THE FLOOD.


Themes like those past and others still to come, are so immense, that
each might fairly ask a volume for its separate elucidation. A few
seeds, pregnant with thought, are all that we have here space, or time,
or power to drop beside the world's highway. The grand outlines of our
race command our first attention: we cannot stop to think and speak of
every less detail. Therefore, now would I carry my companion across the
patriarchal times at once to the era of the Deluge. Let us speculate, as
hitherto, antecedently, throwing our minds as it were into some angelic
prior state.

If, as we have seen probable, evil (a concretion always, not an
abstraction) made some perceptible ravages even in the unbounded sphere
of a heavenly creation, how much more rapid and overwhelming would its
avalanche (once ill-commenced) be seen, when the site of its infliction
was a poor band of men and women prisoned on a speck of earth. How
likely was it that, in the lapse of no long time, the whole world should
have been "corrupt before God, and filled with wickedness." How
probable, that taking into account the great duration of pristine human
life, the wicked family of man should speedily have festered up into an
intolerable guiltiness. And was this dread result of the primal curse
and disobedience to be regarded as the Adversary's triumph? Had this
Accuser--the Saxon word is Devil--had this Slanderer of God's attribute
then really beaten Good? or was not rather all this swarming sin an
awful vindication to the universe of the great need-be that God
unceasingly must hold his creature up lest he fall, and that out of Him