'Here our critics exclaim in terms of stronger disgust than ever. What! say they, the son of a king is desirous to marry a vagabond girl; the marriage is approved; Jacob, the father, and Dinah, the daughter, are loaded with presents; the King of Sichem deigns to receive those wandering robbers, called patriarchs, within his city; he has the incredible politeness or kindness to undergo, with his son, his court, and his people, the rite of circumcision, thus condescending to the superstition of a petty horde that could not call half a league of territory their own! And, in return for this astonishing hospitality and goodness, how do our holy patriarchs act? They wait for the day when the process of circumcision generally induces fever; when Simeon and Levi run through the whole city with poignards in their hands and massacre the king, the prince his son, and all the inhabitants. We are precluded from the horror appropriate to this infernal counterpart of the tragedy of St. Bartholomew, only by a sense of its absolute impossibility. It is an abominable romance; but it is evidently a ridiculous romance. It is impossible that two men could have slaughtered in quiet the whole population of a city. The people might suffer, in a slight degree, from the operation which had preceded; but, notwithstanding this, they would have risen in self-defence against two diabolical miscreants; they would have instantly assembled, would have surrounded them, and destroyed them with the summary and complete vengeance merited by their atrocity. 'But there is a still more palpable impossibility. It is that, according to the accurate computation of time, Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, could be only four or five years old; and that, even by forcing up chronology as far as possible in favour of the narrative, she could, at the very most, be only eight. It is here, then, that we are assailed with bursts of indignant exclamation. What! it is said, what! is it this book--the book of a rejected and reprobate people--a book so long unknown to all the world--a book in which sound reason and decent manners are outraged in every page--that is held up to us as irrefragable, holy, and dictated by God himself? Is it not even impious to believe it? or could anything less than the fury of cannibals urge to the persecution of sensible and modest men for not believing it?' *Chapter xxxv., v. 11. Although kings were to come out of Jacob's loins by promise, Esau's issue have been quite as successful, in fact rather more so, without any of God's assistance.