Sir,--A friendly correspondent has done me the honour of noticing my lecture on the Noachian Flood in more than one contribution to your columns. The easy way in which he admits the possibility of a partial deluge and of pre-Adamite races, together with other symptoms of liberal thought and a trust in the conclusions of science, makes me tremble to think what would have befallen him had he lived ‘in happier ages of the Church.’ At the same time these dangerous and lamentable tendencies towards free-thinking make it needless for me to urge upon him those other and further conclusions towards which he is evidently of his own accord rapidly finding his way. But there are numerous persons who may read his pleasantly-written letters without perceiving how very far gone he himself is from the original simplicity of an unquestioning faith, and may, therefore, fancy that he is a champion of orthodoxy putting down an anti-Scriptural disputant, or showing at least, if he shows nothing more, that the questions in dispute are still too unsettled and vague for plain folks to meddle with or understand. Such a result is directly opposed to that which my lecture aimed at, which was to show plain folks that the subject not only could be understood, but ought to be; to convince them, if possible, that on this subject, and perhaps a few others, they were bound by all the laws of truth and honesty either to learn what there was to be learned, or for the future to hold their peace. Two striking examples were quoted, from the lives of Columbus and Galileo, to show that theologians had dragged the Holy Scriptures through the dirt, by presuming to use their authority for a purpose for which it was never designed, in a province to which it never lays claim, namely, the trial of evidence in natural science. It seems to have escaped the notice of your correspondent, that geography and astronomy were no more advanced in those days than geology and palæontology in our own. But will any one presume to tell us that the Bible is a match for struggling infant sciences, and may be quoted to contradict, suppress, and crush them, but that when they are full-grown it must in turn succumb to their dictation? That is indeed the principle on which, in the old Greek comedy, the son justifies his thrashing his aged father, because in bygone years, when their strength was different, his aged father had thrashed him. Only this, we must remember, is the invention of an incomparable satirist, meant for avoidance, not for imitation.