these, by showing how far they have ground.

But as he says, with quaint strength, there is no chronological element in Revelation.' Without borrowing the fifteen centuries which the Greek Church and Septuagint would lend us, we see, from comparing the Bible with the Egyptian records and with itself, that our common dates are wrong, though it is not so easy to say how they should be rectified. The idea of bringing Abraham into Egypt as early as 2876 B.C. is one of our author's most doubtful points, and may seem hardly tenable. But he wanted time for the growth of Jacob's family into a people of two millions, and he felt bound to place Joseph under a native Pharaoh, therefore, before the Shepherd Kings. He also contends that Abraham's horizon in Asia is antecedent to the first Median conquest of Babylon in 2234. A famine, conveniently mentioned undr the twelfth dynasty of Egypt, completes his proof. Sesortosis, therefore, is the Pharaoh to whom Joseph was minister; the stay of the Israelites in Egypt is extended to fourteen centuries; and the date 215 represents the time of oppression. Some of these details are sufficiently doubtful to afford ground of attack to writers whose real quarrel is with our author's Biblical research, and its more certain, but not therefore more welcome, conclusions. It is easier to follow him implicitly when he leads us, in virtue of an overwhelming concurrence of Egyptian records, and of all the probabilities of the case, to place the Exodus as late as 1320 or 1314. The event is more natural in Egypt's decline under Menephthah, the exiled son of the great Ramses, than amidst the

splendour of the eighteenth dynasty. It cannot well have been earlier, or the Book of Judges must have mentioned the conquest of Canaan by Ramses; nor later, for then Joshua would come in collision with the new empire of Ninus and Semiramis. But Manetho places, under Menephthah, what seems the Egyptian version of the event, and the year 1314, one of our alternatives, is the date assigned it by Jewish tradition. Not only is the historical reality of the Exodus thus vindicated against the dreams of the Drummonds and the Volneys, but a new interest is given it by its connexion with the rise and fall of great empires. We can understand how the ruin on which Ninus rose made room in Canaan for the Israelites, and how they fell again under the satraps of the New Empire, who appear in the Book of Judges as kings of the provinces. Only, if we accept the confirmation, we must take all its parts. Manetho makes the conquerors before whom Menephthah retreats into Ethiopia Syrian shepherds, and gives the human side of an invasion, or war of liberation ;' 'Baron Bunsen notices the "high hand" with which Jehovah led forth his people, the spoiling of 'the Egyptians, and the lingering in the peninsula, as signs, even in the Bible, of a struggle conducted by human means. Thus, as the pestilence of the 'Book of Kings becomes in Chronicles the more visible 'angel, so the avenger who slew the firstborn may have

6

βεις πρὸς τοὺς ὑπὸ Τεθμώσεως ἀπελαθέντας ποιμένας

καὶ ἠξίου συνεπιστρατεύειν κ.τ.λ. Manetho, apud Jos. c. Apion. The whole passage has the stamp of genuine history.

'been the Bedouin host, akin nearly to Jethro, and 'more remotely to Israel.

So in the passage of the Red Sea, the description may be interpreted with the latitude of poetry : though as it is not affirmed that Pharaoh was 'drowned, it is no serious objection that Egyptian. ' authorities continue the reign of Menephthah later. 'A greater difficulty is that we find but three cen'turies thus left us from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. Yet less stress will be laid on this by who'ever notices how the numbers in the Book of Judges proceed by the eastern round number of forty, what 'traces the whole book bears of embodying history ' in its most popular form, and how naturally St. Paul 'or St. Stephen would speak after received accounts.'

It is not the importance severally, but the continual recurrence of such difficulties, which bears with ever-growing induction upon the question, whether the Pentateuch is of one age and hand, and whether subsequent books are contemporary with the events, or whether the whole literature grew like a tree rooted in the varying thoughts of successive generations, and whether traces of editorship, if not of composition, between the ages of Solomon and Hezekiah, are manifest to whoever will recognise them. Baron Bunsen finds himself compelled to adopt the alternative of gradual growth. He makes the Pentateuch Mosaic, as indicating the mind and embodying the developed system of Moses, rather than as written by the great lawgiver's hand. Numerous fragments of genealogy, of chronicle, and of spiritual song go up to a high antiquity, but are

embedded in a crust of later narrative, the allusions of which betray at least a time when kings were established in Israel. Hence the idea of composition out of older materials must be admitted; and it may in some cases be conceived that the compiler's point of view differed from that of the older pieces, which yet he faithfully preserved. If the more any one scrutinizes the sacred text, the more he finds himself impelled to these or like conclusions respecting it, the accident of such having been alleged by men more critical than devout should not make Christians shrink from them. We need not fear that what God has permitted to be true in history can be at war with the faith in Himself taught us by His Son.

"As in his Egypt our author sifts the historical "date of the Bible, so in his Gott in der Geschichte,1 "he expounds its directly religious element. Lament

ing, like Pascal, the wretchedness of our feverish "being, when estranged from its eternal stay, he "traces, as a countryman of Hegel, the Divine "thought bringing order out of confusion.

Unlike

"the despairing school, who forbid us trust in "God or in conscience, unless we kill our souls with "literalism, he finds salvation for men and States only in becoming acquainted with the Author of

our life, by whose reason the world stands fast, "whose stamp we bear in our forethought, and whose "voice our conscience echoes. In the Bible, as an 66 expression of devout reason, and therefore to be "read with reason in freedom, he finds record of

1 Gott in der Geschichte (i.e. the Divine Government in History). Books i. and ii. Leipzig. 1857.

"the spiritual giants whose experience generated "the religious atmosphere we breathe." For as in law and literature, so in religion we are debtors to our ancestors; but their life must find in us a kindred apprehension, else it would not quicken ; and we must give back what we have received, or perish by unfaithfulness to our trust. Abraham the friend of God, Moses the inspired patriot, Elijah the preacher of the still small voice, and Jeremiah the foreseer of a law written on the conscience, are not ancestors of Pharisees who inherit their flesh and name, so much as of kindred spirits who put trust in a righteous God above offerings of blood, who build up free nations by wisdom, who speak truth in simplicity though four hundred priests cry out for falsehood, and who make self-examination before the Searcher of hearts more sacred than the confessional. 'When the fierce ritual of Syria, with the awe of a 'Divine voice, bade Abraham slay his son, he did not ' reflect that he had no perfect theory of the Absolute 'to justify him in departing from traditional revela'tion, but trusted that the FATHER, whose voice from 'heaven he heard at heart, was better pleased with 'mercy than with sacrifice; and his trust was his 'righteousness. Its seed was sown from heaven, but 'it grew in the soil of an honest and good heart. So ' in each case we trace principles of reason and right, 'to which our heart perpetually responds, and our response to which is a truer sign of faith than such 'deference to a supposed external authority as would 'quench these principles themselves.'

It may be thought that Baron Bunsen ignores