beasts of the field was confirmed to Noah and his sons; and here we read of the first permission given to man to use the flesh of animals for food, it being a fair inference from the permission thus given and recorded, that previous to the deluge man subsisted entirely on the vegetable productions of the earth.

At the same time God gave to Noah the assurance that he would never again destroy the earth by a flood. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease. And I do set my bow in the cloud, he continues, and it shall be a token of a covenant beween me and the earth, and the bow shall be in the cloud, and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. But was there no rainbow previous to the deluge? It has been supposed that there must have been, as it is the effect of natural causes the rays of the sun falling on spherical drops of water, and being, in their passage through them, refracted and reflected. It seems, however, that in thus hastily settling the question, commentators and scriptural interpreters have overlooked the direct and explicit assertion of the Almighty-I do set my bow in the cloud; language evidently conveying the idea that the rainbow now appeared for the first time. Then, again, as to its being the natural effect of a natural cause, we are ever to bear in mind that the great Supreme controls, and has ever controlled, all nature; that what we call natural effects are brought about, equally with all others, by that superintending power without which not a sparrow falleth to the ground. But, not to dwell on this question, whether the antediluvians ever saw a rainbow or not, when we see it, it reminds us of God's justice in the destruction of the old world, and of his mercy in declaring that never again shall the human race thus perish. It is an ever-returning symbol of the glorious declaration of the psalmist:

was the appearance of the brightness round about. The beloved John, to whom was given a still clearer revelation of the glories of the upper world, uses this remarkable language: Immediately, says he, I was in the spirit, and behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne, and there was a rainbow round about the throne. Indications these, whatever interpretations may be given them, that the God of nature is identical with the God of glory, and that our earthly rainbow has its archetype in the celestial world. Beautifully is the sentiment expressed by the Quaker poet when, speaking of the storms of life, its afflictions and its trials, he sings:

"When tempest clouds are dark on high,
His bow of love and peace
Shines sweetly in the vaulted sky,
A pledge that storms shall cease.'

And thus the Moravian, in the hour of dark adversity:

"Glory to God above!

The waters soon will cease,
For lo! the swift-returning dove
Brings home the sign of peace.

"Though storms his face obscure,
And dangers threaten loud,
Jehovah's covenant is sure-

His bow is in the cloud."

After this occurrence a series of years elapsed, and the next intimation of Noah's character, in whatever light we view it, is far less creditable than any to which our attention has hitherto been directed. The sacred writer, with his usual brevity, and with an unbending impartiality and love of truth, relates that after this Noah planted a vineyard, and he drank of the wine and was drunken, and he was uncovered within his tent. In extenuation of this affair, it is urged by some that the intoxicating power of the juice of the grape was hitherto unknown, and that consequently Noah was in this matter blameless. Others argue, with equal, perhaps greater plausibility, that Noah had seen the effects of wine among his antediluvian fellowmen, of whom Christ says, they were eating and drinking until the flood came. It is, indeed, possible, though not certain, that drunkenness was one of the prevailing sins in that period when every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually. It seems evident that, had Noah been entirely free from blame, the sacred writer would have given

their commerce; but they sooner also fell to decay, and have been successively in subjection to the descendants of Shem and Japheth.

Of Nimrod, of whom I have spoken as the leader in this undertaking, very little is said in the Bible. He is supposed to have been the author of the Zabian idol

and, as may be inferred from the Scriptural account, it was he who subverted the patriarchal form of government, ambitiously aiming, for himself, at universal empire.

Nimrod, called in the Scriptures a mighty hunter, one of the sons of Cush, appears to have been their leader, and under his direction they migrated toward the South until they reached the plains of Shinar, where they built a city and commenced the erection of a tower, whose top, in their own language, should reach unto heaven, and let us, said they, make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. It is the opinion of those capable of forming a judgment upon the subject, that the tower of Belus, mentioned by Herodotus, was either the original tower of Babel repaired, or that it was constructed on the same foundation. Its remains are still visible; and Captain Mignan, in his travels in Chaldea, gives a description of their appearance. From their situation and magnitude, says he, I believe them to be the remains of the tower of Babel, an opinion likewise adopted by that venerable and highly distinguished geographer, Major Rennell. This solid mound, he continues, is a vast oblong square composed of kilnburned and sun-dried bricks, rising irregularly to the height of one hundred and thirty-nine feet at the southwest; whence it slopes toward the northeast to a depth of one hundred and ten feet. It is called by the natives, El Mujellibah, the overturned, and they have a tradition, handed down from time immemorial, that near the foot of the ruin is a well, invisible to mortals, in which those rebels were condemned by God to be hung with their heels upward, until the day of judgment, as a punishment for their wickedness.

After his death, says Watson, the great hunter was deified by his subjects, and supposed to be translated into the constellation of Orion, attended by his hounds, Sirius and Canicula, and still pursuing his favorite game, the great bear supposed to be translated into Ursa Major, near the North Pole. Upon these ingenious speculations, however, it is not my province to dwell. I choose rather to confine myself to those practical lessons which may be derived from what we know to be God's unalloyed truth. And first, as to his design in the destroying of this heavendaring tower and the confusion of languages consequently thereupon. Their object was to have a universal rallying point where they might all continue to dwell together, one vast consolidated empire, under the government of one mighty monarch, leaving unoccupied and unexplored the other parts of the world, or gradually extending their limits until the whole sphere should be brought within their sway. Let us make us a name, say they, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. The intention of heaven was to thwart that design; the purpose of the Most High being, as it is expressed in the book of Daniel, to separate the sons of Adam and to divide to the nations their inheritance; or, as it is more explicitly stated by St. Paul, when speaking of him whom the Athenians worshiped as the unknown God: He hath not only made of one blood all the nations of the earth, but he hath made them for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the time before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.

With reference to the confounding of the languages of men which then took place, there have been many sneers, and there has been much witticism expended by those who have predetermined that the account given by Moses is a fable or a fiction. Nor is this to be wondered at. Witticism is cheaper than argument, and

a sneer is quite as logical with multitudes as the deductions of sound reasoning; and with those whose minds are already made up, even more satisfactory. There are, however, several facts which cannot be ridiculed out of sight, nor laughed into non-existence. In the first place, there is now, and has been, so far back as all the records of uninspired history carry us, a great diversity in the languages of different nations. How is it accounted for? It is as much the business of him who rejects the Bible to solve this problem as it is mine or yours. If, at the beginning, one pair were created, they must have spoken one language, nor would their children have acquired any other, nor their descendants downward, so far as we can see, to the present day. We cannot conceive any adequate motive for the invention of a new language; there would have been no need of it, none for whom it would have been necessary. Then, again, if the deluge be a fact, and we have seen that there are traditions of it in all parts of the world, those who came out of the ark must have been of one speech, and the problem to be solved is, How came their descendants to differ so widely in the use of words wherewith to convey their ideas? Who was he who said, Go to, I'll start a new language, and teach it to my wife and children. Marvellous man! and there must have been many such, each of whom achieved a greater feat, infinitely greater, than did the world-renowned Cadmus, when, as the tradition has it, he unfolded to the astonished Greeks the sixteen curiously twisted characters which he called the letters of the alphabet. It is a little strange that men don't accomplish such feats in our day! Yankee ingenuity, proverbial as it is, is satisfied with coining a solitary word now and then. It will be a long time before it manufactures an entirely new language. There are the Rappists, with their community of goods, and chattels, and wives; the Mormons, determined to erect as high a barrier as possible between themselves and all other people; and in our own state the Shakers, firm in the belief that God is able, if it pleased him, out of the stones to raise up children unto Abraham. Go among these people. You will find that they have made very little progress toward a new language. They have a few uncouth barbarisms, and it may be a score or two of

Talk

slang phrases and cant expressions with a nasal twang, but that's all. I must not forget, however, that the skeptics of whom I speak jump over these difficulties and boldly cut the knot which they cannot untie. There never was any deluge; Noah? a creature of the imagination; Adam and Eve? a fable, a myth, an allegory. There never was any first man. No first man? then there could have been no second, could there? no tenth, no five hundredth. If you count at all, you must begin somewhere. But men sprung up. as chickweed does by the road-side, needing no creator, no protector, no nurse, no teacher. And as they grew up they began to talk to one another; there in sesquipedalian Greek, yonder in the gibberish of the Hottentot, there again in the porcine grunt of the Kickapoo Indian, and here in the nervous Anglo-Saxon. about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! Why the men who reject the simple narrative of Moses and profess to believe these crudities, would swallow a whole drove of camels or dromedaries, each with a whole family of Arabs perched upon his hump. But I have dwelt too long upon these fooleries. I advert again to the design of Heaven in thus scattering abroad the human race. Clear and unequivocal was that design, that upon this broad earth there should be no such thing as a universal empire; that men should dwell together in different nations, each with the bounds of their habitation marked out by Him who is the one Sovereign of earth as well as the King of heaven. The grasping at universal empire, the building of a mighty tower, has been tried again and again with the same fate as befell the structure on the plains of Babylon. The Persians tried it, and the Greeks, and the Romans, and for a brief space in her haughtiness Rome wrote herself mistress of the whole earth She had made herself a name, but her tower fell; and her pride, and her pomp, and her glory have been for ages in the dust.

Within our own memory men began to build a mighty tower; and the little Corsican, with an ambition more grasping than even that of Nimrod, aimed at, and almost reached, the universal sovercignty of Europe. Where now is that imperial tower? He whose vision is not bounded by second causes, who remembers that He who sitteth between the cher