Widnes Examiner. — 1889-11-02 (Widnes, Cheshire, England)

WORKIN MON.  ANOTHER LAST WORD UPON DIVES AND THE ACCADIAN LEGENDS. Sir—By your kind indulgervie. I must add another last word in the discuenion —which I fear in becoming almost troublesome. I should not have thought it consistent with self-respect to have taken any further notice of Mr. Peers's communications moon the subject in hand, but for the crowning audacity of his last letter Therein he still maintains a statement which he made with reference to an eminent commentator, and which in plain language is simply a falsehood. There is only one alternative to this judgment, and that is his utter I incapacity to comprehend the plainest meaning of an a author. He can choose which alternative snits him best. Wills respect to the Accadian legends, I am not going to hallow him into any of his rambling side-iesues, or to notice, but very briefly the foolish alternatives which he thinks he discovers in the proposition of miniwhich has no disquieted him. Finial in my grip and I hold him down anfear rolens to his baseless assertion—that a the .11o.qiac rerord of the treatioa and Fell copied from the Arcadian tablets. It is not a question even as to the divine character and truth of the Alosias Genesis ; it would bean act of folly in me tat attempt an argutnent of that kind with such a knight-errant in reasoning as Mr. Peers. I have merely to point out that he has practically committed suicide. Th, pale" ../.111 to have found their preliminary operation—of driving him crazy already anticipated—anal have left him for himself tea perform the happy despatch. To be serious, ha' has really closed the discus:lam by admitting the quotation made from Ragoxin's "Chaldea" that the Atomic account, instead of being a copy of the Chaldean legends, must with these "originally have flowed from one anal the some spring." Now, this is exactly my own proposition, but in other words " that the younger and the older accounts may have (and I will add, can only have Imil) a common source from width both are derirnel." Here the discossion might fairly end—but that it Mar be useful to accentuate a point or two--by way of exhibiting our critic's capacity for dealing with Biblical questions. Let us hear this oracle ; my proposition, he says, "can only mean one of two things—either what : has hitherto been reganled as ()special and peculiar revelatiou to the Jews was shared so far as the subjrnt of our argument ves by another and iti,inet people,thr idolatrous manv-godded Arcadians, or both most have' been merely idle tradition, the outcome of some ancient thinker, striving to describe ml cat he dial not understand. Are Delta' friends willing to follow him into this quagmire ? If tho Arcadians had their amount of ereation, origin of man, and his fall, by revelation from heaven, then we must regard these clay-tablets as the Word of God." Now to this precious passage there is a eery ready zeply. Heneedentertain no fear that "Delta's i friends" are so steeped in mental stupor As to think that either of the above alternatives flow from my propos'. tion, or that they am likely to follow Mr. Peers into a , mere "quagmire" of his own conceptions. Note lst, what warrants him to assume (non my words that ' the account of the Creation and Pall are reseeded ; ass special and peculiar revelation to the Jew, 1 I rather think that people now-a-days wile read their Bible with their eyen open regard the revelation in the earlier 1 aliaptem of Genesis as known in sulrnance ages prior to the flood, and as theeonanson property of the rare long the before Jews had any existence as a people or nation. ! (2nd.) Why (dumb) not voale element: of this nrimeva revelation, through their degenerate ancester Ham anal his faithlexs descendants, have reached even "the idolatrous and many-gadded Arnadians ?" Could this ancestor of the founder of the city of !Wear! leave lived several hundred years in the household of his father Naoh. and not have treasured up some of the many