This event was soon after the publication of the law by Moses from Sinai; and it is represented as miraculous, equally as the passage of the Red Sea, and the supply of quails and manna. There have been attempts by some learned men to show that the extraordinary events connected with the exode of the Hebrews from Egypt, and with their journey of forty years in the wilderness, were not miraculous. We do not see, however, but one may as well deny the miracles of Christ, and indeed all miracles whatever. And yet we are not to multiply miracles unnecessarily. The writer of the Psalms has celebrated the occurrence as a miracle; and Moses, who gave an account of it, speaks of it as such. A great question was to be decided before the nations of the earth, at that period, when almost the whole world was given to idolatry; whether the God of Moses, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was the true and only God; and it was therefore a proper occasion for the particular interference of Him who made heaven and earth, and had the control of nature and the elements. The judgments on Pharaoh and his people, and the subsequent protection of the Hebrews, and the giving of the law by Moses, are all the works of Him who created and governs the world, and who (so far as reason or philosophy is able to show) can suspend the laws by which matter is regulated for great moral purposes. Why should it be “thought incredible for God to raise the dead?” He who first made man a living and intellectual being, who formed him with so wonderful a body, and a spiritual property capable of indefinite improvement, “who stamped its lustre on an insect’s wing, and wheels his throne upon the rolling worlds;” he surely, can raise the dead to life, he can calm the stormy winds, he can cause the earthquake to engulf the solid land, and the fire of the volcano to overwhelm the fairest cities.

In the opinion of the most learned among the moderns, Mount Ararat, where the ark of Noah rested, after the deluge, was in Armenia, or Thibet, and between 90o and 100o E. long. and between 30o and 35o north lat. north of Hindostan and Persia, west of the river Indus and of central Asia, and east of Mesopotamia and of the Caspian Sea. This is a temperate clime, and favorable to health and long life, as well as to the pursuits of the shepherd and agriculturist. The Ararat, the Caucasus, and the Taurus are connected, and form almost one group or range, extending a great distance from what is usually called Asia Minor, to India.

The Indian and Hindoo traditions of the earliest times point to Noah and the Deluge; and they claim to be the descendants of that patriarch. Noah and his sons would not long remain on the mountain where the ark rested, on the subsiding of the waters. They advanded no doubt, to the south, to a milder climate and a more champaign country. In the fourth generation, or one hundred and fifty years from the deluge, they removed westward, to the plains of Shinar, where they began to construct a building which should reach to heaven. Dispersed from this place about one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty years after the deluge, they went forth, in different companies, east, west, north and south; but most to the south and to the east, as both the face of the country and the climate would invite. Noah lived two hundred years after this event, and probably journeyed east, where traditions relating to the flood, and the safety of a few from that catastrophe have much prevailed.— From Noah and his sons would be communicated to their posterity whatever was known by them of antedeluvian discoveries and inventions in the arts of life. These could not have been very small during seventeen hundred years, the duration of the old world, according to the common computation; but at this distance of time, and in the want of early records, no very accurate opinion can be formed as to how great, or what those inventions were. But we may safely conclude, that they were not very great; otherwise the early generations after the deluge would have been more civilized than there is now evidence or reason to believe.

We glean the following from our exchanges.

The Cholera.—This dreadful malady, which, since 1833, when it raged so greatly all over Europe, had nearly disappeared, is again becoming most fatal to [p. 946]