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At the present time, it is difficult to persuade serious scientific inquirers to occupy themselves, in any way, with the Noachian Deluge. They look at you with a smile and a shrug, and say they have more important matters to attend to than mere antiquarianism. But it was not so in my youth.
Here they are: they believe in a trinity, not of persons but essentials love, wisdom, and power; they do not believe in the doctrine of faith alone, but of faith conjoined with good works; they do not believe in a vicarious atonement, but in a reconciliation of man to God; they don't believe in a resurrection of the material body, but a resuscitation of the spirit immediately after physical death; they don't believe in a physical destruction of the world by fire, but think that the world as it is now created will continue to exist for ever; they have no faith in the Noachian deluge, and say that the sacred record of it refers to an inundation of evil and not of water; finally they believe that there will be marriages in heaven, not wedding ring unions, not kissing, courting, and quarrelling amalgamations, but conjunctions of goodness with truth; and they have further an idea that there will be "prolifications" in heaven, not of crying children with passions for sucking bottles and sugar teats, but of truth and goodness.
It shows that they would have been glad to inflict harm upon him, for "the soul of the wicked desireth evil." The place in which the covenant was made between Isaac and the Philistines was called Shib'ah, for two reasons, because an oath was "sworn" there, and as a memorial of the fact that even the heathen are bound to observe the "seven" Noachian laws.
Legendary lore clusters round the petrified "Ark" in which the progenitors of the Malayan stock escaped from the Noachian flood.
Zockler is able to do, is to pronounce a faint commendation upon a particularly absurd attempt at reconciliation, which would make out the Noachian Deluge to be a catastrophe which occurred at the end of the Glacial Epoch.
Then came the destruction of Atlantis, the whelming of that vast continent beneath the waters of the ocean, some particulars of which are given in the Hebrew Scriptures in the story of the Noachian deluge, and in the Hindu Scriptures of the further East in the story of Vaivasvata Manu.
Other poets, of inferior powers, have from time to time attempted, with different degrees of success, some of the minor Scriptural histories; Bodmer, the Noachian Deluge; Solomon Gessner, the Death of Abel, &c.
I wonder what would be said to a modern historian who asserted that Pekin was burnt down in 1886, and then tried to justify the assertion by adducing evidence of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Yet the attempt to save the credit of the Noachian story by reference to something which is supposed to have happened in the far north, in the glacial epoch, is far more preposterous.
Now Kaspar was really a 'sensitive, or feigned to be one, with hysterical cunning. Anything unusual would throw him into convulsions, or reduce him to unconsciousness. He was addicted to the tears of sensibility. Years later Meyer read to him an account of the Noachian Deluge, and he wept bitterly.
He thought, for example, of the Revolution of 1688 being a consequence of the bad government of James the Second; of this bad government springing from the king's attachment to popery; this in turn being caused by the exile of the royal family; this exile having its source in Cromwell's usurpation; and so forth, one may suppose, down to the Noachian flood, or the era when the earth was formless and void.
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