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rities. Our Lord, in predicting that overthrow of an infidel world, which was to succeed and consummate the wrath against Jerusalem, illustrates the eager occupation and heedless enjoyment of mankind, by the days before the Flood; when they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage," and "knew not, until the Flood came and swept them all away We have here the declaration, that the Deluge, however long threatened, had found the world still unprepared; life in full tension, mankind busy about the same frivolous or profligate objects, till the moment, when the universal pulse stopped, the springs of the great machine were broken, the current of existence, through its thousand arteries, was chilled and stagnated for ever.

Yet, the narrative still impresses us with the idea of that long-suffering, which forms one of the most sacred characters of providential agency. It is clear that the havoc was not instantaneous. The rain first fell forty days2. The act of Him who

1 Matt. xxvi.

2 It would be idle, or worse, to more than advert to the objections which have been brought against the Mosaic narrative. By some modern philosophers it has been denied altogether, from their being unable "to ascertain the origin of the waters;" as if the same power which created, could not increase the ocean. Another class have taken up the question on its more minute features. A naturalist of some name has actually doubted the whole, on the ground of the diversities of habitats, "which must render the dwelling of the polar and tropic

does nothing without a cause, and who might have submerged the world at a word; why are we entitled to doubt that this delay was mercy; that in this period, many a heart which had scorned the appeals of prophet and patriarch, was shaken from its incredulity by the horrors of inevitable ruin; that thousands and tens of thousands cried from their mountain tops and forests to the high Avenger, whose clouds and thunders were stooping round them; and that they were heard?

But how indescribably strange, tumultuous, and terrible, must have been the sudden check and subversion of all the pursuits of life in the general world; war, traffic, labour, festivity, all broken up together. The "man of renown," the great barbaric chieftain, at the head of his myriads, hurrying to some new scene of spoil; and finding himself checked in the midst of his march, by the torrents from above, and the inundations dwelling from beneath; the long lines of primitive commerce, the rude caravans of the day, suddenly dissipated and driven to the mountains in terror; the tillers of the soil flying from their fields, and seeing their scanty harvests buried in a moment; The marriage and the festival; the extravagances

animals together in the ark impossible." As if the whole transaction were not declared to be a departure from the ordinary course of things; a series of miraculous interferences for a purpose incapable of being accomplished but by miracle, and worthy of miracle.

of peasant revelry; the kingly rejoicing; the warlike triumph; the popular acclamation; the whole dissonant joy and turbulent emotion, the whole lavish magnificence, and profligate and prodigal energies of semi-barbarian life, suddenly dashed and suspended by a sense of universal and irresistible destruction.

Still, the Deluge was evidently gradual. Four stages of its rise are distinctly stated. First the forty days' rain-then the advance of the sea upon the land, "the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.”

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Then it is told that "the waters prevailed and were increased greatly upon the earth."-The final statement is, that "the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered." We have thus the progress of the Flood sufficiently defined by the successive periods—when the ark still remained on the ground-when it floatedwhen it moved from its place—and when the submergence of the globe was total, and the ark was borne wide over the face of the universal ocean. The extinction of life may have been as gradual as the rise of the waters. For it is only at the period of final submergence that the universal death is declared. "The mountains were covered, and all flesh died that moved upon the earth. All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, and all that was in the dry land, died!"

CHAPTER XIX.

THE SITE OF PARADISE.

THE Pagan world abounded with traditions of Paradise and the Deluge. The early legend of all the principal nations was a Golden Age, in which man was free from passion and sorrow; followed by a gradual decline into mental and bodily ill. The Deluge had its corresponding legend. From India to Greece, all retained the confused remembrance of some vast irruption of the waters, of which the distinguishing feature was, that it had drowned mankind; leaving only a few individuals, or even a solitary pair, a Deucalion and Pyrrha, to restore the world'.

But ancient literature possessed three writers, Berosus, Sanchoniatho, and Manetho, who peculiarly attempted to give those cloudy traditions, if

'On this long-laboured topic, the reader will find more than ample illustration in Maurice's rambling volumes on Hindostan, Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry, Bryant's rash, but sometimes ingenious, speculations on Heathen Mythology, and in the learned Miscellany of Stillingfleet.

not the substance, the shape, of history. The first was a Babylonian, and priest of Belus, who leaving Asia, lived in Cos, and propagated in Greece some of the science of his country. The fragments of his history, preserved by Josephus and Eusebius, give a statement of ten kings, or heads of families, who lived in Chaldæa before the Deluge, commencing with Alarus (Adam), and ending with Xisuthrus (Noah). Xisuthrus, having been warned in a dream by Kronos, that the earth was to be destroyed by water, built a ship, which, with the usual Oriental exaggeration, was five furlongs in length, and two in breadth. He took with him his wife, children, and friends; sent out birds to ascertain the state of the earth as the waters subsided; and finally found that his ship rested upon a mountain.

Sanchoniatho was the compiler of the Phoenician history, from the books of Tauth and ancient inscriptions. His only relique is also preserved by Eusebius. It relates chiefly to the line of Cain and a race of giants, whose names it gives to the mountains, Libanus, &c.

Manetho Sebennyta, the historian of Egyptian antiquity, was the high priest of Heliopolis in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Of his works nothing remains, beyond a few fragments quoted from the Chronographia of Syncellus, from Africanus, and the original Chronicon of Eusebius, now lost. He raises the age of the world to

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