solid groundwork of belief in and real understanding of the literal facts of the Divine Word do we prepare ourselves for the perceptions of its inner wisdom. Hence we regard it as not altogether a thing to be deplored that circumstances should occur to lead to a fresh examination of the Divine Word in the letter; for by that means its true and real character becomes better ascertained and more firmly believed. In this light we regard the efforts of the Bishop of Natal; and with his candid mind, his admission that the facts to some extent are real, we do not by any means despair-should the Word in its Divine beauty, as being the Eternal Wisdom accommodated to man, the very Light of the soul, the Daily Bread, the Living Wine of the Spirit, the Ladder from earth to heaven, the Conjoiner of the church below to the church above, the Safeguard of the world, presented to him-that he will reconsider his objections, and the light thrown upon them by the examination which has been given them in many ways, and be able more accurately to discriminate and more rightly to divide the Word of Truth. We cannot but think that he must already be convinced that many of his objections are not so cogent and potent as they appeared to him when he first made them; and the more fully he dwells upon them candidly, the more he will find their apparent force will diminish, until the Divine Word will remain as his Guide and Guard still,-the Word of the Lord that endureth for ever. Four canons of criticism will really remove all the difficulties which appear so formidable to Bishop Colenso : 1. That the Israelitish history being given for the sake of representing the Lord's dealings with the soul in its regeneration, and the rise and fall of churches, only so much of the history would be given as is required FOR THAT OBJECT, details demanded by the mere historian being passed over as of no account. 2. The laws from Sinai being a revelation for all time, their observance would commence as soon as circumstances would permit, and not before; such as could not be practised in the wilderness, would first begin to take effect in the land of Canaan. The spiritual sense of the whole only now being fully disclosed, mankind in this respect only begin to obey them in the present day. 3. That numbers have a spiritual signification, and therefore, whether the actual enumerations were exactly those stated or not, the numbers required by the spiritual sense, in any narrative, would be those used. 4. The Israelites were a people of peculiar abilities for organisation and attention to nicety in detail, and things would be easily done by them from their attention to small things, which to others would be difficult and seem impossible. We cannot in this work enter particularly into all the objections upon which the Bishop relies for making out his case of the non-historical character of the Pentateuch. It will be sufficient to select the chief of them, and shew the grounds upon which the insufficiency of the whole may be perceived. 1. He objects that in counting the names of those who went down into Egypt, he cannot make them out to be seventy, as stated,-only sixty-eight, without reckoning Hezron and Hamul; and if they are reckoned, being the grandchildren of Judah, who was only about fortytwo years old when he went down into Egypt, the history, according to the Bishop, becomes incredible. He labours very much to make this difficulty come out strongly; but we cannot judge otherwise than that the effort is a weak and unhappy one, in face of the well-known fact, that twelve years is a marriageable age in the East for a man, as fifteen is at Rome; and under these circumstances, we may well conceive that Hezron and Hamul may have been born in Canaan, and have been Judah's grandchildren when he went down to Egypt, although his age was only forty-two. The Bishop supposes Judah was twenty-two at his first marriage, and then come all the difficulties he discovers. But this judging of eastern events by customs more proper to western lands, is one source of error which longer reflection would have led the Bishop to avoid. Even if the difficulty had not been removable by the early age of marriage prevalent in the East, our third canon gives a divine reason why it should be employed, namely, that numbers in the Word have a spiritual sense, and in any particular case the appropriate number for that sense would be used, whether the literalist would be able to count it on his fingers or not. Hannah returns thanks after the birth of Samuel, and though only one child was born, she says-" The barren hath borne seven." (1 Sam. ii. 5.) So in the case of those who went down into Egypt, who represented the truths and goods of the church, which had been stored in the soul during infancy and childhood, descending into the natural man (Egypt), preparatory to temptation and regeneration, the number seventy, formed of seven, meaning what is sacred and perfect, and ten, which is expressive of remains, would be the right number to be used. This Hengstenberg fully recognises. "The Sacred author, who must be measured (he says) by the standard of a Sacred historian, not of a writer on statistics, could hence follow his theological principle, which recommended to him the choice of the number seventy. Seven is the signature of the covenant between God and Israel, the special theocratic number. By fixing on the covenant number, the author intimated that the increase was the covenant blessing." 2. The next two objections of the Bishop result from the size of the court of the tabernacle compared with the number of the congregation, and the impossibility of Moses and Joshua, when speaking to all Israel, being heard by the whole of the people-two millions. To these our fourth canon gives the answer. There were wellunderstood arrangements, by which the people were addressed and guided through their elders, who were thus their representatives. This order of things is very evident if we consult Exod. xii. 3, where God is represented as saying "Speak to the whole congregation of the children of Israel;" and in verse 21, when Moses was fulfilling the command, we read"And Moses called for all the elders of Israel." In governing the little kingdom of the human soul, the Lord addresses and guides it through great leading principles, not by direct contact and interference with every distinct thought and affection which moves and flits across the mind. The Bishop's next objection, that the priests (three in number) would be unable to fulfil the necessities of their office, seeing they were commanded to carry the remains of the daily sacrifices out of the camp, and the camp would be at least a mile and a half across in both directions, and might be twelve miles across; and Dr. Colenso suggests the idea of a "priest having to carry, on his back on foot, (a distance equal to) from St. Paul's to the outskirts of the metropolis, the skin and flesh, and head and legs and inwards, and dung, even the whole bullock.". (p. 40.) Our fourth canon again removes the force of this objection; and in this case the reasoning of the Bishop at once falls, when it is seen that the word "to carry" (Lev. iv. 11, 12.) signifies strictly to cause to be carried. It is the same word which is used in Exod. xii. 51– "And it came to pass the self-same day, that the Lord did bring the children of Irsael out of the land of Egypt by their armies ;" and in Exod. iii. 10" That thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt." Several other objections follow those we have noticed in the Bishop's work, which are not of a very important character, as, the number of the people at their first muster, compared with the poll-tax raised six months previously, being identically the same, which could hardly happen with two millions of people; the Israelites dwelling in tents, which leads to the question, How were these tents carried? and the Israelites being said to go out of Egypt armed. All these objections have been most fairly and completely met, and are really covered by our first and fourth canons, and are absolutely very small in themselves if the main points remain unshaken, to which, we now direct ourselves. These are,difficulties as to the Passover,-difficulties as to the numbers of the Israelites, and difficulties as to the possibility of two millions of people living with their cattle in the desert without the means, as it is assumed, of procuring fire or water. But when we come to examine these difficulties we cannot but observe that they are greatly strained by the Bishop's bias, possibly an unconscious one, derived from his conviction that the early chapters of Genesis were unhistorical, or properly, allegorical; and therefore the whole Pentateuch must also be "unhistorical." He quotes Exod. xii. 21-28, and then remarks “That is to say, in one single day the whole immense population of Israel, as large as that of London, was instructed to keep the Passover, and actually did keep it. I have said in one single day; for the very first notice of any such feast to be kept is given in this very chapter, where we find it written, (ver. 12.) ‘I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both man and beast.'” (p. 54.) Again : "Let us now see what the above statement really implies when translated into simple every-day fact. Moses called for all the elders of Israel. We must suppose, then, that the elders lived somewhere near at hand. But where did |