le rite; and one that, as we read the story, recalled to mind
this double baptism, "He shall baptize you," said Jesus, "with the
Holy Ghost and with fire;" "Except a man be born of water and of the
Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Its administration to
infants, to such as had committed no sin, nor knew, indeed, their
right hand from their left, implied a belief in the presence, not of
acquired, but of original impurity. It is based on that; and without
it this rite is not only mysterious, but meaningless. Blind is the eye
which does not see in this old pagan ceremony a tradition of the
primeval Fall, and dull the ear which does not hear in its voice no
faint echo of these words, "I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did
my mother conceive me.... Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew
a right spirit within me."

Like the Fall, the Flood also was an event which, though it may have
worn no channel in the rocks, has left indelible traces of its
presence on the memory of mankind. The Greeks had strange traditions
of this awful judgment; so had the Romans; and so had almost all the
heathen nations of antiquity--strange legends, to which the Bible
supplies the only key. Its account of the Deluge explains the
traditions, and the traditions corroborate it; and by their general
mutual correspondence we are confirmed in our belief that its authors
were holy men of old, who spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
To evade this argument, infidels may trace these legends to Jews, who,
led captive of the heathen, related to them the Mosaic story, and took
advantage of man's love of the marvellous to practise on his
credulity. The attempt is vain; since, on turning from the Old World
to the New, we find the very same traditions there; and there, long
ages before Jew or Christian knew of its existence, or had landed on
its shores. Those paintings which were to Mexicans and Peruvians
substitutes for history, for a written or printed language, embody the
story of the Flood. One of these pictures, for example, shows us a man
afloat with his family in a rude boat on a shoreless sea; in another,
the raven of Bible story is cleaving on black wing the murky sky; in a
third, the heads of the hills appear in the background like islands
emerging from the waste of waters, while, with such confusion as is
inseparable from traditionary lore, the raven is substituted for the
dove, and appears making its way to the lone tenants of