Other impossibilities came forward:  the insufficient dimensions of the ark to take in all the creatures; the unsuitability of the same climate to arctic and tropical animals for a full year; the impossibility of feeding them and avoiding pestilence; and especially, the total disagreement of the modern facts of the dispersion of animals, with the idea that they spread anew from Armenia as their centre.  We have no right to call in a series of miracles to solve difficulties, of which the writer was unconscious.  The ark itself was expressly devised to economize miracle, by making a fresh creation of animals needless.

Different in kind was the objection which I felt to the story, which is told twice concerning Abraham and once concerning Isaac, of passing off a wife as a sister.  Allowing that such a thing was barely not impossible, the improbability was so intense, as to demand the strictest and most cogent proof:  yet when we asked, Who testifies it? no proof appeared that it was Moses; or, supposing it to be he, what his sources of knowledge were.  And this led to the far wider remark, that nowhere in the book of Genesis is there a line to indicate who is the writer, or a sentence to imply that the writer believes himself to write by special information from God.  Indeed, it is well known that were are numerous small phrases which denote a later hand than that of Moses.  The kings of Israel are once alluded to historically, Gen. xxxvi. 31.

Why then was anything improbable to be believed on the writer’s word? as, for instance, the story of Babel and the confusion of tongues?  One reply only seemed possible; namely, that we believe the Old Testament in obedience to the authority of the New:  and this threw me again to consider the references to the Old Testament in the Christian Scriptures.

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But here, the difficulties soon became manifestly more and more formidable.  In opening Matthew, we meet with quotations from the Old Testament applied in the most startling way.  First is the prophecy about the child Immanuel; which in Isaiah no unbiassed interpreter would have dreamed could apply to Jesus.  Next; the words of Hosea, “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” which do but record the history of Israel, are imagined by Matthew to be prophetic of the return of Jesus from Egypt.  This instance moved me much; because I thought, that if the text were “spiritualized,” so as to make Israel mean Jesus, Egypt also ought to be spiritualized and mean the world, not retain its geographical sense, which seemed to be carnal and absurd in such a connection:  for Egypt is no more to Messiah than Syria or Greece.—­One of the most decisive testimonies to the Old Testament which the New contains, is in John x., 35, where I hardly knew how to allow myself to characterize the reasoning.  The case stands thus.  The 82nd Psalm rebukes unjust governors; and at length says to them:  “I