The consummation of this curse may have
been the deluge; and those who dwelt on the earth, before this calamity
swept it with its destroying wing, may have seen it in much of its
original beauty; while those who outlived that event witnessed a
wonderful change.

From that frail fabric, the ark, which proved the second cradle of the
race, Shem had beheld a world submerged,--a race swept off by the floods
of Almighty wrath. He had heard the shrieks of the drowning, the vain
prayer of those who had scoffed the threatened vengeance, the fruitless
appeal of those who had long rejected mercy. As the waves bore up his
frail vessel, he had seen the black and sullen waters settle over
temples, cities and palaces; and he had gazed until he could behold but
one dark expanse of water, in whose turbid depths were buried all the
families of the earth--save one.

Those he had loved and honoured, and much which, perhaps, he had envied
and coveted--the pride, the glory, the beauty of earth--all had passed
away. And after the waters subsided, and the ark had found a
resting-place, what a deep and sad solemnity must have mingled with the
joy for their preservation.

How strange the aspect the world presented! How must the survivors have
recalled past scenes and faces, to be seen no more! How much they must
have longed to recognise old familiar places,--the Eden of Adam and
Eve,--the graves in which they had been laid! For doubtless Seth and his
descendants still remained with their first parents, while Cain went out
from their presence and built a city in some place remote. The earth
which Noah and his descendants repeopled was one vast grave; and what
wonder that those who built above a race entombed, should mingle fancy
with tradition, and imagine that the buried cities and habitations were
yet inhabited by the accursed and unholy. Such have been the fancies of
those who darkly remembered the flood; and as the wind swept through the
caverns of the earth, the superstitious might still imagine that they
heard the voices or the shrieks of the spirits imprisoned within.

Shem seems to have far exceeded his brothers in true piety, and the
knowledge of Jehovah was for many generations preserved among his
descendants, while few or none of them ever sank into those deep
superstitions which debased the children of Ham. And it is beautiful to
remark, that the filial piety which so pre-eminently marked him has ever
been a prominent trait among