could also be shown that each tribe had had its own Noah, saved by ark,
raft, or canoe, or on some tall mountain summit, in the region in which
his descendants continued to reside; but of no force whatever if the
Noah of the race was but one, and if the scene of his danger and
deliverance was restricted, as of necessity it must have been in that
case, to a single locality. Further, if, as we believe, there was but
one Noah,--if, according to the Scriptural account, condensed into a
single sentence by the Apostle, only "eight souls" were saved in the
great catastrophe of the race,--there could have existed no human
testimony to determine whether the exterminating deluge that occasioned
their destruction was a universal deluge, or merely a partial one. It
could not be known by men shut up in an ark, nor even though from a mast
top they could have swept the horizon with a telescope, whether the
waters that spread out on every side of them, covering the old familiar
mountains, and occupying the entire range of their vision, extended all
around the globe, or found their limits some eight or ten hundred miles
away. The point is one respecting which, as certainly as respecting the
creation of the world itself, or of the world's inhabitants, there could
have existed no human _witness-bearing_: contemporary man, left to the
unassisted evidence of his senses, _must_ of necessity have been
ignorant of the extent of the deluge. True, what man could never have
known of himself, God could have told him, and in many cases _has_ told
him; but then, God's revelations have in most instances been made to
effect exclusively moral purposes; and we know that those who have
perilously held that, along with the moral facts, definite physical
facts, geographic, geologic, or astronomical, had also been imparted,
have almost invariably found themselves involved in monstrous error. And
in this matter of the Flood, though it be a fact of great moral
significancy that God in an early period of the human history destroyed
the whole race for their wickedness,--all save one just man and his
family,--it is not in the least a matter of moral significancy whether
or no the deluge by which the judgment was effected covered not only the
parts of the earth occupied by man at the time, but extended also to
Terra del Fuego, Tahiti, and the Falkland Islands. In fine, though the
question whether the Noachian deluge was universal, or merely partial,
is an interest