§ I.

There are many kinds of ignorance; but the worst of all is that of critics, who, it is well known, are doubly bound to possess information and judgment as persons who undertake to affirm and to censure. When they pronounce erroneously, therefore, they are doubly culpable.

A man, for example, composes two large volumes upon a few pages of a valuable book which he has not understood, and in the first place examines the following words:

“The sea has covered immense tracts. . . . . The deep beds of shells which are found in Touraine and elsewhere, could have been deposited there only by the sea.”

True, if those beds of shells exist in fact; but the critic ought to be aware that the author himself discovered, or thought he had discovered, that those regular beds of shells have no existence.

He ought to have said:

“The universal Deluge is related by Moses with the agreement of all nations.”

1. Because the Pentateuch was long unknown, not only to the other nations of the world, but to the Jews themselves.

2. Because only a single copy of the law was found at the bottom of an old chest in the time of King Josiah.

3. Because that book was lost during the captivity.

4. Because it was restored by Esdras.

5. Because it was always unknown to every other nation till the time of its being translated by the Seventy.

6. Because, even after the translation ascribed to the Seventy, we have not a single author among the Gentiles who quotes a single passage from this book, down to the time of Longinus, who lived under the Emperor Aurelian.

7. Because no other nation ever admitted a universal deluge before Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”; and even Ovid himself does not make his deluge extend beyond the Mediterranean.

8. Because St. Augustine expressly acknowledges that the universal deluge was unknown to all antiquity.

9. Because the first deluge of which any notice is taken by the Gentiles, is that mentioned by Berosus, and which he fixes at about four thousand four hundred years before our vulgar era; which deluge did not extend beyond the Euxine Sea.

10. Finally, because no monument of a universal deluge remains in any nation in the world.

In addition to all these reasons, it must be observed, that the critic did not even understand the simple state of the question. The only inquiry is, whether we have any natural proof that the sea has successively abandoned many tracts of territory? and upon this plain and mere matter-of-fact subject, M. Abbé Fran?ois has taken occasion to abuse men whom he certainly neither knows nor understands. It is far better to be silent, than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.

The same critic, in order to prop up old ideas, now almost universally despised and derided, and which have not the slightest relation to Moses, thinks proper to say: “Berosus perfectly agrees with Moses in the number of generations before the Deluge.”

Be it known to you, my dear reader, that this same Berosus is the writer who informs us that the fish Oannes came out to the river Euphrates every day, to go and preach to the Chald?ans; and that the same fish wrote with one of its bones a capital book about the origin of things. Such is the writer whom the ingenious abbé brings forward as a voucher for Moses.

“Is it not evident,” he says, “that a great number of European families, transplanted to the coasts of Africa, have become, without any mixture of African blood, as black as any of the natives of the country?”

It is just the contrary of this, M. l’Abbé, that is evident. You are ignorant that the reticulum mucosum” of the negroes is black, although I have mentioned the fact times innumerable. Were you to have ever so large a number of children born to you in Guinea, of a European wife, they would not one of them have that black unctuous skin, those dark and thick lips, those round eyes, or that woolly hair, which form the specific differences of the negro race. In the same manner, were your family established in America, they would have beards, while a native American will have none. Now extricate yourself from the difficulty, with Adam and Eve only, if you can.

“Who was this ‘Melchom,’ you ask, who had taken possession of the country of God? A pleasant sort of god, certainly, whom the God of Jeremiah would carry off to be dragged into captivity.”

Ah, M. l’Abbé! you are quite smart and lively. You ask, who is this Melchom? I will immediately inform you. Melek or Melkom signified the Lord, as did Adoni or Adonai, Baal or Bel, Adad or Shadai, Eloi or Eloa. Almost all the nations of Syria gave such names to their gods; each had its lord, its protector, its god. Even the name of Jehovah was a Ph?nician and proper name; this we learn from Sanchoniathon, who was certainly anterior to Moses; and also from Diodorus.

We well know that God is equally the God, the absolute master, of Egyptians and Jews, of all men and all worlds; but it is not in this light that he is represented when Moses appears before Pharaoh. He never speaks to that monarch but in the name of the God of the Hebrews, as an ambassador delivers the orders of the king his master. He speaks so little in the name of the Master of all Nature, that Pharaoh replies to him, “I do not know him.” Moses performs prodigies in the name of this God; but the magicians of Pharaoh perform precisely the same prodigies in the name of their own. Hitherto both sides are equal; the contest is, who shall be deemed most powerful, not who shall be deemed alone powerful. At length, the God of the Hebrews decidedly carries the day; he manifests a power by far the greater; but not the only power. Thus, speaking after the manner of men, Pharaoh’s incredulity is very excusable. It is the same incredulity as Montezuma exhibited before Cortes, and Atahualpa before the Pizarros.

When Joshua called together the Jews, he said to them: “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve, whether the gods which your father served, that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land ye dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” The people, therefore, had already given themselves up to other gods, and might serve whom they pleased.

When the family of Micah, in Ephraim, hire a Levitical priest to conduct the service of a strange god, when the whole tribe of Dan serve the same god as the family of Micah; when a grandson of Moses himself becomes a hired priest of the same god — no one murmurs; every one has his own god, undisturbed; and the grandson of Moses becomes an idolater without any one’s reviling or accusing him. At that time, therefore, every one chose his own local god, his own protector.

The same Jews, after the death of Gideon, adore Baal-berith, which means precisely the same as Adonai — the lord, the protector; they change their protector.

Adonai, in the time of Joshua, becomes master of the mountains; but he is unable to overcome the inhabitants of the valleys, because they had chariots armed with scythes. Can anything more correctly represent the idea of a local deity, a god who is strong in one place, but not so in another?

Jephthah, the son of Gilead, and a concubine, says to the Moabites: “Wilt thou not possess what Chemosh, thy god, giveth thee to possess? So, whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess.”

It is then perfectly proved, that the undistinguishing Jews, although chosen by the God of the universe, regarded him notwithstanding as a mere local god, the god of a particular territory of people, like the god of the Amorites, or that of the Moabites, of the mountains or of the valleys.

It is unfortunately very evident that it was perfectly indifferent to the grandson of Moses whether he served Micah’s god or his grandfather’s. It is clear, and cannot but be admitted, that the Jewish religion was not formed, that it was not uniform, till the time of Esdras; and we must, even then, except the Samaritans.

You may now, probably, have some idea of the meaning of this lord or god Melchom. I am not in favor of his cause — the Lord deliver me from such folly! — but when you remark, “the god which Jeremiah threatened to carry into slavery must be a curious and pleasant sort of deity,” I will answer you, M. l’Abbé, with this short piece of advice:—“From your own house of glass do not throw stones at those of your neighbors.”

They were the Jews who were at that very time carried off in slavery to Babylon. It was the good Jeremiah himself who was accused of being bribed by the court of Babylon, and of having consequently prophesied in his favor. It was he who was the object of public scorn and hatr............