by the prostitution of virgins. Idolatry and fornication were in that case inseparable. In Corinth the principal temple was dedicated to Venus, and the homage paid to her was almost as corrupt as that rendered to Baal-peor. How could the Corinthians escape this evil if they allowed themselves to at- tend the sacrificial feasts within her temple — under the pre- tence that an idol is nothing ?
A7id were slain in one day three and twenty thousand. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Septuagint, by Philo, Josephus and the Rabbis, the number is given as twenty-four thou- sand. Both statements are equally correct. Nothing de- pended on the i^recise number. Any number between the two amounts may, according to common usage, be stated roundly as either the one or the other. The infallibility of the sacred writers consists in their saying precisely what the Spirit of God designed they should say ; and the Spirit designed that they should speak after the manner of men — and call the hea- vens solid and the earth flat, and use round numbers, without intending to be mathematically exact in common speech. The Bible, although perfectly divine, because the product of the Spirit of God, is perfectly human. The sacred writers spoke and wrote precisely as other men in their circumstances would have spoken and written, and yet under such an influence as to make every thing they said correspond infallibly with the mind of the Spirit. When the hand of a master touches the organ we have one sound, and when he touches the harp we have another. So when the Spirit of God inspired Isaiah we had one strain, and when he inspired Amos, another. Moses and Paul were accustomed, Hke most other men, to use round numbers ; and they used them when under the influence of in- spiration just as they used other famiUar forms of statement. Neither intended to speak with numerical exactness, which the occasion did not require. What a wonderful book is the Bible, written at intervals during a period of fifteen hundred years, when such apparitions of inaccuracy as this must be seized upon to impeach its infalUbility !
9. Neither let us tempt Christ,* as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of serpents.
* Instead of XpicrrSv, the MSS. B. C, and the Coptic and Ethiopic versions road Kvpiov. The MS. A. has bfoi'. The common text is sustained by the MSS. D. E. F. G. H. I. K., by the Syriac, Vulgate, the old Latin and Sahidic ver-