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“ The terms in which the great wickedness of the antediluvians is described 
indicate a period of violence and outrage ; the age which preceded the Flood 
was an age of ‘ giants,’ and of ‘ mighty men,’ and of ‘ men of renown ’ — for- 
gotten Attilas, Alarics, and Zingis Khans, mayhap — ‘ giants of mighty bone 
and bold emprize,’ who became famous for their 1 infinite manslaughter,’ and 
the thousands whom they destroyed .... It has not unfrequently occurred 
to me — and in a question of this kind one suggestion may be quite as ad- 
missible as another — that the Deluge may have been more a visitation of 
mercy to the race than of judgment. Even in our own times, as happened 
in New Zealand during the present century, and in Tahiti about the close of 
the last, tribes restricted to one tract of country, when seized by the madness 
of conquest, have narrowly escaped extermination. We know that in some 
instances better have been destroyed by worse races— that the more refined 
have at times yielded to the more barbarous ; yielded so entirely, that all 
that survived of vast populations and a comparatively high civilization have 
been broken temples, and great burial-mounds, locked up in the solitudes 
of deep forests ; and further, that whole peoples, exhausted by their vices, 
have sunk into such a state of depression and decline that, unable any longer 
to supply the inevitable waste of nature, they have dropped into extinction. 
And such may have been the condition of the human race during that period 
of portentous evil and violence which preceded the Deluge. We know that 
the good came at length to be restricted to a single family ; and even the 
evil, instead of being numbered, as now, by hundreds of millions, may have 
been comprised in a few thousands, or at most a few hundred thousands, that 
were becoming fewer every year, from the indulgence of fierce and evil 
passions in a time of outrage and violence. ... At all events, the proof of 
an antediluvian population, at once enormously great and very largely spread, 
must rest with those who hold that its numbers and extent were such as to 
militate against the probability of a deluge merely partial, and any such 
proof we may, with the good old Bishop of Worcester, well 4 despair of ever 
seeing ’ produced. Even admitting, however, for argument’s sake, that the 
inhabitants of the Old World may have been as numerous as those of China 
are now — a number estimated by recent authorities at more than three 
hundred and fifty millions, and the admission is certainly greatly larger than 
there is argument enough on the other side to extort — a comparatively 
partial deluge would have been sufficient to secure their destruction. In 
short, it may be fairly concluded that, if there be a show of reason against 
the theory of a flood merely local, it has not yet been exhibited.” 
I do not know that there are any important points which 
I have overlooked in the consideration of this question. But 
for the pressure of clerical life in London, I might perhaps 
have been able to arrange the facts, and elaborate the argu- 
ments, in a way more satisfactory to myself. However, with 
all its defects, I am not without hope that this paper may 
assist some to arrive at a correct conclusion regarding a 
O O 
