It must be confessed that there is an amusing as well as a serious side to the escapades in which some critics indulge in their eagerness to discredit the Bible narrative. The latest "critic" who has come to grief through too great haste, is the ingenious but erratic scholar, W. St. C. Boscawen. Mr. Boscawen, according to his own account, recently saw a Hittite gem with the representation engraved upon it of a priest standing upon the back of a bee. But Mr. Boscawen saw a great deal more than a Hittite priest standing upon the back of that bee. That bee, he reasoned, must be the totem or sacred animal of some worship; and Deborah, in Hebrew means "bee." Again, the lightning is called, in some mythologies, the "sting-fly of heaven;" and therefore, according to Mr. Boscawen, we have, in Hebrew "legend," the association of Deborah, the "bee," with Barak, the "lightning," or "sting-fly of heaven." What could be more evident than that the story of Deborah and Barak is a clumsy biblical theft from pagan mythology? But meanwhile the gem in question has been re-examined by Mr. Pinches and Dr. Tyler, who both find that what Mr. Boscawen mistook for a bee, is only a chip,—that, in fact, if there was a bee anywhere about, it must have been in Mr. Boscawen's bonnet. And so the whole ingenious hypothesis tumbles to the ground; and we are permitted still to regard Deborah and Barak as historical characters. But will the critics never learn the lesson, that the Bible is the most trustworthy book of ancient history which has come down to us, and that the scholar who attempts to overthrow its solid history on the evidence of his own conjectures, is pretty sure to come to grief at last?—S. S. Times.