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according to the commandment. But there is no doubt that they did great good. The record of the Old Testament history, like all other history, is indeed filled with crimes; but amidst them all, the country did go on much longer than other countries of equally ancient origin, and here and there, men did rise up so good and pure, that it is evident the seeds of culture were not sown in vain.

The providence of God is thus far sufficiently uncomplicated to teach all mankind. What a lesson of brotherhood is taught in the consequences of Abel's murder upon Cain's mind! What was that relation of society which he violated? Christ has taught us by acting it out! and, when we enter into his spirit, we shall know what we are doing, when we talk with a brother." And if we consider the connexion of this want of brotherly conscience in Cain, with the previous account of his want of the spirit of worship, can we avoid being struck with the analogy of his character, in its successive stages, to that of the formalist in religion of all after ages; who has ever been found most liable to misunderstand and undervalue the relation of brotherhood, and to overlook the duties belonging to it; nay, sometimes directly and positively to violate them, even unto the commission of crimes against the lives and liberties of men !

But we have not quite done with the antediluvian traditions. Cain's crime and punishment, great as was the impression that they evidently made, preserved, as they were, in such a remarkable picturesque form of composition, did not effectually check the deterioration of the race. Some difficulties, however, occur to most readers, as they go on in the record. The want of natural philosophy, astronomy, and pure metaphysics, are not the only deficiencies which critics and cavillers have pointed out in the historical songs of the prophet-lawgiver. Even as historian, they say, he is not full and consistent. Where did Cain get his wife? And who could have been the inhabitants of the land of Nod? And for whom could Cain have built a city? And what is meant by going out from the presence of the Lord? And what is meant by the distinction between the sons of God, and daughters of men? &c. &c. &c.

It may be remarked, by way of a general answer to all such questions, that Moses did not undertake to write a regular detailed history of the world. He did not intend to

give a history of all the children of Adam. He mentioned the birth of Abel and Cain, because he had anecdotes to tell of them; and of Seth, because he was the ancestor of Noah. There is no knowing how many more children there may have been; or how much they may have wandered from their father's home and religion. Cain's going out from the presence of the Lord seems to imply, that there was already a distinction, and that the public worship of the true God was not kept up by the wanderers; and it is probable that the distinction of sons of God, and daughters of men, denotes a confirmed wandering from the true religion. A union of these two classes by marriage had evil consequences naturally; in the first place, the loss of this distinction, and, in the second, the final prevalence of evil. The next event, however, after the curse of Cain, sufficiently startling to have been preserved as revelation, seems to have been the deluge. That great event, — the tradition of which is preserved in all the Eastern nations, with more or less of the same circumstances, and the reality of which has been confirmed by the scientific researches and reasonings of modern naturalists,*-our poet introduces in his own peculiar and sublime style. "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord, that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, 'I will destroy man whom I have created, from the face of the earth, both man and beast, and the creeping things, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them.' But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord."

The Supreme Being is rather anthropomorphized in this magnificent passage, it is true. But that was of little consequence, in the day when his actual existence and moral government were the great points which it was the business of Revelation to make.

The narrative of the deluge, which follows, is so particular, so simple, so natural, that it carries its own evidence ; and this is made manifest by nothing so much as by comparing it with the other traditions of the deluge preserved in

* See Cuvier's Theory of the Earth.

the East, or rather hidden under the artificial modes of Oriental expression. The moral of the deluge, however, is the strongest proof of its having been a link in the chain of the providence of God. It was a tremendous event, whose consequences must have been long obvious in the natural world. The circumstance of its being preserved in tradition. till the times of Moses, and as an immediate act of a punishing Deity, is itself a proof how strong a moral impression it made. It is impossible to measure its moral consequences upon those who re-peopled the earth; and to them it was a revelation, rather than to the immediate sufferers, unless indeed, it is believed that men may profit in the next life from their experiences in this. It is for posterity especially that those calamities occur which affect nations. To the imagination they seem greater than a calamity which affects an individual only; and objections have even been made to the representation of the deluge as a punishment, on the ground of its extreme severity. Was it possible, it has been asked, that all the world, gifted and ungifted, old and young, should have deserved the same indiscriminate slaughter; and, if not, is it representing the equitable moral government of God to represent so indiscriminate a punishment? But it was, to the individuals who suffered it, not by any means so direful a calamity; it was but death, which each must have suffered in the end, at any rate, a death probably unlooked for, and which was less of a calamity than is ordinarily the case when there are survivors. It seems so tremendous to the imagination, because they all died together; and this was associated, probably, with great physical changes in external nature. It seemed, indeed, to use the bold Oriental expression, as if the immutable God had "repented" of forming the race! And this was all right; for, thus exciting the imagination, it served to impress on posterity a great truth, viz., that when the moral causes at work for the deterioration of men come to predominate over the causes at work for their improvement, so that the new individuals born into society have not a fair chance for virtue, it is the part of Infinite Mercy and Justice to exterminate the race entirely; a lesson which has been repeated by every national calamity which has occurred since to break up the foundations of the existing state of things. It will not be until the social system is founded only upon

the most general principles, that it will involve no principle of decay, but will" inherit the uttermost parts of the earth,' and issue in the heavenly "communion of the just made perfect."

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Here it might seem that we should naturally pause for the present. But there are two postdiluvian traditions, so much in the same spirit as the antediluvian, that they must be considered before the traditions of the Patriarchs. The ninth chapter of Genesis gives an account of the fall of Noah before the spirit of the vine (which seems to repeat the lesson of the tree of knowledge), together with the conduct of his sons on that occasion, by which a moral lesson was evidently intended. What is that lesson? Is it not that a veil is to be drawn by kindred over the weaknesses of their kindred; or at least by children over the degradation of their parents? It would seem by the heavy curse pronounced upon Ham, that some important principle had been violated by him. And might it not have been important to establish the above mentioned principle in society, at a period of the world's history when the tendency was so decidedly to sensuality and violence? The social principle is in great danger of being utterly neutralized when men are so very uncultivated; mutual forbearance is a refinement to which the rude reflections of barbarians do not immediately bring them, and might it not have been necessary, therefore, that the specific precept of religion should do its best to make sacred one relation, at least, of human society, by forbidding the withdrawal of the forms of respect by the child, even when the parent himself might seem to have forfeited them by his personal character or acts?

It is true that Christianity has no such direct precept; and the reproofs of Christ to the Jews, who, in his day, sacrificed every thing to a very narrow patriotism, and even to his disciples, who also interrupted him in the prosecution of his great work, to urge the claims of his ambitious relatives upon his attention, have been wrung to extract from them a principle diametrically opposite. But the whole effect of Christianity is such as to lead to as great a delicacy and tenderness towards all the great family, as Shem showed towards his erring parent. With the Christian, indeed, the weaknesses and crimes of his brethren, however removed in kindred, can never be the subject of heartless scoff, but are

ever covered with the mantle of charity, even when their discussion is necessary for the general good. Of this universal principle of reverence for human nature, and charity for the individuals who are unfaithful to it, is not this narrative of Moses a dawning? In what equally ancient record is there any story expressing such refinement of feeling? It was nearly two thousand years afterwards, that Plato wrote his Eutyphron.

But we must not pass over this passage without considering the curse. Curses abound in the writings of Moses. Literally taken, and with our ideas, nothing can be more diabolical than this committing of children by their parents to future woe, with all their posterity. But perhaps we understand them in too prosaic a manner. Let us consider this particular instance, and draw some general conclusion therefrom concerning all the curses recorded in the Old Testament.

In the times of Moses, the children of Shem, Ham, and Japheth were separated from each other, and there was a great distinction in the condition of these several tribes. Tradition had connected this difference of condition with the different characters of their respective ancestors, as displayed in the only anecdote which had survived them. The facts that constituted the prophetical curse of Noah, were therefore, with Moses' auditors, a matter of historical fact; and is it being too free in our interpretation to suppose that these facts may have been thus stated as prophecy, so as to make a more vivid impression on the minds of the people, and give a deeper sanction to parental authority? Although the different condition of the descendants of Noah might not have sprung immediately from the acts recorded in this tradition, yet they did undoubtedly spring from the different characteristics impressed on the several tribes by the different characters of their three progenitors, of which these acts were one expression; for the influence of the patriarch, who added the authority of king and priest to that of father, was undoubtedly very strong and enduring upon the family he governed with despotic sway. Thus the spirit of the prophecy was strict truth. Nor could harm arise from the idea of a curse, in an age when people did not, like us moderns, reason upon the abstract morality of such things, but acknowledged the right of a father to bless, or to curse, i. e.

VOL. XVII. - N. S. VOL. XII. NO. I.

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