To provide against this difficulty, to prevent them from being dashed to pieces, must we again suppose a miracle? Must we conceive of the human beings and the animals as transported through the air to the more level regions below; or that, by a miracle equally grand, they were enabled to glide unhurt adown the wet and slippery faces of the rock?” Such are some of the difficulties and some of the consequences that must flow from an acceptance of any other theory than the one I have proposed: that the flood was partial in its character, extending only over the habitable parts of the earth; and that it was so temporary in its character as not to have left a single trace of its influence visible on rock or fossil. I have thus endeavoured to suggest points of reconciliation between the accepted facts of Geology and the recorded statements of Scripture; and if this slight contribution be accepted as an aid to faith, and a proof of candour on my part to meet those who linger on the border land of doubt, my purpose will be fully answered. Let me add, in the words of Chenevix Trench—words uttered in the University of Cambridge not long since: “May we in a troubled time be helped to feel something of the grandeur of the Scriptures, and so of the manifold wisdom of that Eternal Spirit by whom it came; and then petty objections and isolated difficulties, though they were multiplied as the sands of the sea, will not harass us. For what are they all to the fact, that for more than 1,000 years the Bible collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization, science, law—in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting and often leading the way? Its very presence as a believed book, has rendered the nations emphatically a chosen race; and this, too, in exact proportion as it is more or less generally studied. Of those nations which in the highest degree enjoy its influences, it is not too much to affirm that the differences, public and private, physical, moral, and intellectual, are only less than what might be expected from a diversity in species. Good and holy men, and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly spirits of history enthroned in the hearts of mighty nations, have borne witness to its influence, and have declared it to be beyond compare the most perfect instrument and the only adequate organ of humanity: the organ and instrument of all the gifts, powers, and tendencies, by which the individual is privileged to rise beyond himself, to leave behind and lose his dividual phantom self, in order to find his true self in that distinctness where no division can be,—in the Eternal I AM, the ever-living WORD, of whom all the elect, from the archangel before the throne to the poor wrestler with the Spirit until the breaking of day, are but the fainter and still fainter echoes.” [Illustration: Logo] M. CLAY, PRINTER HEAD STREET HILL. ----- Footnote 1: