"
The bishop's statements, which now seem so moderate, then aroused
horror. Especial wrath was caused by some of his arithmetical
arguments, and among them those which showed that an army of six
hundred thousand men could not have been mobilized in a single
night; that three millions of people, with their flocks and herds,
could neither have obtained food on so small and arid a desert as
that over which they were said to have wandered during forty years,
nor water from a single well; and that the butchery of two hundred
thousand Midianites by twelve thousand israelites, "exceeding
infinitely in atrocity the tragedy at Cawnpore, had happily only
been carried out on paper." There was nothing of the scoffer in
him. While preserving his own independence, he had kept in touch
with the most earnest thought both among European scholars and in
the little flock intrusted to his care. He evidently remembered
what had resulted from the attempt to hold the working classes in
the towns of France, Germany, and Italy to outworn beliefs; he had
found even the Zulus, whom he thought to convert, suspicious of the
legendary features of the Old Testament, and with his clear
practical mind he realized the danger which threatened the English
Church and Christianity--the danger of tying its religion and
morality to interpretations and conceptions of Scripture more and
more widely seen and felt to be contrary to facts.
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