It is perfectly obvious that for those who accept these Confessions of Faith, not only the so-called "higher Biblical Criticism," but all the discoveries of modern science, from Galileo and Newton down to Lyall and Darwin, are simple delusions. There can be no question that if the words of the Old Testament are "literally inspired," and "mean what they say," they oppose an inflexible _non possumus_ to all the most certain discoveries of Astronomy, Geology, Zoology, Biology, Egyptology, Assyriology, and other modern sciences. Now the account of the Deluge in Genesis affords the readiest means of bringing this theory to the test, and proving or disproving it, by the process which Euclid calls the _reductio ad absurdum_. Not that other narratives, such as those of the Creation in Genesis, do not contain as startling contradictions, if we keep in mind the assertion of the orthodox thirty-eight, that the inspired words of the Old Testament "mean what they say," _i.e._ that they mean what they were necessarily taken to mean by contemporaries and long subsequent generations; for instance, that if the inspired writer says days defined by a morning and an evening, he means natural days, and not indefinitely long periods. But this is just what the defenders of orthodoxy always ignore, and all the attempts at reconciling the accounts of Creation in Genesis with the conclusions of science turn on the assumption that the inspired writers do _not_ "mean what they say," but something entirely different. If they say "days," they mean geological periods of which no reader had the remotest conception until the present century. If they say that light was made before the sun, and the earth before the sun, moon, and stars, they really mean, in some unexplained way, to indicate Newton's law of gravity, Laplace's nebular theory, and the discoveries of the spectroscope. By using words therefore in a non-natural sense, and surrounding them with a halo of mystical and misty eloquence, they evade bringing the pleadings to a distinct and definite issue such as the popular mind can at once understand. But in the case of the Deluge no such evasion is possible. The narrative is a specific statement of facts alleged to have occurred at a comparatively recent date, not nearly so remote as the historical records of Egypt and Chaldæa, and which beyond all question must be either true or false. But if false, there is an end of any attempt to consider the whole scientific and historical portions of the Bible as written by Divine inspiration; for the narrative is not one of trivial importance, but of what is really a second creation of all life, including man, from a single or very few pairs miraculously preserved and radiating from a single centre.[7]