there is
no such explanation given to limit or restrict most of the other
passages; the modifying element must be sought for outside the sacred
volume,--in ancient history or ancient geography. The reader must, for
instance, acquaint himself with the progress of discovery in early ages,
or the boundaries of the Roman Empire under the first Caesars, ere he can
form a probable conjecture regarding the extent of that "all the earth"
which sought the presence of Solomon, or a correct estimate respecting
the limits of that "all the world" which Caesar Augustus could have
taxed. And to this last class, which fail to explain themselves, the
passages respecting the Flood evidently belong. Like the passages cited,
and, with these, almost all the texts of Scripture in which questions
of physical science are involved, the limiting, modifying, explaining
facts and circumstances must be sought for in that outside region of
secular research, historic and scientific, from which of late years so
much valuable biblical illustration has been derived, and with which it
is so imperatively the duty of the Church to keep up an acquaintance at
least as close and intimate as that maintained with it by her gainsayers
and assailants.

That the Noachian deluge might have been but partial, not universal, was
held, let me here remark, by distinguished theologians in our own
country, at least as early as the seventeenth century. It was held, for
instance, by the learned biblical commentator, old Matthew Poole, whom
we find saying, in his Synopsis on Genesis, that "it is not to be
supposed that the entire globe of the earth was covered with water;" for
"where," he adds, "was the need of overwhelming those regions in which
there were no human beings?" It was held also by that distinguished
Protestant churchman of the reign of Charles II., Bishop Stillingfleet,
whom Principal Cunningham of Edinburgh well describes, in his elaborate
edition of the Bishop's work, "The Doctrines and Practices of the Church
of Rome," as a divine of "great talents and prodigious learning." "I
cannot see," says the Bishop, in his "Origines Sacra," "any urgent
necessity from the Scriptures to assert that the Flood did spread over
all the surface of the earth. That all mankind, those in the ark
excepted, were destroyed by it, is most certain, according to the
Scriptures. The Flood was universal as to mankind; but from thence
follows no necessity at all of asserting the univers