PICTURES OLDER THAN THE FLOOD.
SOME of the more recent discoveries of the archæologists deserve to be far better known than they seem to be. They can teach us many a needed lesson of faith in the dear old Book, which is the only certain and safe guide, alike concerning the remote past and the impending future of our race. For several decades it has been quite the fashion to poke fun at its earlier chapters as only "nursery yarns;" but of late a strong reaction has set in, as one by one the contemporary witnesses have risen from their dusty beds of the vanished centuries, proclaiming with voices of convincing thunder that these old poet-prophets knew what they were talking about. It was not alone the Old Testament which had been attacked by the destructive critics of Germany and elsewhere, but Livy and Herodotus as well. But just as the excavations in the Roman Forum have turned into waste paper, Niebuhr's brilliant "demolition" of early Roman history, which had been accepted by scholars for nearly half a century, even so have other witnesses in solid rock risen up in these last days to vindicate the truth of Old Testament history, and teach us lessons of trust in that Hand which traced the times and bounds of nations from creation's morn. Step by step backward has this vindication gone, until those scientific doubters who are yet capable of learning lessons of faith are beginning to realize that even the very first chapters of Genesis may soon turn out to be good science and history after all. The Bible is indeed an anvil that has worn out many a hard hammer. Of course we Christians have believed its testimony all these years, in spite of the fashionable theories of the evolutionists. It is only those who have been so ready to apologize for the Bible by seeking to show how it "harmonized" with their ideas of science, who are now in danger of having their elaborate reasonings cast aside as so much waste paper. Those who have gone steadily about the work of their Master, fulfilling His last commission as given from triumphant Olivet, and proclaiming all the time that another world, like that of Noah for its wickedness, will, like it, be swept out of existence, tho by fire instead of water, are not now placed in the "fix" of having to revise their ideas of the flood and the antediluvian world. They have never doubted Moses' record all these years. This reaction in public opinion began a good many years ago. Quite soon after the learned world began worshiping Darwin's theory, the Creator began uncovering some of First, it was the monuments of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia that produced the duplicates, or vouchers, for the various historical books of the latter half of the Old Testament. Then the records of the time of Abraham were honored. And lastly such discoveries as those at Mycenæ and Crete are gradually dinning it into the heads of all reason-loving men that primitive man was not such a low savage after all. The pick and the shovel are fast answering the destructive critics and scientists with arguments unanswerable and of their own favorite kind. But the geologists are also receiving their answer. It was long a cardinal doctrine of their "science" that the fossils belonged to ages long before man came on the stage of action; that even the "latest" of them, those huge creatures of the olden time, the megatheriums, mammoth, etc., were extinct long before man was created. It was on this, as one of its chief postulates, that this pretentious system of geology was founded and built up, with its ever-narrowing ages of life receding into the mists of an abysmal past. But about 1859 the evidence began to become conclusive that man lived in Western Europe along with some of those long-extinct species of mammals which show an altogether different kind of climate from that which now prevails—a different world entirely. It was not the believer in a creation of six literal days who was under the necessity of rejecting these discoveries. They were just what he expected; for the belief in creation's week has ever gone side by side with a belief in the record of the flood. But these discoveries were very naturally disturbing to those who had worked out such a pretty scheme of a creation on the instalment plan "long drawn out," with the "days" of Genesis corresponding to their geological ages, and with man created only after about all these ups and downs of the continents had taken place. But the evidence of the fossils—again their own chosen kind of argument—was far too strong; and none of them now think of denying that "palæolithic man," as they are pleased to term that race, existed when the rhinoceros, lion, and hyena roamed over England and Northwestern Europe, together with the mammoth, which was a kind of elephant so nearly like the present species of India (E. indicus) that many think the two identical. Countless thousands of these ancient elephants and rhinoceroses are found in the extreme north of Siberia within fifteen degrees of the north pole; and in some cases the carcasses are in a state of such perfect preservation that the flesh is eagerly devoured by the dogs and wolves, showing that the poor brutes were destroyed suddenly in some awful and strange manner utterly contrary to any doctrine of "uniformitarianism." Indeed, many leading geologists, including the late Sir William Dawson, declare without hesitation that these ancient men and huge animals were all probably swept away together at the time of "the last great submergence" of Western Europe.