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islands the summits of a range of hills; Sumatra, with its central range, a vast extent of elevated country, with central hills, like the plain of Quito with its Andes; Borneo and New Holland huge table-lands, corresponding to each other as the Mysore to central Tartary. Of course, conceptions of the site of Paradise, a subject on which all documents have been withheld from our curiosity, must be conjectural. Yet the position of the chosen seat of happiness in a large and fertile island, seems congenial to human ideas. Security, seclusion, and luxuriance, are natural portions of the picAll the ancient dreams, oriental and western, of happiness too high to be shared among the multitude of mankind; have fixed their place in islands, (the Insula Fortunatæ, the White Island, the Island of Eternal Youth in the Pacific, &c.) surrounded by a guardian ocean, and watched over by protecting deities.

ture.

CHAPTER XX.

THE NEW WORLD.

THE violence of the deluge had ceased with its necessity. Mankind were in the universal grave. From that time, the waters began to subside. In the seventh month the ark touched the summit of Ararat. In the tenth month the mountain tops were seen. And on the seven and twentieth day of the second month of the new year, Noah, by the direct command of God, went forth with his family from the ark, and found himself the master of a new world.

Yet the circumstances were still more extraordinary than the situation. The patriarchal family, but a year before, were the last defenders of Revelation. Personally, they must have long lost all authority over their people; and, in the fierce and profligate concourses of the mingled Cainites and Sethites, must have been little more than hermits, or outcasts from mankind. But, now, all was changed. The scoffers were in the bosom

of the deep'. The scorned, perhaps the persecuted, patriarch, was monarch of the globe! a kingdom of solitude, for the moment; but spreading before his eye with the prophetic promise of millions, of whom his three sons were to be the progenitors, and the kings. And among whom the true worship was to resume its rank, and Revelation be the law of mankind.

In answer to the sacrifice, by which he at once acknowledged the covenant of mercy, and purified the sins of his household, a blessing was given; the infliction of sterility was to be no more. The "curse" was taken away. The original blessing of human increase was renewed; but, with a fuller provision for human subsistence, in the permission to use animal food; and even a more direct protection to that increase, in the shape of a positive command against bloodshed. The whole declaration was closed by a Covenant, taking the

1 Fossils of human remains have been found in considerable numbers at Durfort in France. But the general absence of those remains, which has so much embarrassed one branch of the geologists, and given so rash a triumph to the infidelity of the other, is to be accounted for on the simple principle, that they have been sought, where it was never intended that they should be found. The grave of the ante-diluvian millions is the bed of the ocean. Perhaps, Scripture contemplates this mighty burial-place, where it declares that "the sea shall give up her dead," that judgment shall embrace the primeval population, as well as the descendants of Noah; the past with the existing world.

new race under the peculiar safeguard of Heaven, securing them against a future deluge, and promising them the uninterrupted succession of the seasons, seed time and harvest, while the earth remained.

This primal compact was sealed by a phenomenon, of a loveliness and magnificence, which, even now, can never be displayed without exciting the admiration and wonder of man. "And God said, this is the token of the covenant that I make between me and you, and every living creature that is with you. I do set my bow in the cloud. The bow is declared to be a sign to man, that the earth shall not be again destroyed by a deluge. Yet the emblem may have contained more than the promise of protection. The rainbow does not appear until the storm is past. It seldom appears at all in that portion of the year when the natural inclemency of the skies might have made such a pledge the most important, at least, to the early inhabitants of the world. Thus the security would seem to be given, when security was no longer required or to be refused altogether, when the fears of mankind were most awakened. But its purpose may have been directed as much to the ruin past, as to the preservation to come. The Sabbath had been already established, for a perpetual memorial of the creation of the world; the rainbow might be sent as a perpetual memorial of

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its punishment and purification.

Shining on the skirts of the retiring tempest, no nobler remembrancer could be given at once of the justice which had exercised so lofty a sway over the earth, and of the persevering and discriminating mercy which had saved the righteous remnant of mankind. All human monuments may perish; but, so long as man endures, there stands a monument of surpassing splendour, raised for his wisdom, in the skies; an unchangeable testimony to the constant action of Providence on the frame of nature, and of the justice dealt out to the crimes and virtues of man:-the "SIGN of God" in heaven',

'It might be interesting, but it would be endless, to recapitulate the images which the rainbow has given to poetry and eloquence. Homer, who, as an Ionian, might have known its history, calls it the sign :

Τερας μερόπων ανθρωπων.

It has been objected to this origin of the rainbow, that it must, from the nature of things, have already existed. The usual reply of our divines (Waterland, &c.) is, that it was then first appointed as a sign. But this is unsatisfactory. It may be justly demanded, why a familiar phenomenon should have been chosen for the purpose of conveying a most important promise, which it had never been capable of conveying before. Or, how are we to conceive that HE, whose resources are beyond all exhaustion, would have adopted means which, by their familiarity, were altogether destitute of the evidence of a Divine interposition? While, if the bow was seen in the cloud for the

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