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will be rejected by those who are not disposed to yield to the doc- 

 trines of inspiration an assent equally implicit, or who may per- 

 haps regard inspiration as the assertion of probable conjectures. 



9. But as this doctrine of inspiration stands, as it were, 

 contra-distinguished to mere rational deduction ; as it is adopted 

 upon faith principally, though perhaps supported in some measure 

 by collateral testimonies of another kind ; it is obvious that our 

 inquiry, which professes to be an examination of the results of 

 unaided reason, must proceed upon other grounds: we therefore 

 take leave of the authority of inspiration here, leaving it to be 

 received upon the terms on which it is proposed, viz. upon faith. 



10. That the whole of the existing human race had their 

 origin in two first parents, cannot become a matter of inference, 

 from any ancient testimonies or recorded facts; because such re- 

 ports must necessarily be partial: they may relate to one or two 

 nations, but not to all the places upon the globe. 



11. Neither can the universality of a deluge be proved by 

 such ancient testimonies, for precisely the same reason, viz. that 

 if only one family should survive a great inundation, this family 

 can afterwards testify no more than that it alone, of all the people 

 of a district or a country, escaped such an inundation; and that 

 this family began anew to people the land upon which it was left 

 by the retiring of the waters. This family, without the aid of 

 inspiration, being necessarily precluded a knowledge of the inhabi- 

 tants or occurrences, belonging to a distant soil, is, from this limited 

 information, qualified to speak only of its own. Thus, if our own 

 island should by a sudden subsidence become covered by the sea, 

 to the destruction of all its inhabitants, save one; that one, if he 

 transmitted the account to posterity, would affirm that the deluge 

 was universal, provided he was unacquainted with any country 

 beyond his own ; and if he should have been acquainted with some 

 neighbouring countries, as Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, &c. 

 and if these should have participated in the general wreck, he 

 would still be unqualified to give an universal record, since the 

 inhabitants of America, and of the East-Indies, during this great 

 European inundation, might be quietly cultivating the soil, or fol- 

 lowing their habitual pursuits, without the slightest knowledge of 

 this formidable catastrophe. In fewer words, no man can attest 

 the fate of a country which he does not know to exist; acd the 

 earliest inhabitants of the globe are not likely to be acquainted 

 with any other country than their own, because a facility of inter- 

 course, or even a possible intercourse, between distant countries 

 is a result of the arts, and belongs to a later period of civilization. 

 We are therefore to seek for other proofs (of the natural kind) of 

 an origin of the human race in two first parents. 



12. It will be said, by way of furnishing these proofs, that 



every part of the earth, so far as it is known, bears traces of H 



deluge, in the formation of rocks, in the stratafication of materials, 



in alluvial soils, &c. Now if it be granted that the things just 



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