The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 42

Started Housekeeping

Started Housekeeping,

and a few minutes afterward a snake came through a crack in the fence and commenced to talk with her on the subject of fruit. She was not acquainted in the neighbourhood, and she did not know whether snakes talked or not or whether they knew anything about the apples or not. Well, she was misled, and the husband ate some of those apples and laid it all on his wife; and there is where the mistake was made. God ought to have rubbed him out at once. He might have known that no good could come of starting the world with a man like that. They were turned out. Then the trouble commenced, and people got worse and worse. God, you must recollect, was holding the reins of government, but he did nothing for them. He allowed them to live six hundred and sixty-nine years without knowing their ABC. He never started a school, not even a Sunday-school. He didn't even keep His own boys at home. And the world got worse every day, and finally he concluded to drown them. Yet that same God has the impudence to tell me how to raise my own children. What would you think of a neighbour, who had just killed his babes giving you his views on domestic economy? God found that he could do nothing with them and He said: "I will drown them all, except a few." And he picked out a fellow by the name of Noah, that had been a bachelor for five hundred years. If I had to drown anybody, I would have drowned him. I believe that Noah had then been married something like one hundred years. God told him to build a boat, and he built one five hundred feet long, eighty or ninety feet broad and fifty-five feet high, with one door shutting on the outside, and one window twenty-two inches square. If Noah had any hobby in the world it was ventilation. Then into this ark he put a certain number of all the animals in the world. Naturalists have ascertained that at that time there were at least eleven hundred thousand insects necessary to go into the ark, about forty thousand mammalia, sixteen hundred reptilia, to say nothing about the mastodon, the elephant and the animalcule, of which thousands live upon a single leaf, and which cannot be seen by the naked eye.