Now, as to the size of this ark, this floating caravan, it must needs be very large; and also take a great time in building.  For, suffering cause and effect to go on without a new creation, it was reasonable to suppose that the man, so launching as for another world on the ocean of existence, would take with him (especially if God’s benevolence so ordered it) all the known appliances of civilized life; as well as a pair or two of every creature he could collect, to stock withal the renewed earth according to their various excellences in their kinds.  The lengthy, arduous, and expensive preparation of this mighty ark—­a vessel which must include forests of timber and consume generations in building; besides the world-be-known collection of all manner of strange animals for the stranger fancy of a fanatical old man; not to mention also the hoary Preacher’s own century of exortations:  with how great moral force all this living warning would be calculated to act upon the world of wickedness and doom!  Here was the great ante-diluvian potentate, Noah, a patriarch of ages, wealthy beyond our calculations—­(for how else without a needless succession of miracles could he have built and stocked the ark?)—­a man of enormous substance, good report, and exalted station, here was he for a hundred and twenty years engaged among crowds of unbelieving workmen, in constructing a most extravagant ship, which, forsooth, filled with samples of all this world’s stores, was to sail with our only good family in search of a better.  Moreover, Noah here declares that our dear old mother-earth is to be destroyed for her iniquities by rain and sea:  and he exhorts us by a solid evidence of his own faith at least, if by nothing else, to repent, and turn to him, whom Abel, Seth, and Enoch, as well as this good Noah, represent as our Maker.  Would not such sneers and taunts be probable:  would they not amply vindicate the coming judgment?  Was not the “long-suffering of God” likely to have thus been tried “while the ark was preparing?” and when the catastrophe should come, had not that evil generation been duly warned against it?  On the whole, it would have been Reason’s guess that Noah should be saved as he was; that the ark should have been as we read of it in Genesis; and that the very immensity of its construction should have served for a preaching to mankind.  As to any idea that the ark is an unreasonable (some have even said ridiculous) incident to the deluge, it seems to me to have furnished a clear case of antecedent probability.

Lastly:  Noah’s fall was very likely to have happened:  not merely in the theological view of the matter, as an illustration of the truth that no human being can stand fast in righteousness:  but from the just consideration that he imported with him the seeds of an impure state of society, the remembered luxuries of that old world.  For instance, among the plants of earth which Noah would have preserved for future insertion in the soil, he could not have