THE LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND OF SCIENCE. 645 



sion of a series, once more, not of speculations, but of facts, which 

 have a most remarkable bearing upon the question of the trust- 

 worthiness of the narrative of the flood. It is established that, 

 for centuries before the asserted migration of Terah from Ur of 

 the Chaldees (which, according to the orthodox interpreters of 

 the Pentateuch, took place after the year 2000 B. a), lower Meso- 

 potamia was the seat of a civilization in which art and science 

 and literature had attained a development formerly unsuspected, 

 or, if there were faint reports of it, treated as fabulous. And it is 

 also no matter of speculation, but a fact, that the libraries of these 

 people contain versions of a long epic poem, one of the twelve 

 books of which tells a story of a deluge which, in a number of its 

 leading features, corresponds with the story attributed to Berosus, 

 no less than with the story given in Genesis, with curious exact- 

 ness. Thus, the correctness of Canon Rawlinson's conclusion, 

 cited above, that the story of Berosus was neither drawn from the 

 Hebrew record, nor is the foundation of it, can hardly be ques- 

 tioned. It is highly probable, if not certain, that Berosus relied 

 upon one of the versions (for there seem to have been several) of 

 the old Babylonian epos, extant in his time ; and if that is a rea- 

 sonable conclusion, why is it unreasonable to believe that the two 

 stories, which the Hebrew compiler has put together in such inar- 

 tistic fashion, were ultimately derived from the same source ? I 

 say ultimately, because it does not at all follow that the two ver- 

 sions, possibly trimmed by the Jehovistic writer on the one hand, 

 and by the Elohistic on the other, to suit Hebrew requirements, 

 may not have been current among the Israelites for ages. And 

 they may have acquired great authority before they were com- 

 bined in the Pentateuch. 



Looking at the convergence of all these lines of evidence to the 

 one conclusion — that the story of the flood in Genesis is merely a 

 Bowdlerized version of one of the oldest pieces of purely fictitious 

 literature extant ; that whether this is or is not its origin, the 

 events asserted in it to have taken place assuredly never did take 

 place ; further, that, in point of fact, the story, in the plain and 

 logically necessary sense of its words, has long since been given 

 up by orthodox and conservative commentators of the Established 

 Church — I can but admire the courage and clear foresight of the 

 Anglican divine who tells us that we must be prepared to choose 

 between the trustworthiness of scientific method and the trust- 

 worthiness of that which the Church declares to be divine au- 

 thority. For, to my mind, this declaration of war to the knife 

 against secular science, even in its most elementary forms ; this 

 rejection without a moment's hesitation of any and all evidence 

 which conflicts with theological dogma, is the only position which 

 is logically reconcilable with the axioms of orthodoxy. If the 



