THE DELUGE OF NOAH
To the older men of this generation, who have followed the changes of scientific and historical opinion, the story of the Deluge, old though it is, has passed through a variety of phases like the changes of a kaleidoscope, and which may afford an instructive illustration of the modifications of belief in other, and some of them to us more important, matters, whether of history or of religion, which have presented themselves in like varied aspects, and may be variously viewed in the future.
As children we listened with awe and wonder to the story of the wicked antediluvians, and of their terrible fate and the salvation of righteous Noah, and received a deep and abiding impression of the enormity of moral evil and of the just retribution of the Great Ruler of the Universe. A little later, though the idea that all the fossil remains imbedded in the rocks are memorials of the Deluge had passed away from the minds of the better informed, we read with interest the wonderful revelations of the bone-caves described by Buckland, and felt that the antediluvian age had become a scientific reality. But later still all this seemed to pass away like a dream. Under the guidance of Lyell we learned that even the caves and gravels must be of greater age than the historical Deluge, and that the remains of men and animals contained in them must have belonged to far-off æons, antedating perhaps even the Biblical creation of man, while the historical Deluge, if it ever occurred, must have been an affair so small and local that it had left no traces on the rocks of the earth. At the same time Biblical critics were busy with the narrative itself, showing that it could be decomposed into different documents, that it bore traces of a very recent origin, that it was unhistorical, and to be relegated to the same category with the fairy-tales of our infancy. Again, however, the kaleidoscope turns, and the later researches of geology into the physical and human history of the more recent deposits of the earth's crust, the discoveries of ancient Assyrian or Chaldean records of the Deluge, and the comparison of these with the ancient history of other nations, rehabilitate the old story; and as we study the new facts respecting the so-called palæolithic and neolithic men, the clay tablets recovered from the libraries of Nineveh by George Smith, the calculations of Prestwich and others respecting the recency of the glacial period, and the historical gatherings of Lenormant, we find ourselves drifting back to the faith of our childhood, or may congratulate ourselves on having adhered to it all along, even when the current of opinion tended strongly to turn us away.
In illustration of the present aspects of the question I make two extracts, one from Lenormant's Beginnings of History, another from a recent work of my own.
'We are,' says Lenormant, 'in a position to affirm that the account of the Deluge is a universal tradition in all branches of the human family, with the sole exception of the black race, and a tradition everywhere so exact and so concordant cannot possibly be referred to an imaginary myth. No religious or cosmogonic myth possesses this character of universality. It must necessarily be the reminiscence of an actual and terrible event, which made so powerful an impression upon the imaginations of the first parents of our species that their descendants could never forget it. This cataclysm took place near the primitive cradle of mankind, and previous to the separation of the families from whom the principal races were to descend, for it would be altogether contrary to probability and to the laws of sound criticism to admit that local phenomena exactly similar in character could have been reproduced at so many different points on the globe as would enable one to explain these universal traditions, or that these traditions should always have assumed an identical form, combined with circumstances which need not necessarily have suggested themselves to the mind in such a connection.' [37]
[37] Les Origines de l'Histoire. Brown's translation.
On the geological side, the following may be accepted as a summary of facts: [38]
[38] Modern Science in Bible Lands, 1888, pp. 244, 245, 251, 252.
'If the earliest men were those of the river gravels and caves, men of the mammoth age or of the palæolithic or palæocosmic period, we can form some definite ideas as to their possible antiquity. They colonised the continents immediately after the elevation of the land from the great subsidence which closed the pleistocene or glacial period, or in what has been called the "continental" period of the post-glacial age, because the new lands then raised out of the sea exceeded in extent those which we now have. We have some measures of the date of this great continental elevation. Many years ago, Sir Charles Lyell used the recession of the Falls of Niagara as a chronometer, estimating their cutting power as equal to one foot per annum. He calculated the beginning of the process, which dates from the post-glacial elevation, to be about thirty thousand years ago. More recent surveys have shown that the rate is three times as great as that estimated by Lyell, and also that a considerable part of the gorge was merely cleaned out by the river since the pleistocene age. In this way the age of the Niagara gorge becomes reduced to perhaps seven or eight thousand years. Other indications of similar bearing are found both in Europe and America, and lead to the belief that it is physically impossible that man could have colonised the northern hemisphere at an earlier date. These facts render necessary an entire revision of the calculations based on the growth of stalagmite in caves, and other uncertain data which have been held to indicate a greater lapse of time.