NOAH.


When the world, about to grow so wicked, was likely thus to have been
cleansed, and so renewed, the great experiment of man's possible
righteousness was probable to be repeated in another form. We may fancy
some high angelic mind to have gone through some such line of thought as
this, respecting the battle and combatants. Were those champions,
Lucifer and Adam, really fit to be matched together? Was the tourney
just; were the weapons equal; was it, after all, a fair fight?--on one
side, the fallen spirit, mighty still, though fallen, subtlest, most
unscrupulous, most malicious, exerting every energy to rear a rebel
kingdom against God; on the other, a new-born, inexperienced, innocent,
and trustful creature, a poor man vexed with appetites, and as naked for
absolute knowledge in his mind as for garments on his body. Was it, in
this view of the case, an equal contest? were the weapons of that
warfare matched and measured fairly?

Some such objection, we may suppose, might seem to have been admissible,
as having a show at least of reason: and, after the world was to have
been cleansed of all its creatures in the manner I have mentioned, a new
champion is armed for the conflict, totally different in every respect;
and to reason's view vastly superior.

This time, the Adam of renewed earth is to be the best and wisest, nay,
the only good and wise one of the whole lost family: a man, with the
experience of full six hundred years upon his hoary brow, with the
unspeakable advantage of having walked with God all those long-drawn
centuries, a patriarch of twenty generations, recognised as the one