'This does, it is true, suppose a hundred thousand persons at least in that village; but should the Doctor forget that the Lord had promised Abraham that his posterity should be as numerous as the sands of the sea? 'The Jews and the Christians (adds he) have not scrupled to express their repugnance to attach faith to this destruction of fifty thousand and seventy men. 'We answer that we are Christians, and have no repugnance to attach faith to whatever is in the Holy Scriptures. We answer with the Reverend Father Calmet, that "if we were to reject whatever is extraordinary and beyond the reach of our conception, we must reject the whole Bible." We are persuaded that the Jews being under the guidance of God himself, could experience no events but such as were stamped with the seal of the divinity, and quite different from what happened to other men. We will even venture to advance that the death of these fifty thousand and seventy men is one of the least surprising things in the Old Testament. 'We are struck with astonishment still more reverential when Eve's serpent and Balaam's ass talk; when the waters of the cataracts are swelled by rain fifteen cubits above all the mountains; when we behold the plagues of Egypt, and the six hundred and thirty thousand fighting Jews, flying on foot through the divided and suspended sea; when Joshua stops the sun and moon at noon-day; when Sampson slays a thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass..... In those divine times all was miracle, without exception; and we have the profoundest reverence for all these miracles; for that ancient world which was not our world; for that nature which was not our nature; for a divine book, in which there can be nothing human. 'But we are astonished at the liberty which Dr. Kennicott takes of calling those _Deists_ and _Atheists_, who, while they revere the Bible more than he does, differ from him in opinion. Never will it be believed that a man with such ideas is of the academy of medals and inscriptions. He is, perhaps, of the academy of Bedlam, the most ancient of all, and whose colonies extend throughout the earth.' (_Philosophical Dictionary_.) Verse 19. The Douay renders this--'He slew of the people seventy men, and fifty thousand of the common people;' *Chapter vii., v. 1. What were the men of Kirjathjearim, that they should enjoy complete immunity from the ills which attended the {130} other unfortunates who came in contact with the ark, and what gave them the right to sanctify Eleazar? Kirjathjearim was a city of the Gibeonites. (Joshua, chap, ix., v. 17.) Verse 6. 'Drew water, and poured it out before the Lord.' This is a mode of sacrifice, or rather of offering, to the Lord which I do not find mentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament. Verse 13. It is not true that the Philistines came no more into the coast of Israel. (_Vide_ chap, xvii., v. 1.)