LETTER XVIII.

Summary View of the Evidence which the Recapitulated Traditions of other Nations give as to the Universal Deluge-And its Concordance with the Geological Appearances.

MY DEAR SON,

HAVING perused these testimonial traditions from both ancient and modern times, and from all quarters of the globe, let us fairly and dispassionately ask ourselves,-not what we may choose or like to believe or to disbelieve,but what is the right and rational conclusion to which they should lead us, as men seeking for truth; valuing only what is true and real, and desirous to avoid all fallacies and prepossessions.

We observe, as we peruse them, a singular diversity of circumstances. This is an advantage to us in an inquiry into the certainty of the great event we are investigating; for these differences and peculiarities satisfy us, that they are not copies from each other, as all uniformity may be. It is always possible that the exactly similar may be borrowed from what is so, but wherever variation begins, this possibility diminishes. The diminution increases with the difference; and when the discrepances become so great as those of India and North and South America are found to be, on comparing them with the accounts of antiquity and the ideas of the classical nations, the possibility of a copy ceases, and changes into that character which we denominate by the contrary

term.

Convinced from this consideration that we have before us a large collection of independent traditions, what is the impartial judgment which our reasoning mind, according to its usual laws and operations in all our other researches and transactions, should and will naturally form on this subject?

Is it possible for us, without forcing our reason out of its natural bias and tendency, on such evidence, to avoid concluding that there has been a general deluge, overwhelming the earth and that population upon it which preceded our present race?

If the question was, whether there has been an invasion and destruction of Troy; or whether Alexander the Great subdued the Persian empire, or whether Cyrus established it, should we hesitate one instant in accrediting either of these events, and all of them, on such a concurrence of testimony; and should we not rather wonder at the mind that under any other feelings or influences should persist in denying them? We have certainly no right to depreciate each other for entertaining contrary opinions to ourselves. This would be unreasonable, and an infringement of that benign and mutually respecting feeling with which all fellow-creatures should regard each other. My meaning is not, therefore, either to encourage self-opinion in ourselves or unbecoming notions of others, but simply to ask, if it would not be a rational deduction as to ourselves, that if we were to reject any of the great facts of history which came to our knowledge, with the confirming support of such a combination of traditions as attend the incident of the deluge, we should be judging on some impulses or impressions different from the desire to know the real truth on the investigated subject? This deduction is warranted by the experience, that those who have acted with any analogy to this mode of conduct, have either been defective in their judging capacity, or have been wilfully supporting an extravagant conjecture for some personal purpose of their self-interest or self-love. The Père Hardouin's assertion that all our classics were forgeries; Volney's idea that our Saviour and his apostles were but the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac; the declaration and belief of one of our contemporaries that the Grecian paganism and the divinities are the true deities and religion which we should adopt; De Maillet's idea that men have sprung from fishes,* and many such like dreams which might be enumerated,† are instances of individual peculiarities, in which mind may be thought to be acting

* He maintained this wild idea in his Telliamed, published in 1748. Cuvier thus notices it: "De Maillet covered the whole globe with water for thousands of years. All terrestrial animals had been originally marine. Man himself was at first a fish; and the author assures his readers that it is not uncommon to find in the ocean fishes which have not only become half-men, but which will some day become entire human beings."-Cuvier, Fossil Bones, v. i. p. 41.

In this very year, 1834, I find an English traveller maintaining that animals grow up out of the earth!!

in contradiction to reason and to evidence, without any personal injustice or affront to the defenders of such imaginations.

But the truth is, that no right mind which is not acting under prepossessions that turn it from the simple desire of calmly discerning what is true or most probable, has ever differed from the general sense, on the main outlines of the history of the world. A few have deviated so far into singularity as to call in question the Trojan war; but although this has nothing like such collateral corroborations as the occurrence of the deluge, yet the doubt and ingenuity of its impugners have not shaken the general impression of its reality, and have the effect of seeming to be only a favourite chimera, a mental football, or a too hasty adoption of its supporters.

If such be our impressions as to the grand transactions of mankind, notwithstanding the minor amount of evidence on which their memorial rests; and if we act on the same intellectual principles in considering the traditional testimonies of the deluge, it appears to me that the lover and student of historical truth who allows nothing but the desire of ascertaining the reality of the fact to guide him, as far as at this late age of the world he can now discover it, can form but one conclusion on the topic we are considering; and this will be, that there has been such a general catastrophe before the present generations of mankind spread over the present surface of the earth. For in these facts, that the earth was so overflooded, that the anterior race perished as the waters prevailed, and that from a small surviving or preserved fragment, the human kind were renewed into the tribes and nations who have since been on the globe, all the historical and traditional accounts which have been cited coincide and agree. They all state or imply these main incidents, and these are the substantial points of knowledge which this subject requires us to entertain.

It is, however, important to remark, that several of them, very remote from each other,-Assyrian, Grecian, Roman, Sanscrit, South American, and the Polynesian islands,nations, some of which could have had no communication with each other, also represent it as an event which the divine power purposely occasioned: and the reason for the exertion of it when given was, on account of the offences of the exist

ing population. Such a confirmation as this affords important verification of the Hebrew narrative of the causes and effects of the awful transaction; and it is also favourable to the credit of the Mosaic account, that both North and South America should, as well as Greece and Chaldea, have traditions that birds or animals were sent out of their preserving vessel to ascertain the condition of the devastated earth,t and that several should mention the fact that animals were saved in it.‡

I cannot think that it comes within the compass of what we usually mean by possibility, that such numerous and separate traditions of a deluge should exist among so many unconnected nations, unless the great event had occurred, and the remembrance of it had descended from generation to generation. The real fact is the only cause that sufficiently accounts for them, to my judgment; and unless that had taken place, they could not have been thus afloat. No local inundations would have produced them; no one ever thinks of extending what are so, beyond their known vicinity. There may have been many lakes and over-floodings of water, and long continuances of it in many countries, both before and after the Noachian deluge. It is the occurrences of this kind which have misled some geologists to substitute these for that; but both are independent of the other. No partial inundations would prevent the divine production of a universal one, when the time and expediency of that had arrived, . and its tremendous operation neither supersedes nor disproves any local diffusions and depositions of the watery Huid, at any anterior or subsequent period. Baron Cuvier seems to think that there were partial predominances of water over various parts of the land before the general flood. There is nothing in the Mosaic history which discountenances uch incidents; and we may, without opposing that, believe any occurrences of this sort, which material nature may conincingly indicate. But THAT DELUGE which the Deity appointed and caused to come over the whole inhabited regions of the globe, for the purpose of ending the first race and

* See Notes* and ‡ on p. 239, and and ‡ on p. 240; also, ‡ and || n p. 248, t on p. 249, || on p. 253, † on p. 254, and *, t, and on p. 255. † See Notes on p. 238, * on p. 239, and ton p. 241; also, on p. 51. t on p. 252, || on p. 253, and and I on p. 254.

state of things, and of introducing the second kinds of both, to be an advancing stage in the progressive formation of his human nature, stands out by itself from all the minor and subordinate ones: it has nothing to do with them, nor they with it.

Whatever of other kinds took place were in the course of nature's established and usual laws and agencies at that period. But the universal deluge was not a natural event, and could not have been produced in the ordinary state of things, or by its preserving and continuous laws. It was the special result of a special exertion of the divine will and power, for a special reason and for a specific end. It was a creative as well as a destructive operation-destructive as to all living things, in whom it extinguished the principle of life, and as to the preceding rocks and surface which it broke up and altered; but creative as to the new masses and habitable ground which it deposited and spread-as to the new laws of human nature, and the new kinds and modification of plants and animals which it introduced: but it was by all these causes and effects, as distinct and different from all other inundations, as the skies are from the earth, or the ocean from the Alps or Pyrenees.

Be careful not to confound one thing with another, either in history or philosophy. Keep every fact, both of nature and man, in due classification and arrangement; and place each in its proper station and order in the compartments o your recollection; otherwise you will be frequently mistaking some things for others; and will then reason very erroneously, from wrong materials, and on fallacious grounds.

You will have observed in the traditions, that each nation tended to localize some main incidents of the commotion within their own country and tribe; and it is from this inclination of personal vanity that some sought to confine the great event solely to their own district, as if it exclusively magnified their personal importance. This is quite natural, and attests the strength of the belief, and is favourable to the reality of the occurrence. Thus the Chaldean account made the preserved patriarch a Chaldean king.* The Greeks deemed him to be a Grecian prince, and fixed on Greece as the great scene of the calamity, and thought that the waters