on the earth? And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow-servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled." The very last vision in the last chapter of The Revelation runs thus: "And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard and seen, I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which showed me these things. Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the saying of this book: worship God." With that the visions close. Now it may be submitted if throughout the Bible the separate personalities of God and man are not as distinctly set forth or implied as in these visions of its last book. It is going beyond the limits I had set for myself for this article, but I want to refer to these last quotations from the book of the Revelation of St. John because of the bearing they have upon the continuance of our personality beyond the bounds of this life. All pantheism, if it carries the idea of immortality at all, rests, and must rest, in the theory of the absorption of the human being in the divine. Christian Science must logically take that plunge. But I find personality so distinctly realized in this life that I deem it uncalled for to surrender it for the life to come. Go back to the last verse of the quotation which I made from Tennyson: "This use may lie in blood and breath, Which else were fruitless of their due, Thus it lay in Tennyson's mind. The experiences we have with our "findings" in this physical condition are necessary to define to us our own personality, so that we may not have to go through with that rudimentary pro cess in a world to come. We may start with the conviction, in that sphere of being, that "I am I." We shall not be sent to grope for the definition of ourselves by the processes of contact with or study of our environment. The first factor of consciousness will be personality. We shall have that vantage with which to begin. "I am that I am," is a definition of the Divine consciousness, why is it not, or why is it not to be, the definition of our own? When we get the consciousness of personality, we shall have the undisturbed intellectual conviction of immortality. Is it not one of the ends of religion to produce the conviction that as God is, so, pro tanto, man is? One more allusion to Tennyson, for his conclusions are of value. Tennyson gave direction to have "Crossing the Bar" put at the end of every edition of his poems. Listen to this: "For though from out this bourne of time and place The floods may bear me far, I hope to see my pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar." And so the great Englishman glides away from us on the shoreless sea, in stout insistence upon his own individuality, to meet the eternal personal God. ARTICLE VI. GEOLOGICAL CONFIRMATIONS OF THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.1 BY G. FREDERICK WRIGHT. THE DIRECT CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE. ACCORDING to the account of the Flood in Genesis, while it was so extensive as to need special arrangements to preserve the animals associated with man, the catastrophe was, as geologists reckon time, of short duration. Still, if we can consider the one hundred and twenty years of warning which was given to Noah as covering a period of subsidence, culminating in the final catastrophe described by the sacred writer as of a year's duration, we should have a progress, in the main, so slow and gradual that it could scarcely be observed from year to year, though very likely producing the most wide-spread destruction of animal species which so evidently took place about the close of the glacial period; while the more rapid rise of the land, intimated in the biblical story by the short duration of the flood, would account, as we shall see, for a large class of phenomena, which we are about to describe. But the influence of such a brief subsidence must be looked for, not in the general phenomena connected with the fossils in the ordinary rocks or with the dislocation of mountain strata, but in those superficial deposits of gravel, sand, loess, and clay which everywhere girdle the shores, border the valleys, and mantle the upland plains of the continents. To discriminate in these superficial deposits 1 Concluded from page 556. between those which are due to the slow action of existing agencies and those which are the result of a wide-spread movement is by no means always an easy matter; yet much has been done in this direction during the last twen ty-five years, with the remarkable result, that, whereas existing local causes are seen to be sufficient to account for the larger part of the erosion of gorges and river valleys and the deposition of sediment of various degrees of coarseness over broad plains, a large residuum of phenomena demands the presence of causes which have now either altogether ceased their activity, or have so diminished their force as to be inadequate for the explanation of the facts. I have perhaps been as active as any one in efforts to discriminate, in the superficial deposits in the northern part of North America and in Northwestern Europe, between those which are the direct result of the great ice invasion of the glacial period,' and those which are the effects of local and more limited causes, and have, therefore, been strongly predisposed to attribute as much as possible to di rect glacial agency, especially as it so easily accounts for the larger part of the gravel deposits over these areas which were earlier attributed to a submergence of the continent or to the action of floating ice. But longer and wider study of the facts of surface geology reveals more and more clearly a considerable residuum of phenomena which indicate a brief postglacial submergence, since man's advent, of a large part of Europe and Asia. EVIDENCE FROM EUROPE. The residual facts pointing to this conclusion in England and the continent of Europe have been very fully stated by the late Professor Joseph Prestwich, one of the 1 See Ice Age in North America, and its Bearings upon the Antiquity of Man (pp. xl, 648), and Man and the Glacial Period (pp. xvi, 385), both published by D. Appleton & Co., New York. most eminent, cautious, and unerring of recent geological observers. The conclusions of Professor Prestwich we have already given with considerable fullness in the BIBLIOTHECA SACRA,2 and still more clearly in "Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences." For our present purpose, it will be in place, however, briefly to recapitulate. But, fully to appreciate the force of the facts, one needs to go carefully through Professor Prestwich's elaborate monographs referred to, or, better still, follow him, as I have done to some extent, over the fields described. The evidence is classed under three heads, namely, The Rubble-drift of Southern England and Northern France; The Ossiferous Breccias of the Continent; and The Highlevel Loess of France and Central Europe. 1. The Rubble-drift.-At numerous places over the southern counties of England and on the south side of Dover Strait, in France, there are deposits of angular gravel, bearing no relation to the present drainage systems of the country, and containing paleolithic implements and the bones of extinct animals associated with prehistoric man. This drift is found as far inland as the vicinity of Oxford, and at an elevation on the Cotteswold Hills of about nine hundred feet. It differs in important respects from all ordinary gravel, such as is found along river courses or on the beaches of oceans and lakes, in (1) The angularity and sharpness of the harder constituent débris. Evidently the material has been moved but "The Raised Beaches, and Head,' or Rubble-drift, of the South of England," Quart. Jour. of the Geol. Soc., Vol. xlviii. pp. 263-343; "The Evidences of a Submergence of Western Europe, and of the Mediterranean Coasts, at the Close of the Glacial or so-called Post-glacial Period, and immediately preceding the Neolithic or Recent Period," Phil. Trans. of the Royal Soc. of London, Vol. clxxxiv. pp. 903–984; "On Certain Phenomena belonging to the Close of the Last Geological Period and on their Bearing upon the Tradition of the Flood." * See Oct., 1895, pp. 723-739. New York: D. Appleton & Co. See especially pp. 149–165. VOL. LIX. No. 236. 7 |