It is evident that the whole weight of the objection consists in this: that, according to the sacred narrative, the priest is commanded, first, to carry the bullock _himself_; secondly, to carry it _on his back_; thirdly, in doing so, to _go on foot_. Now there is not the faintest insinuation in any text Dr. Colenso has produced, nor, we may add, in any text the Pentateuch contains, that the priest should _go on foot_, or that he should carry the bullock _on his back_. These two ideas are to be found only in the fanciful and rather irreverent gloss of Dr. Colenso. Neither is it commanded in the sacred text that the priest should _himself_ carry the bullock out of the camp. Even in the English translation there is nothing to imply that he might not, for this duty, employ the service of his attendant Levites. It is said, indeed, “he shall carry forth the bullock without the camp”. But by the common use of language we may impute to a person, as his own, the act which he does by the agency of another. Thus a minister of state is said to write a letter, when the letter is written at his direction by his secretary. In the Fourth Book of _Kings_ it is recorded of Nabuchodonosor that “_he carried away all Jerusalem_, and all the princes, and all the valiant men of the army, to the number of ten thousand, into captivity:... and the judges of the land he carried into captivity from Jerusalem into Babylon. And all the strong men, seven thousand, and the artificers and the smiths a thousand”, etc.—(IV. _Kings_, xxiv. 14-16). No one dreams of any difficulty in a sentence like this. Yet, if we admit the Colenso system of interpretation, the difficulty is insuperable, because the _meaning of the sentence_ is, that Nabuchodonosor _himself_ carried that immense multitude _on his back_ from Jerusalem to Babylon.