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thousand feet, a depth sufficiently profound to bury the loftiest mountains of the district; and yet, having a gradient of declination of but sixteen feet per mile, the contour of its hills and plains would remain apparently what they had been before, the doomed inhabitants would see but the water rising along the mountain sides, and one refuge after another swept away, till the last witness of the scene would have perished, and the last hill-top would have disappeared. And when, after a hundred and fifty days had come and gone, the depressed hollow would have begun slowly to rise, and when, after the fifth month had passed, the ark would have grounded on the summit of Mount Ararat, all that could have been seen from the upper window of the vessel would be simply a boundless sea, roughened by tides, now flowing outwards, with a reversed course, towards the distant ocean, by the three great outlets which, during the period of depression, had given access to the waters. Noah would of course see that "the fountains of the deep were stopped," and "the waters returning from off the earth continually;" but whether the Deluge had been partial or universal, he could neither see nor know. His prospect in either case would have been equally that described by the poet Bowles:

"The mighty ark

Rests upon Ararat; but nought around

Its inmates can behold, save o'er the expanse
Of boundless waters the sun's orient orb
Stretching the hull's long shadow, or the moon
In silence through the silver-curtained clouds
Sailing, as she herself were lost and left
In hollow loneliness."

Let me further remark, that in one important sense a partial Flood, such as the one of which I have conceived as adequate to the destruction, in an early age, of the whole

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human family, could scarce be regarded as miraculous. Several of our first geologists hold, that some of the formidable cataclysms of the remote past may have been occasioned by the sudden upheaval of vast continents, which, by displacing great bodies of water, and rolling them outwards in the character of enormous waves, inundated wide regions elevated hundreds of feet over the sea level, and strewed them over with the rock boulders, clays, gravels, and organic debris of deep sea bottoms. And these cataclysms they regard as perfectly natural, though of course very unusual, events. Nor would the gradual depression of a continent, or, as in the supposed case, of a portion of a continent, be in any degree less natural than the sudden upheaval of a continent. It would, on the contrary, be much more according to experience. Nay, were such a depression and elevation of the great Asiatic basin to take place during the coming twelvemonth as that of which I have conceived as the probable cause of the Deluge, though the geologists would have to describe it as beyond comparison the most remarkable oscillation of level which had taken place within the historic period, they would certainly regard it as no more miraculous than the great earthquake of Lisbon, or than that exhibition of the volcanic forces which elevated the mountain of Jorullo in a single night sixteen hundred feet over the plain. And why have recourse, in speculating on the real event of four thousand years ago, to supposititious miracle, if an event of apparently the same kind would not be regarded as miraculous now? May we not in this matter take our stand beside the poet, who, when recognizing a Providence in the great Calabrian earthquake, and in the overwhelming wave by which it was accompanied, pertinently inquired of the skeptics,

"Has not God

Still wrought by means since first he made the world?

And did he not of old employ his means

To drown it? What is his creation less

Than a capacious reservoir of means,

Formed for his use, and ready at his will?"

The revelation to Noah, which warned him of a coming Flood, and taught him how to prepare for it, was evidently miraculous: the Flood itself may have been purely provi dential. But on this part of the subject I need not dwell. I have accomplished my purpose if I have shown, as was attempted of old by divines such as Stillingfleet and Poole, that there" seems to be no reason why the Deluge should be extended beyond the occasion of it, which was the corruption of man," but, on the contrary, much reason against it; and that, on the other hand, a Flood restricted and partial, and yet sufficient to destroy the race in an early age, while still congregating in their original centre, cannot be regarded as by any means an incredible event. The incredibility lies in the mere human glosses and misinterpretations in which its history has been enveloped. Divested of these, and viewed in its connection with those wonderful traditions which still float all over the world regarding it, it forms, not one of the stumbling-blocks, but one of the evidences, of our faith; and renders the exercise a not unprofitable one, when, according to the poet,

"Back through the dusk

Of ages Contemplation turns her view,
To mark, as from its infancy, the world
Peopled again from that mysterious shrine
That rested on the top of Ararat."

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LECTURE NINTH.

THE DISCOVERABLE AND THE REVEALED.

Ir seems natural, nay, inevitable, that false revelations, which have descended from remote, unscientific ages, should be committed to a false science. Natural phenomena, when of an extraordinary character, powerfully impress the untutored mind. In operating, through the curiosity or the fears of men, upon that instinct of humanity-never wholly inactive in even the rudest state-which cannot witness any remarkable effect without seeking to connect it with its producing cause, they excite into activity in the search the imaginative faculty,-always of earlier development than the judgment in both peoples and individuals, and which never fails, when so employed, to conduct to delusions and extravagances. And this state of mind gives birth simultaneously to both false religion and false science. Great tempests, inundations, eclipses, earthquakes, thunder and lightning, famine and pestilence, the births of monsters, or the rare visitation of strange fishes or wild animals, come all to be included in the mythologic domain. Even the untutored Indian sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.” And when an order of priesthood springs up, a portion of the leisure of the class is usually employed in speculating on these phenomena; and to their speculations they give the form of direct revelation. Thus almost all the false religions of the old world-not grafted, like Mohammedanism, on the true one-have their pretended revela

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tions regarding the form, structure, and origin of the earth, the mechanism of the heavens, the electric and meteoric phenomena, and even the arrangement of oceans and continents on the surface of our planet.

The old extinct forms of heathenism,- Etrurian, Egyptian, Phoenician, and Babylonian, had all their cosmogonies.* In the wild mythology of ancient Scandinavia, of which we find such distinct traces in the languages and superstitions of northern Europe, and which even in our own country continues to give the names of its uncouth deities to the days of our week, there is a strange genesis of not only the heavens and earth, but of the gods also. It has, besides, its scheme of the universe in its great mundane tree of three vast roots, celestial, terrestrial, and infernal, -which supports the land, the sea, the sky, and all things. The leading religions of the East which still survive, such as Buddhism, Brahminism, and Parseeism, have all their astronomy, geography, meteorology, and geology, existing as component parts of their several systems. Nor have there been wanting ingenious men who, though little tolerant of the various attempts made to reconcile the Mosaic account of creation with the discoveries of modern science, have looked with a favorable eye on the wild science of the false religions, and professed to detect in it at least striking analogies with the deductions of both the geologist and the astronomer. When the skeptical wits of the last century wished to produce, by way of foil, a morality vastly superior, as they said, to that of Christianity, they had recourse to the Brahmins and the Chinese. And though we hear less of the ethics of these people since we have come to know them better, we are still occasionally

* For a brief but masterly view of these ancient cosmogonies, see the Rev. D. Macdonald's "Creation and the Fall." Edinburgh: Constable & Co.

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