accounting for the _origin_ of this beautiful phenomenon, which might
well appear _super_natural to his uninstructed imagination.

Besides the manifold absurdities of this story there are other aspects
of it even more startling. What a picture it presents of fiendish
cruelty and atrocious vindictiveness! What an appalling exhibition
of divine malignity! God, the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of the
universe, is represented as harboring and executing the most diabolical
intentions. He ruthlessly exterminates all his children except a favored
few, and includes in his vengeance the lower animals also, although
they were innocent of offence against his laws. Every creature in whose
nostrils was the breath of life, with the exception of those persevered
in the ark, was drowned, and the earth was turned into a vast
slaughter-house. How imagination pictures the terrible scene as the
waters rise higher and higher, and the ravening waves speed after their
prey! Here some wretched being, baffled and hopeless, drops supinely
into the raging flood; there a stronger and stouter heart struggles to
the last. Here selfish ones battling for their own preservation; there
husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and maidens, affording
mutual aid, or at last, in utter despair, locked in a final embrace and
meeting death together. And when the waters subside, what a sickening
scene presents itself! Those plains, once decked with verdure,
and lovely in the sun and breeze, are covered with the bones of a
slaughtered world. How can the Christian dare to justify such awful
cruelty? The God of the Pentateuch is not a beneficent universal father,
but an almighty fiend.

This story of Noah's Flood is believed still because people never
examine what is taught them as the word of God. Every one who analyses
the story must pronounce it the most extraordinary amalgam of immorality
and absurdity ever palmed off on a credulous world.

EVE AND THE APPLE.

BIBLE ROMANCES.-3.

By G. W. FOOTE.

Christianity is based upon the story of the Fall. In Adam all sinned, as
in Christ all must be sayed. Saint Paul gives to this doctrine the
high sanction of his name, and we may disregard the puny whipsters of
theology, who, without any claim to inspiration, endeavor to explain the
Genesaic narrative as an allegory rather than a history. If Adam did not
really fall he could not have been cursed for falling, and his posterity
could not have