I have now examined all the items of the curse--eight in number--said to have been visited upon Adam, Eve, and the serpent; and what do they all amount to? Not one of them has been realized as such; but most of those which were practically realized turned out to be real blessings. And yet they have been proclaimed to the world by the clergy as the missiles of wrath hurled upon a guilty world for the sin of rebellion against the divine government; and, whether any of these so-called "visitations of divine displeasure" were designed as penalties for disobedience or not, it is evident they have not in a moral sense been realized, or had any beneficial effect whatever. And we must conclude that it was rather short-sighted in Moses' God to attempt to bring his children into obedience by pronouncing curses upon them. He himself virtually acknowledges it; for, after having tried these expedients and found they availed nothing, he became so discouraged, that he said, "It grieved him to the heart" (see Gen. vi. 6) that he had made so rebellious a creature as man. THE SECOND SCHEME OF REDEMPTION. The God of Moses, after having tried the expedient of cursing his children,--the cunning workmanship of his hands,--and grieved over the failure for more than a thousand years,--he (the God of Moses) came to the conclusion to try another expedient. He concluded to select a few of the choicest specimens of the _genus homo_, in order to preserve the race and start anew with some of the best stock or material that could be found. Accordingly, old drunken Noah--the most righteous man that could be found amongst the millions of the inhabit ants of the globe--was chosen to build a schooner, yacht, canoe, or some kind of a vessel, called an arc into which he stowed millions of birds, bipeds, and insects of all species and all sizes, from the ostrich and condor down to fleas, flies, mosquitoes, spiders, and bed-bugs; and millions of animals and reptiles of all kinds and all sizes, from the mammoth and the mastodon down to skunks, lizards, snakes, gophers, and grasshoppers; together with himself and family of eight persons, and food sufficient to last them ten months while in the ark, and several years afterwards, as we must presume was done from the fact that it is declared that the waters destroyed every living thing upon the face of the earth. And it must have required several years to restock it with grass and animals to serve as food for the granivorous, herbivorous, and carnivorous species; and this would make a bulk sufficient to fill forty such vessels, and a weight sufficient to sink the whole British navy. And all this living mass of respiring and perspiring animals were dependent upon one little window twelve inches by fifteen for light and air, and which had to be kept shut most of the time to keep out the rain. If some giraffe or cameleopard had been disposed to monopolize the window by thrusting