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all the sons of God shouted for joy/ In vain have they been 
applied to invalidate that covenant, which, as it had a retrospect 
to the period before creation existed, shall receive its full and 
glorious accomplishment when creation shall be no more; when 
Lhe sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall withdraw her shin- 
ing, and the stars shall fall from heaven: for thus its Almighty 
author has declared concerning it; ‘ Heaven and earth shall pass 
away, but my words shall not pass away/ 
“ The variety of fables to which the awful event of the deluge 
has been accommodated, the diversities in the narrative, adapted 
to local prejudices or to theological opinions, prove that they are 
taken from uncommunicated fragments of some original tradition. 
The incident is recorded, not by construction of philosophical 
theories, but by simple narrators of facts. It is also observable, 
that the accounts of a deluge still to be found among the more 
eastern nations, are as strongly marked by truth, and are equally 
conformable to the history of Moses, as those which are preserved 
in Egypt/’ 
“ But although the concurrent voice of antiquity thus loudly 
responds to the testimony of the Hebrew historian; though the 
memorials of an event, so interesting to the early world, must have 
been treasured up with care, and recollected with sentiments of awe 
and gratitude; though they have been recorded on the tablet of the 
skies, and shadowed out in hieroglyphic sculpture in monuments 
on the earth; though the combined powers of fancy and erudition 
have been successfully employed, in referring, to this source, many 
of the pagan symbols and devotional ceremonies; yet vague and 
unsatisfactory would all these evidences appear, if they had not 
