in the use of brass and iron, and Naamah, the daughter of Cain, according to tradition, first added ornaments to female apparel. 3. Gen. 4 25-5: 32. : - It was, probably, soon after the death of Abel (ch. 4 : 25), that Adam, when he was 130 years of age, begat a son in his own likeness, whom he called Seth, (that is, appointed or put). He was put in the place of Abel, and was the ancestor of the race of the children of God which continued in the faith, and which included ten generations previous to the Deluge: Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah. Adam lived 930 years; Methuselah, whose age exceeded that of any other human being, lived 969 years. Enoch, "the seventh from Adam" (Jude, ver. 14), because he walked with God, by faith, was translated, that he should not see death, (Heb. 11:5). He preached concerning the coming of the Lord to execute judgment, Jude, ver. 15, (perhaps he prophesied concerning the deluge). Lamech, like Eve, expected to find in his son a comforter in his work and toil on the ground, which the Lord had cursed, and hence called him Noah, (that is, rest or comfort). (He probably hoped to find in the tenth generation the fulfilment of the ancient promise, since, according to established opinions, the number ten represented a completion or a conclusion.) The life of Adam extended to the fifty-sixth year of Lamech; (Shem, the grandson of the latter, survived Abraham 50 years).

OBS.-The longevity which is characteristic of this period, arising, in part, from the circumstance that the strength of the primitive generations was less impaired than in the case of their successors, and that the primitive power of antediluvian nature was not yet entirely broken, is to be ascribed chiefly to the purpose of God to furnish the earth the more speedily with inhabitants.

§ 17. The Deluge.

1. Gen. ch. 6.—While men began to multiply with wonderful rapidity, during the long period of life granted to them, ungodliness began to prevail in the same degree. The fathers, in the Sethitic line, who walked in faith, were the salt of the earth. The " sons of God" (usually understood to be the Sethites), saw

the "daughters of men" (usually interpreted as the daughters of Cain), that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. From these ungodly espousals proceeded arrogant, violent, and wicked men (Nephilim, "giants"); wickedness and violence at length so generally prevailed, that only one man was found who had kept the faith: Noah, "a preacher of righteousness." (2 Pet. 2:5.) The long-suffering of God waited 120 years for the repentance of men. In the meanwhile, Noah built the ark, according to the command of God, and made it 300 cubits in length, 50 cubits in breadth, and 30 cubits in height. But men were not led to repentance; "they were eating and drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away" (Matt. 24: 38, 39),-a warning and a type of the day of judgment.

OBS.-"It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth." (Gen. 6: 6.) Repentance implies, first, a painful consciousness that the result does not correspond to the design, and, secondly, an ardent desire to be able to annul the past, and to commence anew. So far,

a certain analogy may be traced between the divine and human repentance. They differ essentially herein, that the perverse result is at no time and in no mode occasioned by God, and that he always possesses the means to annul the past, and to commence anew. In this instance, he arrested the course in which the creatures of his hand proceeded, by the judgment of the Deluge, and commenced anew in Noah, as the second ancestral head of the human race.

2. Gen. 7: 1-8: 14.- In obedience to the command of God, Noah entered the ark, together with his wife, his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, and their wives. He also took with him "of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort male and female (6: 19), but of every clean beast "by sevens (7:2), probably for sacrificial purposes (8:20); the necessary supply of food was also secured (6 : 21), and the Lord then "shut him in." (7 : 16.) The Deluge commenced in the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month—in the year of the world 1656. The waters rose 15 cubits above the highest mountains, and "all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died."

(7:22.) The Deluge extended through the space of a year; the ark, at length, rested on Ararat, a ridge of mountains in Armenia.

OBS. 1.-The capacity of the ark was 3,600,000 cubic feet; if we assign nine-tenths of this space to the food which was stored, and allow 54 cubic feet, on an average, for each pair of animals (three feet in each direction, length, breadth and height, for each animal), sufficient space remained for nearly 7000 species. No fish, insects or worms were included; all the varieties may be referred to species, and the species now claimed as belonging to a genus, may, perhaps, in many cases, be reduced in number. The gathering of the animals was facilitated by their own instinct; even now, a certain presentiment of an approaching catastrophe in nature occasionally leads them to seek the neighborhood of man; besides, a difference of climate did not exist before the Flood. A mass of water equal to the two-hundred-and-seventy-second part of the mass of the earth would be sufficient to envelope the globe with a covering of water rising to a vast height above the level of the sea.

OBS. 2. Traditions of a general deluge are found among all na tions, exhibiting, in most instances, a surprising agreement with the scriptural narrative. These traditions introduce statements which render it easy to recognise the Noah of whom the Bible speaks, in the righteous Manu (elsewhere called Satyavrata, with his three sons, Scherma, Charma, and Jyapeti) of India, in Xisuthrus (the tenth king after Alorus) of Chaldea, in Osiris of Egypt, in Fohi of China, and in Deucalion of Greece. Coins of the Phrygian city of Apamea (of the third century) represent the Flood in a mode which resembles the scriptural account, and, besides, exhibit the letters No. Traditions, preserving a similarly striking correspondence, are also found among the Peruvians, Mexicans, Greenlanders, &c.

OBS. 3. Geology also furnishes the most decisive evidence of a general Flood. The surface of the earth exhibits a deposite which succeeded a universal and mighty flood, and which, consequently, has received the appellation of diluvial land.

Vast quantities of bones and teeth of ante-diluvian animals, masses of rock and boulders, carried onward by the flood, are found in this diluvial portion. Masses of granite, often of immense size, and evidently derived from the elevated regions of Scandinavia, are spread over Northern Germany and the regions adjoining the Baltic Sea, and can have been transported thither by a mighty flood alone (possibly on fields of ice). Thus, too, the flood carried rocks of immense

size from Mt. Blanc to the Jura mountains. It deposited quantities of bones of the Mastodon on the Cordilleras, at a height of 8000 feet; and avalanches of snow on the Himalaya mountains, at an altitude of 16,000 feet, have brought down the bones of deer and horses. Many bone-caves (like the Kirkdale cave near York, which Buckland first investigated for geological purposes), clearly show the dif ference between the ante-diluvian and the post-diluvian periods. From the Arctic Sea, through the tropical regions, and as far as the southern hemisphere-in Siberia and North America, in Germany, Peru, Mexico and New Holland - there are found vast numbers of fossils (tropical plants and animals, forests of palm-trees, and, particularly in Siberia, entire herds of elephants). Nay, a mammoth was found (at the beginning of the present century) in the ice of Tungusi (Siberia), with the flesh, skin and hair still preserved, furnishing evidence that these animals had been buried by the sudden arrival of the flood, and, further, that, previous to the Deluge, a tropical climate had prevailed over the whole earth, which was converted by that event, at the poles, into one of excessive severity.

OBS. 4.—During his descent into hell, and previous to his resurrection, Christ preached to those who had perished in the deluge. (1 Pet. 3: 19, 20; % 156. Obs. 1.) The deluge was a flood of grace to Noah, and, in this aspect, was a prefiguration of Baptism. (1 Pet. 3: 21.)

CHAPTER II.

FROM THE DELUGE TO THE CALLING OF ABRAHAM.

(1656-2083, after the Creation of Man.)

§ 18. The Noachian Covenant.

GEN. 8:15—9: 17.- The messenger of peace, bearing the olive-leaf, had announced the abatement of the waters of the deluge. In obedience to the divine command, Noah went forth from the ark; he builded an altar, and offered sacrifice. The Lord smelled the sweet savour, and said: "I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake, for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth: neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease." The paradisiacal bless

ing: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth," was renewed in the case of Noah and his sons; dominion over all animals was also given, but the power of dominion was no longer a natural endowment; authority could be exercised over animals only through the medium of cunning and art, or of fear and dread. Animal food was expressly allowed, but "flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof," was excepted. (See Lev. 17: 11.) "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed for in the image of God made he man." - As a token of the renewed covenant, God set the rainbow in the cloud.

OBS. Thus, a new course of development commences in the kingdom of God, occupying the period during which the forbearance of God (Rom. 3: 25), dealt with sin, until IIe should be manifested, who was able to atone for it and to blot it out. The renovated earth proceeding from the deluge (its baptism of water, 1 Pet. 3: 21), is appointed to be replenished by a new race of men, the remnant of the former, like a brand plucked out of the fire, but, nevertheless, connected with that former race. Adam's sin dwells in the race that is spared, as it dwelled in the former, but the counsel of salvation rules over the race with increased activity. Noah's sacrifice, which opens the new development, is a confession of sinfulness and of the hope of redemption. The response of God to this confession is written on the vault of heaven, and, like characters inscribed with sympathetic ink, which afterwards become visible, the writing of God stands forth brightly and distinctly before all succeeding generations, when the lowering storm, admonishing us of former judgments, gives place to the cheering beams of the sun that reminds us of the grace which has since been revealed. The exalted plan according to which God administers the affairs of the world, contemplates the universal sinfulness of man as an evil that has occurred and that still operates, and that plan is now so arranged as to be adapted to man; (there is deep significance in the word "for," which occurs in the promise, Gen. 8: 21). Divine mercy regards the sinner as an unhappy creature, and tenderly deals with him while the possibility of his salvation exists, and the divine long-suffering bears with the sinner and spares him as long as his return to God is possible; both unite in delaying the second and last, or general judgment of divine holiness (which can consider sinfulness as guilt alone and punish it as such), until divine grace shall have accomplished all things which it had predetermined to do for the redemption of the sinful race of man. (Acts 17: 31.) Even this new course of development, how