obeyed the divine command, he and his family, with 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, went unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh wherein is the breath of life; and being entered, the Lord shut Noah in: and the flood came and destroyed all out of the ark: so we read, 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.” Some calculate the number of the inhabitants of the old world, that were destroyed, to be twelve, if not eighteen thousand millions.

Noah's entering the ark, must have been an act of faith. God will save Noah and his family from death, by the ark. He enters it in obedience to the Lord's command, who declares he will establish his covenant with him, which was, doubtless, a shadow of the covenant of grace. The ark may be considered as a figure of Christ and his church; Christ is a security against the storms of Jehovah's wrath: such as are interested in his person, blood, and righteousness, and take hold of him, and who enter into him by faith, are saved, and that with an ever

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lasting salvation. It was fitted for swimming, and for resisting the winds, and thus is a fit figure to be a symbol of the sufferings, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. It was pitched within and without with pitch, which, says the learned Ainsworth, "figured the atonement made for the church, by Christ; wherewith we being covered and plastered, the wrath of God cannot fall on us."

Noah and his family, when shut up in the ark, represented a burial: they seemed, as it were, to be buried in it. When the great deep was broken up, and the windows of heaven opened, they were surrounded and covered with water; so Christ, the head and substitute, represented his whole church; they were all in him, when he made atonement, and the overwhelming wrath of God fell on him, and surrounded him on all sides. The apostle Peter considers it as a figure of baptism, which is a memorial of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ: his words are, "By which also, he went and preached to the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient, when once the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water. The like figure, whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience towards God) by the

resurrection of Jesus Christ," 1 Peter iii. 19 to 21. The Lord Christ, by his spirit in Noah's ministry, preached to sinners who were disobedient; who dying in their sins, their spirits are, says the apostle, now in hell. He then takes notice of the long-suffering of God, in that dispensation towards them, and of the goodness of God, in saving Noah and his family in the ark, which was a figure of baptism. As those only in the ark were saved by water, so those only who are in Christ, and baptized into Christ, and his death, are saved by baptism. The window in the ark, may be considered as typical of Christ, the light of everlasting life. The one door, was also expressive of Christ, who saith of himself, "I am the door, if any man enter in, he shall be saved," John x. 9.

Section 4. Beasts, fowls, and creeping things, being by the special providence of God, collected together, and being admitted into the ark, Noah entered it the seventeenth day of the second month, i. e. Tizry, which answers to part of our September and October; and the night which followed, the cataracts of heaven being opened, showered down abundance of rain. The clouds were created full of water, on the first day of the creation, even in the very same instant with the heavens; and which are also comprehended under the term heavens, Gen. i. 1. The great deep was also let loose from below, as well as

those rains from above, and so the earth came presently into its first situation covered with water. These violent rains, such as never were before, or since, nor ever shall be, clouded the world in universal darkness, in which the wicked were enclosed, before they were enclosed in outer darkness. The rains continued forty days and forty nights, so that the flood increased to fifteen cubits, or nine yards and a quarter above the highest mountains, which were all covered: and when the forty days rain had brought it to that pitch, it so continued one hundred and fifty days more. Those two sums are to be reckoned distinct, and not as included in each other; for, when the one hundred and fifty days were ended, there were six months and ten days of the flood past: so says Dr. Lightfoot; and he adds, "Those who conceive the year of the flood began in March, suppose one miracle more than either scripture or reason giveth ground for, that the waters should increase, and be at their height all the heat of summer, and abate and decrease all the cold of winter. In distinction to this, the beginning the year of the flood from Tizry, or September, brings the rains to fall in the beginning of winter, namely, from about the beginning of our November, to the middle of December, or to about the winter solstice; and from thence the flood to be at high water, fifteen cubits above the mountains, for five months toge

ther, viz. to the middle of May; and from thence in the heat of the summer to be drying up." Thus the ungodly inhabitants of the old world, perished by the flood, and their souls were consigned to everlasting perdition, as Peter says, 1 Peter iii. 9. and our Lord points them out as dying in carnal security, Luke xvii. 26, 27. and the Holy Ghost also notices their destruction to the same effect in the book of Job, where Eliphaz asks him, "Hast thou marked the old way which wicked men have trodden; which were cut down out of time, whose foundation was overflown with a flood? which said to the Almighty, depart from us," &c. Job xxii. 15 to 17.

From the beginning of the flood, to the end of seven months, the seventeenth day of the month, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat. As the waters began to abate, and the tops of the mountains were seen, Noah sent out first a dove, and then a raven, to observe how it was; but the dove returned. After seven days he sent her out again, and she returned in the evening, and lo! in her mouth, an olive leaf plucked off: "So Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.” He tarried another seven days, and sent forth the dove again, which returned no more. And in the six hundred and first year of Noah's life, which was the year of the world 1657, on the first day of the month, the earth was dried; and on the