NOAH.

When the world, about to grow so wicked, was likely thus to have been cleansed, and so renewed, the great experiment of man’s possible righteousness was probable to be repeated in another form.  We may fancy some high angelic mind to have gone through some such line of thought as this, respecting the battle and combatants.  Were those champions, Lucifer and Adam, really fit to be matched together?  Was the tourney just; were the weapons equal; was it, after all, a fair fight?—­on one side, the fallen spirit, mighty still, though fallen, subtlest, most unscrupulous, most malicious, exerting every energy to rear a rebel kingdom against God; on the other, a new-born, inexperienced, innocent, and trustful creature, a poor man vexed with appetites, and as naked for absolute knowledge in his mind as for garments on his body.  Was it, in this view of the case, an equal contest? were the weapons of that warfare matched and measured fairly?

Some such objection, we may suppose, might seem to have been admissible, as having a show at least of reason:  and, after the world was to have been cleansed of all its creatures in the manner I have mentioned, a new champion is armed for the conflict, totally different in every respect; and to reason’s view vastly superior.

This time, the Adam of renewed earth is to be the best and wisest, nay, the only good and wise one of the whole lost family:  a man, with the experience of full six hundred years upon his hoary brow, with the unspeakable advantage of having walked with God all those long-drawn centuries, a patriarch of twenty generations, recognised as the one great and faithful witness, the only worshipper and friend of his Creator.  Could a finer sample be conceived? was not Noah the only spark of spiritual “consolation” in the midst of earth’s dark death? and was not he the best imaginable champion to stand against the wiles of the devil?  Verily, reason might have guessed, that if Deity saw fit to renew the fight at all, the representative of man should have been Noah.

Before we touch upon the immediate fall of this new Adam also, at a time when God and reason had deserted him, it will be more orderly to allude to the circumstances of his preservation in the flood.  How, in such a hurlyburly of the elements, should the chosen seed survive?  No house, nor hill-top, no ordinary ship would serve the purpose:  still less the unreasonable plan of any cavern hermetically sealed, or any aerial chariot miraculously lifted up above the lower firmament.  To use plain and simple words, I can fancy no wiser method than a something between a house and a diving-bell; a vessel, entirely storm-tight and water-tight, which nevertheless for necessary air should have an open window at the top:  say, one a cubit square.  This, properly hooded against deluging rain, and supplied with such helps to ventilation as leathern pipes, air tunnels and similar appliances, would not be an impracticable method.  However, instead of being under water as a diving-bell, the vessel would be better made to float upon the rising flood, and thus continually keeping its level, would be ready to strike land as the waters assuaged.