Let us now advert to a few of the anterior probabilities affecting this evil earth’s catastrophe.  It is not competent to us to trench upon such ulterior views as are contained in the idea of types relatively to anti-types.  Neither will we take the fanciful or poetical aspect of coming calamity, that earth, befouled with guilt, was likely to be washed clean by water.  It is better to ask, as more relevant, in what other way more benevolent than drowning could, short of miracle, the race be made extinct?  They were all to die in their sins, and swell in another sphere the miserable hosts of Satan.  There was no hope for them, for there was no repentance.  It was infinitely probable that God’s long-suffering had worn out every reasonable effort for their restoration.  They were then to die; but how?—­in the least painful manner possible.  Intestine wars, fevers, famines, a general burning-up of earth and all its millions, were any of these preferable sorts of death to that caused by the gradual rise of water, with hope of life accorded still even to the last gurgle?  Assuredly, if “the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel,” the judgments of the Good one are tempered well with mercy.

Moreover, in the midst of this universal slaughter there was one good seed to be preserved:  and, as Heaven never works a miracle where common cause will suit the present purpose, it would have been inconsistent to have extirpated the wicked by any such means as must demonstrate the good to have been saved only by super-human agency.

The considerations of humanity, and of the divine less-intervention, add that of the natural and easy agency of a long-commissioned comet.  No “Deus e machina” was needed for this effort:  one of His ministers of flaming fire was charged to call forth the services of water.  This was an easy and majestic interference.  Ever since man fell—­yea, ages before it—­the omniscient eye of God had foreseen all things that should happen:  and his ubiquity had, possibly from The Beginning, sped a comet on its errant way, which at a calculated period was to serve to wash the globe clean of its corruptions:  was to strike the orbit of earth just in the moment of its passage, and disturbing by attraction the fountains of the great deep, was temporarily to raise their level.  Was not this a just, a sublime, and a likely plan?  Was it not a merciful, a perfect, and a worthy way?  Who should else have buried the carcases on those fierce battle-fields, or the mouldering heaps of pestilence and famine?—­But, when at Jehovah’s summons, heaving to the comet’s mass, the pure and mighty sea rises indignant from its bed, by drowning to cleanse the foul and mighty land—­how easy an engulfing of the corpses; how awful that universal burial; how apt their monumental epitaph written in water, “The wicked are like the troubled sea that cannot rest;” how dread the everlasting requiem chanted for the whelmed race by the waves roaring above them:  yea, roaring above them still! for in that chaotic hour it seems probable to reason that the land changed place with ocean; thus giving the new family of man a fresh young world to live upon.