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highest mountains. The Bible does not tell you that the Deluge was a miracle 
in a limited sense, but that it was God’s work of destruction, like the curse 
that came upon the earth for man’s sake. Was that great curse universal, 
or only partial, which came on account of man’s disobedience ? Did Australia 
or America escape ? If you admit the universality of that first curse, what 
difficulty can you have in admitting the universality of that judgment or 
second curse ? But let us come to what science shows us. I do not go into 
the scientific hypotheses, explaining the changes that have taken place — the 
great upheavals and depressions ; but we can tell something of the terrific 
forces chained up in the depths of the earth. Look at the islands of the 
Azores. When you see those islands raised above the sea, and when you 
plumb the depths of the ocean, you may well ask what force and what power 
raised them up. What force and what power was that which even Darwin 
himself admits lifted up the Andes and 2,000 miles of land, not by a gradual 
process extending over 3,000 years, but in the course of one earthquake, and 
lifted them up eight feet ? We find there are forces in nature quite capable 
of doing that which science tells us of, in showing that the Andes and the 
Himalayas were once under water and are now above it. But science has failed 
to give us any satisfactory reason for their present position, unless you admit 
such a miracle and work of God as is implied in a universal deluge. Let us 
go to another fact. There is the science of ethnology, which teaches us that 
if you take the past history and tradition of mankind, they show that the 
human race everywhere have had impressed on them the tradition of a flood, 
universal so far as mankind were concerned. Tylor, in his History of Civiliza- 
tion, attempts to account in one way for the universality of that tradition by 
the fact of the people finding shells on the tops of their mountains. But 
examine their histories and traditions, and see how precisely they agree with 
the inspired record. See how Mexico gives you the tradition of a bird 
bearing a branch across the waters. All these things are impressed in a 
marvellous way upon the different peoples, and they corroborate each other 
in a marvellous way. I maintain that all true science — the science of history, 
the science of the natural history of mankind, the science of human tradition 
so far as it can be interpreted, and the science of geology in its true sense 
as the words spoken to us by the rocks of the earth — these things all bear 
testimony to a universal deluge 
Mr. Reddie. — But it will not do merely to say that the rocks have been 
covered with water, because they bear testimony that they were formed in 
water as strata. It will not do, therefore, to say merely that they have once 
been “ covered ” with water ; and I feel so much the value of your remarks, 
that I should like you to be quite clear upon the grounds of your argument. 
The Chairman. — But that is in my favour. No one will deny that the 
cretaceous strata and the nummulitic rocks of Egypt were under water. It 
is for you to account, it you can, for their being brought up without such 
force as would be sufficient to produce a deluge 
Mr. Titcomb. — I cannot but call attention to what our Chairman has said 
concerning the universal traditions of the Deluge. I have collected 200 or 
