Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

THE CLOSING STRUGGLE.
IV. THE CLOSING STRUGGLE.
349
The storm aroused by Essays and Reviews had not yet
subsided when a far more serious tempest burst upon the
English theological world.
In 1862 appeared a work entitled The Pentateuch and the
Book ofJoshua Critically Examined, its author being Colenso,
Anglican Bishop of Natal, in South Africa. He had former-
ly been highly esteemed as fellow and tutor at Cambridge,
master at Harrow, author of various valuable text-books in
mathematics ; and as long as he exercised his powers within
the limits of popular orthodoxy he was evidently in the
in the Church but he chose
way to the highest positions :
another path. His treatment of his subject was reverent,
but he had gradually come to those conclusions, then so
daring, now so widespread among Christian scholars, that
the Pentateuch, with much valuable historical matter, con-
tains much that is unhistorical that a ; large portion of it
was the work of a comparatively late period in Jewish history
; that many passages in Deuteronomy could only have
been written after the Jews settled in Canaan that the Mo-
;
saic law was not in force before the captivity ; that the
books of Chronicles were clearly written as an afterthought,
to enforce the views of the priestly caste and that in all the
;
books there is much that is mythical and legendary.
Very justly has a great German scholar recently adduced
this work of a churchman relegated to the most petty
of bishoprics in one of the most remote corners of the world,
as a
"
proof that the problems of biblical criticism can no
longer be suppressed ; that they are in the air of our time,
so that theology could not escape them even if it took the
wings of the morning and dwelt in the uttermost parts of
the sea."
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 mil-
lions of people, with their flocks and herds, could neither
have obtained food on so small and arid a desert as that over