THE NO A CHI AN FLOOD. 37 



had not the faintest shadow of control, or that every 

 Israelite, without exception, found and visited his an- 

 cestral home in Palestine merchants from Gades and 

 Ophir and Tarshish, slaves and prisoners, sucking 

 children, bed-ridden old men, dying sufferers? "We 

 shall not, if we are wise, shut up either Caesar Augustus 

 or the Evangelist St. Luke to so preposterous a meaning. 

 In this and ten thousand other instances, our general 

 knowledge of the attendant circumstances, or what we 

 call 'the nature of the case/ supplies the necessary 

 exceptions. To have them all drawn out in detail would 

 be tedious and troublesome. Suppose a glorious comet 

 is about to make its appearance, and some astronomer 

 publicly advises every one to be on the look-out for it on 

 a certain night, how ridiculous would he appear if he 

 made express exception of persons on the other side of 

 the globe, of persons immured in dungeons, of persons 

 not yet born, of persons who were blind, of persons who 

 were dead ! Yet an author, writing some three or four 

 thousand years back, and borrowing perhaps from 

 picture-records, certainly from the traditions, however 

 delivered, of an age long anterior to his own, when 

 language was far less ample and precise than it has 

 since become, is treated as though every word must 

 bear the full and exact force which it would have in a 

 carefully- written treatise upon logic in the present day. 

 We may assume that the author either had sound and 

 accurate information in the ordinary course of human 

 tradition, or else that he was endowed with a super- 

 human knowledge of the historical events in question. 



