There are many thoughts which we may have. We may think how the
flood came to pass; what means God used to make it rain forty days;
what is meant by breaking up the fountains of the great deep. We
may calculate how large the ark was; and whether the Bible really
means that it held all kinds of living things in the world, or only
those of Noah's own country, or the animals which had been tamed and
made useful to man. We may read long arguments as to whether the
flood spread over the whole world, or only over the country where
Noah and the rest of the sons of Adam then lived. We may puzzle
ourselves concerning the rainbow of which the text speaks. How it
was to be a sign of a covenant from God. Whether man had ever seen
a rainbow before. Whether there had ever been rain before in Noah's
country; or whether he did not live in that land of which the second
chapter of Genesis says that the Lord had not caused it to rain upon
the earth, but there went up a mist from the earth and watered the
face of the ground, as it does still in that high land in the centre
of Asia, in which old traditions put the garden of Eden, and from
which, as far as we yet know, mankind came at the beginning.

We may puzzle our minds with these and a hundred more curious
questions, as learned men have done in all ages. But--shall we
become really the wiser by so doing? More learned we may become.
But being learned and being wise are two different things. True
wisdom is that which makes a man a better man. And will such
puzzling questions and calculations as these, settle them how we
may, make us BETTER men? Will they make us more honest and just,
more generous and loving, more able to keep our tempers and control
our appetites? I cannot see that. Will it make us better men
merely to know that there was once a flood of waters on the earth?