"First, Eurus to the rising morn is sent,
(The regions of the balmy continent;).
And eastern realms, where early Persians run,
To greet the blest appearance of the sun.
Westward the wanton Zephyr wings his flight;
Pleas'd with the remnants of departing light.
Fierce Boreas, with his offspring, issues forth
T' invade the frozen waggon of the north;
While frowning Auster seeks the southern sphere,
And rots in endless rain, th' unwholesome year.
"High o'er the clouds, and empty realms of wind,
The God a clearer space for heaven design'd;
Where fields of light, and liquid æther flow,
Purg'd from the pond'rous dregs of earth below.
"Scarce had the Power distinguish'd these, when straight
The stars, no longer overlaid with weight,
Exert their heads, from underneath the mass;

And upward shoot, and kindle as they pass,

And with diffusive light adorn their heavenly place.
Then, every void of nature to supply,

With forms of gods he fills the vacant sky:

New herds of beasts, he sends the plains to share:
New colonies of birds to people air:

And to their cozy beds, the finny fish repair.

"A creature of a more exalted kind

Was wanting yet, and then was man design'd:
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
For empire form'd, and fit to rule the rest:
Whether with particles of heavenly fire
The God of nature did his soul inspire,

Or earth, but new divided from the sky,
And, pliant, still retain'd th' ethereal energy:
Which wise Prometheus* temper'd into paste,
And mix'd with living streams the godlike image cast.

}

}

• " Japetus”—or Japhet,

Thus, while the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthy mother tend,
Man looks aloft; and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.

From such rude principles our form began;

And earth was metamorphos'd into man."

Garth's Ovid. Vol. I. p. 5—9.

This extract from Ovid refers to page 70, of the preceding Lec

ture.

NOTE 5.-Testimony to the majesty of the scriptures from Longinus in his treatise on the sublime. He had been saying that, "those who speak of God, ought to be careful to represent him as 66 great, and pure, and without alloy :" He adds, Taúry xài ô Tây Ιεδαίων θεσμοθέτης, ἐχ ὁ τυχὼν ἀνῆς, ἐπειδὴ τὴν τῇ θεία δυν' αμιν καλὰ τὴν ἀξίαν ἐχώρησε, καὶ ξέφηνεν, εὐθὺς ἐν τῇ εἰσβολῇ γράψας τῶν νόμων, “ Εἶπεν ὁ Θεός,” φησὶν τι; “ γενέσθω φῶς, και ἐγένετο· yevéodw yñ, nai śyer'sTw." Thus the legislator of the Jews, a man of no common genius, conceived and spake justly of the power of Deity, when in the very beginning of his laws, he writes-" God said,” (said he) What?" Be light, and it was: Be earth, and it was so.”

Dion. Long. de Sublim. Sec. IX. p. 50. Pearce's Edit.

<Longinus lived in the time of Aurelian the emperor, and was a favourite of Zenobia, queen of the Palmyrians. His treatise " on "the sublime," from which the above extract is taken, is, in itself, a master-piece of eloquence.

This extract refers to page 76, of the preceding Lecture.

NOTE 6.-I had stated, in the first edition of these Lectures, that only three persons, Methuselah, Shem, and Jacob, were necessary to transmit the account of the Creation from Adam to the time when the Israelites went down into Egypt. A very kind communication from a most respectable gentleman of Camberwell, induced me to review this calculation, which had been adopted upon the authority of Dr. Taylor, in his Scheme of Scripture-Divinity; (preserved in Bishop Watson's Theol. Tracts, vol. I. p. 181) and having discovered

a glaring error in the Doctor's calculation respecting Jacob, as well as carefully examined the calculations submitted to me by my liberal and enlightened critic, I have adopted his statement in the present edition from a persuasion of it's accuracy, and beg leave to offer him my most grateful acknowledgements for his obliging communication. Had those journals of professed criticism, which have laboured with so much zeal to discover and expose every trifling inaccuracy in this volume, been as well-informed as they are fastidious, they might, by pointing out this, and some other' real and important errors, which I have detected since the publication of the first edition of this work, have rendered me an essential service; they would, in so doing, have honoured the character which they have assumed, and have been intitled to my warmest gratitude: as it is, they have but exposed the bitterness of their own spirit-and taught me in what estimation to hold their criticisms.- -See p. 85, of the preceding Lecture,

96

LECTURE III.

THE DELUGE.

GEN. VII. 11-24.

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeeth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights. In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them into the ark: They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort. And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life. And they that went in,

went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in. And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark; and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth: and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth: and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died, that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man. All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed upon the earth, an hundred and fifty days.

2 PET. III. 5—7.

For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and

H