poses by a little exertion; the obscurity now resting on them can be dissipated; the fiction within which they are enshrouded can be removed: and any service thus rendered to the cause of truth ought to be of some use to mankind.

The difficulties of the inquiry have been very unnecessarily increased by the dislocation or wholesale rejection of all annals and traditions which do not correspond with the books of the Jewish people; these last having been most arbitrarily assumed to be absolutely correct and complete, though, apart from their religious authority, they have no inherent right to be regarded as our sole or main guides in remote antiquity. In all inquiries of this nature, it should rather be laid down as a fundamental rule that the annals of each nation concerned are prima facie entitled to credence where they are not outrageously unworthy of belief; because it only stands to reason that each country should be the best custodian of the records relating to itself. Traditional knowledge, says Müller, is the germ of humanity, wisdom, and learning; and we cannot afford to refuse any information that comes up to us in that shape merely because it will not square with the system laid down in the Genesis, which, in matters distinct from religion, is not infallible. We would not reject national traditions even when they are contradictory, or to some extent gross and absurd, since there may be a great proportion of truth in them, mixed up with possibly a greater proportion of what is mythical and untrue; and, even if it should be impracticable to separate the pure metal from the dross, we would rather receive the whole compound under a protest, than throw it away altogether. This, in fact, is the course we invariably follow in other similar cases where the question of Bible history is not involved. We do not refuse, for instance, to believe in Homer and the Trojan war, or even in Válmik and the Rámáyana, though we have no certain information in respect to either, and though much that is related of them is assuredly mythical and untrue. Why, then, in the absence of accurate information, should we refuse to accept the evidence of China, Persia, and Egypt in regard to them

selves, merely because such evidence does not correspond with, or directly contradicts, the testimony of the Jewish books? The argument frequently urged that the evidence from other sources consists mainly of distortions of the Bible account, the same story being presented in different garbs from different quarters, simply begs the question that it ought to prove. The countries of the ancient world were all simultaneously peopled and simultaneously civilised, and the accounts in regard to them must necessarily be similar to some extent; but, if similar, they are not the same in all or many respects, while in certain respects they are directly opposed to each other, which in itself is a proof that they are not derived from the same source. Captain Troyer, in his translation of Rájáh Tarangini, writes that "after reducing to their lowest possible values all the historical traditions and chronological data of the Chinese, Hindus, Persians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other nations, . . . . I cannotre fuse credence to this fact-namely, that great states highly advanced in civilisation existed at least three thousand years before our era." This must be the inevitable conclusion of every such inquiry; and, if we once admit that these great states did exist so early, a further inquiry forces itself upon us in respect to the manner in which they succeeded in attaining their greatness. It is simply absurd to assume that the same legislators and the same inventors of the arts and sciences perambulated the whole universe to instruct all mankind. Everything is now attributed to Adam and Eve to commence with, and then to Noah and his descendants from the time of the flood; but, if all of them had strolled over the globe throughout the whole period of their lives, they would scarcely have been able to achieve a fourth part of what is supposed to have originated with them. The absurdity of our general belief on this point is so apparent that it is strange that we have never attempted to rectify it. It is still in our power to do so, the history of the ancient world not having yet been altogether lost to us. We have only to admit the evidence which we have hitherto refused

in respect to it, to remove it from the region of total doubt and uncertainty; and, if even then we find ourselves unable to solve all our difficulties thoroughly, we shall at least not perversely continue to misunderstand the nature of the problem we have to deal with. Much of the evidence which we propose to accept has a fabulous character; but these are just the fables we must not wholly reject, since what we call fables were probably truths in the ages in which they were written, when they were correctly understood. No nation as a body of men would or could have gratuitously invented a series of mere stories to palm them off on posterity as historical facts. What they did was to dress their history in such garb as appeared pleasing to them without being open to misconstruction in their day. We have only to find out the sense the narration was intended to convey; nor ought any man to be censured on the score of presumption for attempting to do so.

Of all the accounts available to us, the oldest in point of compilation are the five books of Moses, which give us what is considered to be the most authentic and genuine report of the world-so far as they go. But they only profess to furnish a general history of mankind up to the period of the flood, and from an excess of light at the outset, leave us darkling through the ages that follow. The next records. in point of time are the Veds and the Puráns of the Hindus, which are purely mythical, and barely afford light to make the darkness of their subject visible. Of China, the Shúking contains annals going as far back as B.C. 2300, and they appear to be generally very reliable, though the record possibly was not compiled previous to the first century before Christ. Of Persia, the very ancient accounts given in the Dabistán and the Zendávestá, though mostly fabulous, contain a large sprinkling of truth which may well receive attention, even though we may not feel perfectly sure of our ground till we begin to receive the corroborative testimony of the western writers. Egypt had no historian till the age of Ptolemy Philadelphus, when Manetho, the high priest, was ordered to write its history; but the history that

he did write then was collated with veritable records and inscriptions on national monuments, and would seem to have been generally believed in. The works of Berosus and Abydenus on the Chaldean empire were not written till after the time of Alexander the Great, notwithstanding which all their contents were certainly not utterly fabulous. Sanchoniatho, who wrote the Phenician Antiquities, was of older date, being supposed by some to have been contemporaneous with David, and by others with the Trojan war; and his testimony, as one of the very oldest on the subject, is entitled to receive the highest consideration. We might have been able to derive much confirmatory assistance also from several other attempts which were made in the earlier ages to collect floating traditions, had they come down to

us.

Democritus wrote a history of Phrygia, Zanthus of Lydia, Anacharsis of Scythia, Aristippus of Lybia, Heraclides of Persia, and Dius, Moschus, and others, of Phoenicia. But all these have been lost. What remains of Sanchoniatho now is an adulterated and confused medley; of Manetho we have but a garbled second-hand abridgment by Syncellus; of Berosus, some detached passages and fragments only have been rescued. But instead of regretting that our position is not better than it is, we should rather be thankful that it is not worse.

The Mosaic account is very simple and clear. Man is formed out of the dust, but in the image of his Maker; the first pair are placed in Eden-that is, start in life with the greatest felicity; sin enters even among them, and, as a necessary consequence of it, they are cast out from their felicity and made subject to death; the disorders increase, and sin becomes rampant as the family multiplies; the whole human race becomes incorrigibly corrupt, and are therefore all destroyed by a flood: but, God being grieved at heart that it should be so, Noah finds grace in His eyes, and he and his family are saved to repeople an empty world.

We may stop here to ask, whether this account, apparently true so far as it goes, is at the same time complete? Another

account, only less ancient than the Mosaic one, is that given by Sanchoniatho. His first man and wife, on being created, find out the food gathered from trees, and the way of generating fire by rubbing pieces of wood against each other. They increase and multiply vastly, the beings procreated bearing the names afterwards venerated in Egypt and Greece as those of gods and goddesses. They live in the most brutal state of prostitution and crime; but no destruction of the world by a flood is spoken of. Is this necessarily false because it does not absolutely tally with the other account? or should we not rather accept it as based on a different tradition of the first ages from what Moses knew? China, Persia, and Egypt similarly give us distinct and differing stories of their own, which are not necessarily false, and which, differing from the Mosaic account, do not necessarily impugn its correctness. The fact, which lies in a nutshell, is this, that the account of the Bible is only true and complete as far as it goes-that is, as far as the knowledge available to Moses could have made it so. In respect to subsidiary details, it would seem to be not absolutely or nearly accurate. The whole world was not possibly destroyed by the deluge, as Moses relates. Here we are bound to accept the additional evidence available to us on that particular point. The Persian and Phoenician versions give no account of the deluge at all; the account furnished by the Chinese, which is unimpeachable, is that there was a deluge which did great mischief, but that all mankind did not perish by it; and the account of Berosus expressly limits the inundation and destruction to Assyria, of which only the annals compiled by him took cognizance. These divergences from the account of Moses only explain that what Moses knew to have been universally destructive, actually did much less damage in other parts of the world not known to the Jews, and was scarcely felt in some of them; and this surely must have been true. The mountains of Armenia, where the ark rested, are said to have been covered only with fifteen cubits of water. This alone, if it was so, is sufficient evidence to establish that the