but Noah and his family.  This it accomplished, and why need we raise any further inquiries; as, for example, whether the polar lands, where no man has ever trod, were submerged also?  “All the high hills under the whole heaven” doubtless included all the high hills where man lived, and which, therefore, were known to man.

(B.) Another class of difficulties is historical, consisting in alleged inconsistencies and disagreements between different parts of the narrative.  For the details of these, the reader must be referred to the commentaries.  One or two only can be noticed as specimens of the whole.  It is said that the second account of the creation (Gen. 2:4-25) is inconsistent with the first; the order of creation in the first being animals, then man; in the second, man, then animals.  But the answer is obvious.  In the first account, the order of succession in the several parts of creation is one of the main features.  It distinctly announces that, after God had finished the rest of his works, he made man in his own image.  The second account, on the other hand, which is introductory to the narrative of man’s sin and expulsion from Eden, takes no notice of the order of creation in its several parts.  In this, man is the central object, and other things are mentioned incidentally in their relation to man.  The writer has no occasion to speak of trees good for food till a home is sought for Adam; nor of beasts and birds till a companion is needed for him.  Then each of these things is mentioned in connection with him.  No candid interpreter can infer from this that the second account means to give, as the veritable order of creation—­man, the garden of Eden, beasts and birds!

A difficulty has been alleged, also, in regard to Cain’s wife.  But this grows simply out of the brevity of the sacred narrative.  The children of Adam must have intermarried, brothers and sisters.  The fact that no daughter is mentioned as born to Adam before Seth, is no evidence against the birth of daughters long before.  In the fourth chapter no individuals are mentioned except for special reasons—­Cain and Abel, with a genealogical list of Cain’s family to Lamech, because he was the head of one branch of the human race before the deluge.  In the fifth chapter none are named but sons in the line of Noah, with the standing formula of “sons and daughters” born afterwards.  We are not to infer from this that no sons or daughters were born before; otherwise we should exclude Cain and Abel themselves.  At the time of the murder of Abel, the two brothers were adult men.  What was their age we cannot tell.  It may have been a hundred years or more; for our first parents were created not infants, but in the maturity of their powers, and Adam was one hundred and thirty years old when the next son after Abel’s murder was born.  Gen. 4:25.  At all events, the interval between Abel’s birth and death