words, "Truth is strange--stranger than fiction."

THE WANDERING JEWS.

BIBLE ROMANCES.-VII.

By G. W. FOOTE.

The Middle Ages had a legend of the Wandering Jew. This person was
supposed to have been doomed, for the crime of mocking Jesus at the
crucifixion, to wander over the earth until his second coming. No
one believes this now. The true Wandering Jews were those slaves whom
Jehovah rescued from Egyptian bondage, with a promise that he would lead
them to a land flowing with milk and honey, but whom he compelled to
roam the deserts instead for forty years, until all of them except two
had perished. Of all the multitude who escaped from Egypt, only Joshua
and Caleb entered the promised land. Even Moses had to die in sight of
it.

These poor Wandering Jews demand our pity. They were guilty of many
crimes against humanity, but they scarcely deserved such treatment as
they received. Their God was worse than they. He was quick-tempered,
unreasonable, cruel, revengeful, and dishonest. Few of his promises
to them were performed. They worshipped a bankrupt deity. The land of
promise was a Tantalus cup ever held to their lips, and ever mocking
them when they essayed to drink. God was their greatest enemy instead of
their best friend. Their tortuous path across the wilderness was marked
by a track of bleaching bones. All the evils which imagination can
conceive fell on their devoted heads. Bitten by serpents, visited by
plagues, cursed with famine and drought, swallowed by earthquake, slain
by war, and robbed by priests, they found Jehovah a harder despot than
Pharaoh. Death was to them a happy release, and only the grave a shelter
from the savagery of God.

Commentators explain that the Jews who left Egypt were unfit for the
promised land. If so, they were unfit to be the chosen people of God.
Why were they not allowed to remain in Egypt until they grew better, or
why was not some other nation selected to inherit Canaan?

At the end of our number on "The Ten Plagues" we left the Jews on the
safe side of the Red Sea. We must now ask a few questions which we had
no space for then.

How, in a period of two hundred and fifteen years, did the seventy males
of Jacob's house multiply into a nation of over two millions? Experience
does not warrant belief in such a rapid increase. The Jewish chroniclers
were fond of drawing the long bow. In the book of Judges, for
instance, we are told that the Gileadites, under, Jep