We now come to the close of the whole in the Deluge; and as this has been made in our own time the subject of much discussion, and as it contains within itself the whole kernel of the subject, it merits a separate treatment.
To the older men of this generation, who have followed the changes of scientific and historical opinion, the story of the Deluge, old though it is, has passed through a variety of phases like the changes of a kaleidoscope, and which may afford an instructive illustration of the modifications of belief in other, and some of them to us more important, matters, whether of history or of religion, which have presented themselves in like varied aspects, and may be variously viewed in the future.
As children we listened with awe and wonder to the story of the wicked antediluvians, and of their terrible fate and the salvation of righteous Noah, and received a deep and abiding impression of the enormity of moral evil and of the just retribution of the Great Ruler of the Universe. A little later, though the idea that all the fossil remains imbedded in the rocks are memorials of the Deluge had passed away from the minds of the better informed, we read with interest the wonderful revelations of the bone-caves described by Buckland, and felt that the antediluvian age had become a scientific reality. But later still all this seemed to pass away like a dream. Under the guidance of Lyell we learned that even the caves and gravels must be of greater age than the historical Deluge, and that the remains of men and animals contained in them must have belonged to far-off æons, antedating perhaps even the Biblical creation of man, while the historical Deluge, if it ever occurred, must have been an affair so small and local that it had left no traces on the rocks of the earth. At the same time Biblical critics were busy with the narrative itself, showing that it could be decomposed into different documents, that it bore traces of a very recent origin, that it was unhistorical, and to be relegated to the same category with the fairy-tales of our infancy. Again, however, the kaleidoscope turns, and the later researches of geology into the physical and human history of the more recent deposits of the earth's crust, the discoveries of ancient Assyrian or Chaldean records of the Deluge, and the comparison of these with the ancient history of other nations, rehabilitate the old story; and as we study the new facts respecting the so-called palæolithic and neolithic men, the clay tablets recovered from the libraries of Nineveh by George Smith, the calculations of Prestwich and others respecting the recency of the glacial period, and the historical gatherings of Lenormant, we find ourselves drifting back to the faith of our childhood, or may congratulate ourselves on having adhered to it all along, even when the current of opinion tended strongly to turn us away.