, is
less than 2,600 years. Now this is quite insufficient. How is this
difficulty to be met? We answer; a special uncertainty attaches to the
numbers in this case. They are given differently in the different
ancient versions. The Samaritan version extends the time 650 years. The
Septuagint extends it eight or nine hundred years. If more time still be
thought wanting for the development of government, art, science,
language, diversities of races, etc., I should not be afraid to grant
that the original record of Scripture on this point may have been lost,
and that the true chronology cannot now be ascertained. Nothing in
ancient manuscripts is so liable to corruption as the numbers. The
original mode of writing them was by signs not very different from one
another, and thus it happens that in almost all ancient works, the
numbers are found to be deserving of very little reliance.'
But the errors and uncertainty with regard to numbers amount to nothing.
They do not affect the Bible as the great religious instructor of the
world.
The sun has its spots, dark ones and large ones too; and the face of the
moon is not all of equal brightness; but are the sun and the moon less
useful on that account? Do they not answer the ends for which they were
made, and are not those ends the most important and desirable
imaginable? Cavillers might say, if the sun and moon were made to be
lights of the earth, why are they not _all_ light, and why is not their
light of the greatest brilliancy possible? But we too have a right to
ask, Do they not give us light enough? And is not their light as
brilliant as is desirable? Will the caviller prove that the sun and moon
would be greater blessings if their light wore more intense, or more
abundant? Men may have too much light as well as too little.
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