‏‘.אדם‎—“Man _was_ appointed miserable _and_ wretched, _but_ the blessed God shall descend, teaching _that_ his death shall send to the afflicted, Rest.” The consolation which a sentence like this was calculated to give to the Patriarch Noah, and to his family, in the near prospect of the “end of the world that then was,” may be more easily conceived than described; nor let it be forgotten that in continuation of this Divine nomenclature, the Patriarch was instructed to call his son, who was to be the progenitor of the wonderful Being whose coming is predicted in this sentence, by the name of _Shem_, in prophetic anticipation of the future development of that glorious _Name_, in which both Jews and Gentiles were afterwards to trust, and on which the salvation of both worlds was suspended. To return from this lengthened digression; it is manifest that there is great reason to suspect that the numbers contained in the Hebrew text which have reference to dates and to the age of the world, have been systematically and extensively altered. Dr. Russell cites a passage from the celebrated Abulfarajius, in which he asserts that the Jews, believing it to have been foretold that the Messiah was to have been sent in the _last times_, altered the chronology in order to be able to produce a reason or apology for their rejection of Jesus Christ. Thus they made it appear by their new computation, that Christ was manifested in the very beginning of the _fifth_ millennium, near to the middle of the period to which the duration of the earth was to be limited, that is, according to their glosses upon Scripture, not more than 7000 years in all. But the computation of the Septuagint, he observes, showed that Christ did actually come in the _sixth_ millenary age of the world; the very time at which the prediction of the Old Testament led mankind to expect his advent. The learned Dr. refers also to the candid Augustine, who states that the Jews were suspected of having corrupted their copies of the ancient Scriptures, and particularly of having altered the generations and lives of the Antediluvian patriarchs, out of dislike to the Christians, and in order to weaken the authority of the Septuagint, which was used not only in their churches during divine service, but also in their writings and controversies with the Jews. Though Augustine saw that the temptation to vitiate the sacred text lay with the Rabbins, and that the Greek translators had no inducement to alter the original, he was unwilling to believe that either party could have intentionally altered the Scriptures; thinking it more probable that the differences between the Hebrew and the Septuagint, had originated in the wish entertained by an early transcriber, to render the _generations_ of the patriarchs more natural, and less disproportioned to the total length of their lives.[58] This disproportion, as we have remarked in our First Part, was only partial in the Hebrew, and the discrepancy in this