154 
Gospel had been “preached to every creature under heaven” ; but that only 
means its applicability “ to every creature under heaven,” for surely no man 
ever supposed that the Apostle intended it to be understood that he thought 
the Gospel had then been preached to every living man in the world ! There 
is also a great objection to dealing with texts of this kind from the mere ex- 
pressions in our vernacular translation, for we know very well that many of 
these sentences would require modification if we took the Hebrew or Greek 
originals so far as we have got them ; and we must always further bear in mind 
that we have not the actual origines of either the Old or the New Testament, 
but only later versions, and we should therefore be all the more careful in 
dealing with exegesis. There is a similar straining by the use of italics in 
the quotation from Professor Hitchcock, on page 145 of the paper. “ The 
hail smote every herb of the field and brake every tree.” That applies only to 
the fields of Egypt, and not to the fields in other parts of the world ; and it 
is not fair to put those words in italics. The passage implies only a local 
calamity,, and not that every individual herb or tree throughout the world 
was smitten or broken. I have already noticed the next part of the paper 
summing up the arguments against the universality of the Deluge, brought 
from so many sources, but they are really not borne out by what we now 
know. I am not quite sure that we know what might be the prolificacy of 
the human race in those early days when men lived for so long. Certainly we 
should not be led to imagine that the human race were so little prolific, seeing 
that they, as well as the inferior animals, were created to replenish, the earth. 
I am sorry to have had to make these remarks of an adverse kind, because 
the general tone of the paper is very excellent ; but I think the author is one 
of those friends who is doing no little damage with the best intentions to do 
good. Mr. Davison has, I think, been a little too easy in accepting as truth 
many of these quasi-scientific facts, and regarding as science some things 
which are not worthy of the name. (Hear, hear.) 
Rev. C. A. Row. — In answer to the observations which have just been 
made by Mr. Reddie, let me say that I never heard him reason so illogically 
before. (Laughter.) One thing did astonish me, and that was his assertion, 
which I have seen made in one of the papers of this Society before, that the 
mountains of Auvergne burst out into volcanic fire in the fifth century of 
the Christian era. When you consider what a mighty eruption that must 
have been, and that it left no trace in history, you must feel astonished at 
this assertion. Compare it with any other similar event : take the eruption 
of Vesuvius. We know when that took place ; and we know that it over- 
whelmed Pompeii and Herculaneum, and made a most prodigious impression 
in history, although it did not occur in an age when it would have been 
likely to have made a greater impression than the eruption of the mountains 
of Auvergne would have done. There were plenty of authors in the fifth 
century — writers of the Church ; and if such an eruption had taken place, it 
must have stamped the whole of the literature of that period from end to 
end 
Mr. Reddie. — Forgive me ; I omitted to read, in order to save time, what 
