improvement of their moral selves, and therefore of their moral nature, since they became conscious of what was righ and what was wrong. The mind must be debilitated or un hinged in any one, before it can desire to be deteriorated, of to become inferior to itself. We all wish and seek to be thought to be what we ought to be, and not to be deemer deficient, or unworthy, or inferior. We love to stand high in each other's opinion, and to do so we must strive to be what will bring the approbation to us, and therefore to aim and rise to what is deemed the best in our living day. Hence, as society improves, every individual must improve, more or less, with it; and thus the appointed process is continually working to urge every new generation to a greater, and wider, and ampler moral excellence, than the level of its predecessors.

Human existence has thus been a vast process of moral and intellectual formation, steadily evolving at every stage its appointed result, and always enlarging the progression, either in numbers or degrees, and most usually in both respects. The grand ultimate result, the successive advances, the ever-multiplying produce, and the means to effect it, and to surmount and avert the impending counteractions, which the contrarieties of millions of opposing wills would be always presenting, would be at the commencement, and always afterward, in the contemplation of the Almighty Director. He planned and provided, and has been supplying, supporting, and assisting, every agency that such a process and such a result would need. But adequate time was as essential as the adequate means; because gradual progression and acquisition could alone bring together, into the human spirit, the innumerable materials of which such perfection must consist. We are not aware of the myriads of right perceptions, ideas, thoughts, wishes, imaginations, reasoning, volitions, and judgments, which actually form at the present moment a right-minded and rightly-acting individual of the present amount of attained human excellence. But all these had to be brought separately into existence, in some individual or other, in different ages and nations, Defore they could be imbibed and collected into the individaal mind of each who now has accumulated and possesses hem.

Hence a perfect moral being can only be the last result VOL. II.-U

of a very long series of such attainments, discoveries, feerings, thoughts, actions, and habits, as at length compose a production so noble. Much evil and much good must be suffered and done, not by one only, but by all, and therefore by each, before any one, and still more before large multitudes can be of this character. The essence and principle of an acquired moral nature is, that the mind should itself become its own spontaneous right director. It must no longer need tuition to be so, nor even the self-coercion. Moral perfection will always consist in the soul itself having been so fully trained and exercised in every rectitude of thought and feeling, will and habit, that its actual nature has become that which can only so think and feel, will and act. We are all in a school of exercise for acquiring this inclination and transformation of our nature. Few of us like the training or the duty, but we are all under the discipline, whether we wish it or not, and we are all attaining considerable improvement from it.

LETTER XV.

A few observations on the Causes and Objects of the General Deluge, and on the state of our Historical Information concerning it.

MY DEAR SYDNEY,

I HAVE now to call your attention to that great event from which our present natural and social worlds have more immediately proceeded.

The anterior state of both was so different from what followed the awful revolution which terminated their previous condition, that the new order of things had many of the effects of a new creation. It established that system of life and course of nature under which the human race have ever since been subsisting. It is from the deluge that we may date the more direct commencement of the present state and mode of existence, and laws of human life and society; and herefore it deserves some consideration of its cause, objects, effects, and evidences.

It is a waste of ingenuity or labour to seek to account for it by natural causes; partial inundations may arise from local circumstances, and partial operations of ordinary agencies; but no existing laws could produce a universal destruction, because the regular course of nature is to continue as it is, and not to subvert itself. It is made to subsist, and to be what we find it to be; and it looks like a contradiction which approaches an impossibility, that established laws and agencies can at the same time be both preserving and destroying. We may likewise say, that if natural laws could then have produced a universal deluge, they would have since repeated the operation with reiterations like the cometary visitations; but the history of all nations attests, that since the existing records of human transactions began, no second general deluge has ever taken place. We therefore run no risk of error in referring this stupendous incident to a supernatural cause, and that can only have been the will, and appointment, and exerted power of that Being, who alone can create and destroy; who would never suffer any agents to abolish what he meant to continue; by whose omnipotence either event is equally producible, but who never causes any thing to perish without adequate reasons, and for beneficial results.

Intelligence like that which has formed the universe amid which we are existing, employs its boundless power with as much wisdom and goodness when it alters, as when it constructs. We may therefore be certain that it effected this great revolution in its human world as an improvement in its condition; as an advancing stage of its grand process; for the benefit of those who were afterward to inhabit it; and as an assistant to the progression of human nature at large. As death, without any assignment of a fixed mode or time of dying, was made the law to all human life; the removal of the existing population by an overwhelming flood, was no other alteration of the previous course of things, than the causing all those to die at the same time, and at that particular time, who would have inevitably departed at some subsequent, though varying periods. It brought no more death into the world than had been before attached to it. It only caused the individual termination to occur earlier to the existing race than would have happened without it. The Deity did not choose that the future generations of his human creatures should be the offspring of those who had become

so contaminated by corruption and violence; and whose reproductions would have thereby been injurious to themselves and to human nature. He did not mean that such vices and crimes as had become general should be perpetuated, as he character and habit of the human order of beings; and therefore he terminated the population which had become so depraved. In their stead he began a new production of mankind, from a particular and single stem, selected out of the pre-existing society for that purpose. He observed one family that was fit to be the new founders of a fresh series of human nature, consisting of one aged parent and three maturing sons.* He preserved these, with their wives, in a spacious vessel, built under his direction, with such of the animal genera as he intended should spread again their species over the new surface that would be formed. The safety of these chosen survivers having been provided for, the tremendous commotion was produced. No detail of the operation has been recorded. Descending rains, and waters bursting up from below, are all that is alluded to of the natural means. The discharges from the skies continued for forty days, but the waters continued rising and rushing onward for one hundred and fifty days, until they covered the high hills. Their general elevation above the surface is marked as having been fifteen cubits, but the tumultuous movements of the agitated waves were so directed, that their torrents swept over the mountains during the continuance of their destructive operation; and all that had life on earth perished in their overwhelming violence, ¶ except the eight persons whom the ark rescued from the catastrophe, as it floated on the new-made sea.**

As a single day's convulsion and inundation would have been sufficient to extinguish human life, the facts that the effusions from the skies lasted forty days, that the waters continued rising and prevailing for one hundred and fifty, and that one hundred and fifty more days were afterward occupied in

* "Come thou and all thy house into the ark: for thee I have seen righteous before me in this generation."-Gen. vii. 1.

Gen. vii 2, 3, 14-16.

On the seventeenth day of the second month, in Noah's six hundredth year, "all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and he windows or floodgates of heaven were opened."-Gen. vii. 11.

Gen. vii. 12, 17.

Gen. vii 21, 22.

Gen. vii. 19, 20. **Gen, vii. 17, 23.

the retiring and subsidence of the watery fluid, announce to us that a great process was then in operation for other objects than the death of the subsisting population. These objects must have related to the state and structure of the earth it. self in its habitable surface; and as geological investigations show that the present rocks and masses of our surface áre fragmentary formations of earlier ones, and have been preceded or accompanied by great changes, and convulsions, and dislocations, it is our duty, and the dictate of our common sense to remember, that we have here, in the diluvian catastrophe, an actual period, historically recorded, in which events and agitations of this character are attested to have taken place.

Beyond this remark I will not press the consideration here; but no man of science can do justice to his subject, who forgets or disregards the facts which have been thus preserved for our knowledge. It is not indeed within the capacity of every geologist, nor perhaps of any one in the present imperfect state of the almost new-made science, to discern amid the phenomena which the rocks and remains of the earth present to his observing judgment, what were the operations and changes which attended the commotions of the deluge. But we should not repeat the common error of depreciating what we fail to understand, or dismiss that from our consideration which we cannot satisfactorily explain. The true is true at all times, whether we comprehend or like it, or not; it is therefore a hasty act of mind, and not sound judgment, to reject the admission of a deluge because it does not suit our pre-adopted theories. It is wiser to mistrust them than to disbelieve what has been so authoritatively recorded. But such conduct will only be a stimulus to new ninds, to take up the subject with calmer impartiality, and o endeavour to form happier suppositions, to make juster inferences, and to exercise a penetrating sagacity, superior to that of their predecessors. These results will in time take place. Most of the last series of geologists, and some of the present, have thought proper to discredit the interposition of the deluge, and have treated the idea of it, and its supporters, with mingled animosity and contempt. This is to be regretted, and will not deter the friends of intellectual religion from still desiring to see it in friendly harmony and coalition with real scientific knowledge: nothing is done well by their disunion. The more you study geology, the more