'We have all heard of Noah's flood; and it is impossible to think of the whole human race, men, women, children, and infants, (except one family) deliberately drowning, without feeling a painful sensation; that must be a heart of flint that can contemplate such a scene with tranquillity. There is nothing in the ancient mythology, nor in the religion of any people we know of on the globe, that records a sentence of their God, or of their Gods, so tremendously severe and merciless. If the story be not true, we blasphemously dishonour God by believing it, and still more so in forcing, by laws and penalties, that belief upon others. I go now to show, from the face of the story, that it carries the evidence of not being true. 'There were no such people as Jews or Israelites in the time that Noah is said to have lived, and consequently there was no such law as that which is called the Jewish or Mosaic Law. It is, according to the Bible, more than six hundred years from the time the flood is said to have happened to the time of Moses, and, consequently, the time the flood is said to have happened was more than six hundred years prior to the law called the law of Moses, even admitting Moses to be the giver of that law, of which there is great cause to doubt. 'We have here two different epochs, or points of time; that of the flood, and that of the law of Moses; the former more than six hundred years prior to the latter. But the maker of the story of the flood, whoever he was, has betrayed himself by blundering, for he has reversed the order of the times. He has told the story as if the law of Moses was prior to the flood; for he has made God to say to Noah, Genesis, chap, vii, v. 2, "Of every clean beast, thou shalt take to thee by sevens, tne male and his female, and of beasts that are _not clean_ by two, the male and his female." This is the Mosaic law, and could only be said after that law was given, not before. There were no such things as beasts clean and unclean in the time of Noah--it is nowhere said they were created so. They were only _declared_ to be so _as meats_, by the Mosaic law, and that to the Jews only; and there were no such people as Jews in the time of Noah. This is the blundering condition in which this strange story stands. 'When we reflect on a sentence so tremendously severe as that of consigning the whole human race, eight persons excepted, to deliberate drowning, a sentence which represents the Creator in a more merciless character than any of those whom we call Pagans ever represented the Creator to be, under the figure of any of their deities, we ought at least to suspend our belief of it, on a comparison of the beneficent character of the Creator with the tremendous severity of the sentence; but when we see the story told with such an evident contradiction of circumstances, we ought to set it down for nothing better than a Jewish fable, told by nobody knows whom, and nobody knows when.