regarded the dictates of common sense. It is impossible to read the narrative of our chapter without being irresistibly impressed that the whole earth was destined for destruction. This is so evident throughout the whole of the description, that it is unnecessary to adduce single instances. Such expressions as, "all the mountains were covered by the floods," are asserted to mean a great part of them. But all the passages which have been collected to prove that application of the term all in Hebrew, are far from being conclusive analogies. In our case, the universality does not lie in the words merely, but in the tenor of the whole narrative. All flesh had corrupted its way before the Lord upon the earth; therefore the whole human race was to be destroyed with the earth. We need not even urge the reasons adduced by others, that if the flood had been local, it would have been unnecessary to encumber the ark with birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove; or that, if the waters rose fifteen cubits above the highest mountains of the then inhabited countries, their level would have been sufficient to give universality to the deluge. These arguments, whether borne out by the natural sciences or not, are unnecessary. The text admits of no other acceptation, but a universal flood. It is difficult to know to what extent the earth was at the time of the deluge inhabited by man; whether the population was limited, and whether the prevailing violence and warfare had incessantly tended to diminish it. The text speaks of the whole earth, and of all creation. It evidently pre-supposes that the whole of its surface was peopled by human beings; for God intended to destroy the whole earth on account of man's iniquity. The supposition of the local character of the Noachian deluge, is analogous to the preposterous assertion, that the first chapters of Genesis do not treat of the creation of heaven and earth, but of the formation of some limited district by an internal convulsion of our planet. Thus the Creation and the deluge would belong to almost the same class of geological events; for the submergence of the dry land, and the rise of the floods, stand in the relation of cause and effect; a creation and a deluge are inseparable occurrences. Nothing but utter perplexity could have brought intelligent minds to maintain such untenable views. For we find among its supporters a Matthew Poole, a Stillingfleet, and a Le Clerc; and J. Pye Smith, Hitchcock, Hugh Miller, and others, have followed in their deceptive traces. It required, on the part of the advocates of a local deluge, but one hazardous step more, actually to assign for it a precise region, either in the southern part of Western Asia, or in the plains of Armenia, or in a "trench-like strip of country that communicated between the Caspian and the Gulf of Finland." The question then stands thus: Geology teaches the impossibility of a universal deluge since the last 6,000 years, but does not exclude a partial destruction of the earth's surface within that period. The Biblical text, on the other hand, demands the supposition of a universal deluge, and absolutely excludes a partial flood. How is this difficulty to be reconciled? The only solution possible is by consistently carrying out the principle of Biblical interpretation, which has hitherto guided us. We acknowledge the historical connection between the Hebrews and the other eastern nations. We admit an analogy between the writings of the former and the traditions of the latter; but we distinguish between the form and the spirit; between the materials and the ideas, for the embodiment of which they were employed. The Old Testament does not show the ancient Hebrews as superior to their contemporaries in secular knowledge. They were not above them in the physical sciences; they shared, in positive learning, nearly all their notions, and a great portion of their errors. But they surpassed them infinitely in religious contemplation; they alone shook off the fetters of superstition; they conquered idolatry, and rose to the purest notions concerning the attributes of God and the duties of man. The religious lessons, therefore, which the history of the Noachian deluge discloses, are its chief value, and form its only remarkable difference from the many similar traditions of ancient tribes; and they are by no means affected by the question, whether the deluge was partial or universal. The Biblical narrative is based upon a historical fact. But this fact was, in the course of time, amplified and adorned, till it was, in the period of the author of the Pentateuch, generally augmented into a universal flood; he employed the materials in the form in which they had become the common legendary property of nations; but, with his usual wisdom and comprehensiveness of mind, he worked them out into a powerful link of his grand religious system; they became, in his hand, the foundation of a new covenant between God and man. III-GENERAL DIFFICULTIES. BUT the literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative presents other and great difficulties, which have not been urged by sceptics alone; nor are they of recent date; they have, at a very early period, been acknowledged, not without anxiety and sorrow, by strong pillars of the Church; they have sometimes been argued away by every effort of pious ingenuity, but they have as frequently been abandoned as insolvable mysteries. We shall mention the chief of those difficulties. 1. The waters are represented to have covered the earth to the height of fifteen cubits above the tops of the mountains (vii. 20; viii. 5). This would require, at least, eight times the aggregate quantity of water contained in all the seas and oceans of the earth. But the rain can, even if the clouds at once discharge all their stores, cause a water-sheet of only a few inches in thickness; and the sea might spread its floods over the earth, but it does not thereby increase the actual amount of water. It has, indeed, been replied to this objection, that the water of the oceans, even independently of the rain, was sufficient to immerse the highest mountains; for it is said that the antediluvian peaks were not by far so high as those of the present era, and that the tremendous convulsions of the deluge were the originating causes of the highest mountains, as the Chimborazo, Hecla, and the Himalayan range. But the total erroneousness of this opinion has above been proved. 2. The sudden addition of so great a mass of water would materially change the action of gravity upon the earth; the nutation of the axis would be varied; and not only the orbit of our planet, but the whole solar system must be deranged. 3. The ark was to contain one pair of every species of unclean animals, and seven pairs of every clean species. Now there are already known upwards of 1,600 species of Mammalia, 6,200 of birds, 600 of reptiles, 5,000 of conchylia, besides the almost endless number of insects, vermes, aud infusoria. The ark, though of large dimensions, even granted that Noah was able to build it, and that the animals did not multiply during the deluge, was far from being capacious enough to receive all those creatures, together with the enormous quantity of food necessary for the extent of a whole year. It has been maintained, that the Biblical text speaks only of a limited number of useful and domesticated animals, which lived in the immediate vicinity of Noah, or in the small district then inhabited by man. But this assertion forms a part of that unwarranted opinion concerning a local deluge, which we have above attempted to refute. 4. Most animals can live in a certain zone only; they perish if suddenly transported into an ungenial climate. It would imply a perversion of all laws of physiology, to suppose that the thousands of animals coming from remote regions, could be preserved in the ark without injury to life or vigour. Many of the insects have no wings; many live but a few days, or even a few hours after they have obtained their wings; it is beyond our comprehension how they could, after the flood, have reached the distant clime suitable to their existence. The original centres of distribution were necessarily more than one, since every great continent has its own peculiar fauna, which occupied L the circles round those centres in ages long anterior to the deluge. But the miracles required to produce all those wonderful effects are a gratuitous supposition. 5. It is a matter of great difficulty to understand how the large quantity of meat necessary for the subsistence of so many flesh-eating animals could be preserved for a twelvemonth. To obviate this objection, another miracle has been invented on which the Bible is perfectly silent, namely, that those animals, during this time, entirely changed their nature, and were satisfied with vegetable food. But even the herbivorous animals, in many instances, live only on a restricted number of plants, which again occur only in limited, and often remote localities. 6. A very great part of the fishes, which are never mentioned in our narrative, because they were believed to have remained uninjured by the deluge, could not live in the water, the nature of which was so materially altered by the enormous mixture of rain and sea-floods. Salt water, if suddenly introduced into fresh, destroys the inhabitants of the latter, and many of the marine fishes and mollusks can only live in salt water. It has been conjectured, that the spawn of the fishes might have been preserved even if the living individuals perished; but the spawn would, in a universal deluge, have lost its vitality, or have been developed into fishes long before the expiration of the year; so that these individuals also would have perished. 7. There are trees still existing older than the date of the Noachian deluge. If they had been submersed in water, they would scarcely, even had they outlived that catastrophe, have maintained the strength necessary to carry their existence through so many millenniums. Of the hundred thousand species of known plants, very few would survive submersion for a whole year; at least three-fourths of them would necessarily have perished in a universal deluge. It is agreed by all botanical authorities, that though partial inundations of rivers do not long, or materially change the vegetation of a region, the infusion of great quantities of salt-water destroys it entirely for long periods. But the earth produced the olive-tree and the vine immediately after the cessation of the deluge. We have faithfully stated some of the obvious difficulties, omitting the great number of minor objections which have been raised from the time of Origen; we search after truth, and are determined to examine without prejudice. We now entreat our readers to weigh calmly the arguments and facts here produced; the general tradition of all nations proves the historical character of a deluge, but geology denies its universality; this circumstance, added to the combined weight of the internal and unanswerable discrepancies, makes it manifest that the Biblical narrative, with regard to the facts, is to be estimated like other analogous traditions of the ancient writers; though the religious truths which it contains, belong to the most important parts of the Biblical canon. CHAPTER IX. 1. And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth. 2. And 1-4. The animal creation had received the Divine blessing; the stability of the earth had been guaranteed; it now remained to pronounce a benediction over them for whose sake both the animal tribes and the earth had been preserved. Noah had proved himself worthy of the Divine love, which, moreover, was promised henceforth to hold precedence over ironhanded justice; and the mercy of God shone upon him and his house. The history of man starts with Noah from a second beginning; it was, therefore, necessary to renew his dominion over the brute creation; and this is done in almost the same, but rather more energetic terms, than those the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, on all that moveth upon the earth, and on all the fishes of the applied in the corresponding act at the time of Adam (i. 28). The fear and terror of man shall be upon the beasts and fowls, and the fishes shall be delivered up into his hands. These strong expressions easily prepare us for the very striking change which now takes place in the relation between men and beasts. Hitherto, man had been ordained to rule over the animals, and to apply them for his use; but he had no authority over their lives, except for sacrifices, and, of course, if he was forced to repel their attacks; he was assigned to live exclusively on the vegetable produce, although he was thereby exposed to a perpetual struggle with the reluctant soil. It was, however, believed, that the Adamites in their universal degeneracy were not satisfied to use the milk, or the wool, or the labour of the animals; they longed after their flesh also: and how should generations, among which the murder of fellow-men was a familiar crime, refrain from killing those beings over which they believed themselves to possess an unlimited right? This appetite, once awakened, could not easily be eradicated; the custom had, through many centuries, taken too deep a root; it was, therefore, again an act of Divine compassion over human weakness, legally to allow animal food, the enjoyment of which would, without this sanction, for ever have been a crime. Thus, the permission to kill animals has remained as a standing monument of the inveterate depravity of the antediluvian generations; it is a concession made to man, because "the cogitation of his heart is evil from his youth"; it is the inheritance from an age of violence; and, though violence can, in itself, never assume the character of innocence, it ceases, according to our passage, at least to be a sin against the Divine will. However, we are here also not left without an allusion to disclose to us the true meaning of that permission. Every living creature was allowed for food, like the herbs in former times (see i. 29); butthe flesh with its soul, that is, its blood, shall not be eaten (ver. 4). The animals are not unrestrictedly permitted like vegetable food; they are not considered as mere objects; they are living beings, endowed with a soul which is to be respected, and which is holy, since it proceeds from God; and, as the blood was considered to contain the principle of life, it was rigorously forbidden on penalty of death; which prohibition is repeated in the New Testament among the essential laws. The eating of the blood of animals was, indeed, considered equivalent to murder, and was visited with the most awful Divine judgments. Thus, at least one faint reminiscence was left to recall the original inviolability of every animal life; it is the glimmering spark which may once be rekindled to a full flame; and this will take place in the Messianic times, when even the beasts of prey will cease to feed by murder, but will eat grass like the ox and the lamb. Originally, when the fruits and herbs were destined for the food of man, the grass was left for the subsistence of the animals (i. 29, 30). But, while it is related, that later, as a consequence of increasing degeneracy, man consumed the flesh of animals also, and that this change was confirmed by God; the author is entirely silent with regard to the period when, in his opinion, the animals ceased to content themselves with vegetable productions, and began to devour the flesh of other animals. This is the only deficiency in this part of his composition, otherwise so complete. Many have thought themselves at liberty to conjecture, that he considered the sanguinary nature of the animals to have been a consequence of the fall of man. But, though this opinion is not against the spirit of the Old Testament, we must repeat, that the remotest allusion is wanting to prove it. It would, moreover, sea; into your hand are they delivered. 3. Every moving thing that liveth shall be to you for food; as the green herb I give you all things. 4. Only flesh with its soul, compel us to the supposition, that the organisation of the carnivorous animals was, before the fall, widely different from that which they at present possess; a supposition against which the natural sciences would rise with a unanimous protest. The account of the Creation once finished, the Bible pursues exclusively the history of man; and the animals, for their own sake, engage its attention again, only when it pourtrays the ideal future, with its universal peace and perfect happiness. We may add the doctrine of the Zend Books, that, at the end of time, men will cease to eat meat; they will live upon fruit and milk alone; after a short period, they will exchange milk for water; till, at last, they will require no physical food whatever. This analogy is interesting in more than one respect. As Moses expressly permitted the flesh of animals, we are justified in seeking, in this ordinance, a practical religious idea; his laws are almost invariably enjoined in clear and conscious opposition to pagan abuses; his precepts, besides their positive value, are arrows directed against superstition. A chief reason of animal worship among the Egyptians, and later among the Pythagoreans, was the belief of the transmigration of souls, which, it was supposed, pass into the bodies of animals, and are, after the lapse of many years only, permitted to re-enter a human form; hence, it was an abomination to kill animals, and to eat their flesh; and, hence, the most scrupulous attention was bestowed upon them; and, though in Egypt not all animals were sacred in the same district, yet there was scarcely an animal which was not worshipped in some part of the country. Astrology, also, was connected with animal-worship; for, to each planet an animal was dedicated, which was considered to be chiefly connected with that heavenly body; and the veneration for animals thus became still more intense, dangerous, and : fanatical. Nor are the other reasons, which ancient writers assign for animalworship, less absurd and objectionable; one, which seems to have obtained great currency, was, that the gods, when once compelled to flee before the attack of the giants, assumed the forms of various animals, and that gratitude induced them, later, to command their veneration and worship. If some animals are of special service and utility to some countries; if, for instance, the ibis kills the winged serpents, and the ichneumon destroys the eggs of the crocodile the Bible denies that this gives man a right to declare them as Divine beings; to assign whole provinces for their sustenance; to offer to them voluntary gifts in gold and silver; to collect alms for them; to bathe and to anoint them; to cover them with rich garments, and to place them on luxurious cushions; to erect for them magnificent temples, and to scent the air which they inhale with the most costly perfumes; to bewail their death more than that of a man; to punish those who kill them as impious murderers, and to visit even their undesigned destruction; to embalm their bodies, and to entomb them in beautiful sarcophagi with lavish expence. The beasts are, according to the Mosaic doctrine, beings that owe the breath of their life to the omnipotence of God; to Him they are indebted for all their instincts; and, if these serve the use and advantage of man, they fulfil merely their natural destiny; and the honour belongs to Him alone who has endowed them with those wonderful powers. It was necessary, to eradicate the obnoxious superstition of animal-worship, which had spread in many repulsive forms; and to impress upon the Hebrews, that the soul of man, whose prototype is God Himself, can never be so degraded as to dwell in the body of an animal; that it returns to God who has given it; and that, therefore, for such reason, the animals |