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 noonday; when Samson 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. BILHAH--BASTARDS Bilhah, servant to Rachel, and Zilpah, servant to Leah, each bore the patriarch Jacob two children, and, be it observed, that they inherited like legitimate sons, as well as the eight other male children whom Jacob had by the two sisters Leah and Rachel. It is true that all their inheritance consisted in a blessing; whereas, William the Bastard inherited Normandy. Thierri, a bastard of Clovis, inherited the best part of Gaul, invaded by his father. Several kings of Spain and Naples have been bastards. In Spain bastards have always inherited. King Henry of Transtamare was not considered as an illegitimate king, though he was an illegitimate child, and this race of bastards, founded in the house of Austria, reigned in Spain until Philip V. The line of Aragon, who reigned in Naples in the time of Louis XII., were bastards. Count de Dunois signed himself "the bastard of Orleans," and letters were long preserved of the duke of Normandy, king of England, which were signed "William the Bastard." In Germany it is otherwise; the descent must be pure; bastards never inherit fiefs, nor have any estate. In France, as has long been the case, a king's bastard cannot be a priest without a dispensation from Rome, but he becomes a prince without any difficulty as soon as the king acknowledges him to be the offspring of his sire, even though he be the bastard of an adulterous father and mother. It is the same in Spain. The bastard of a king of England may be a duke but not a prince. Jacob's bastards were neither princes nor dukes; they had no lands, the reason being that their father had none, but they were afterwards called _patriarchs_, which may be rendered _arch-fathers_.