Page:The Political History of the Devil - Defoe (1726).djvu/29

 round the world, in the famous Ark! he could resolve all the difficulties about the building it, the furnishing it, and the laying up provisions in it for all the collection of kinds that he had made; He could tell us whether all the creatures came voluntier to him to go into the ark, or whether he went a hunting for several years before, in order to bring them together.

He could give us a true relation how he wheedled the people of the next world into the absurd ridiculous undertaking of building a Babel; how far that stupendous stair-case, which was in imagination to reach up to Heaven, was carried, before it was interrupted and the builders confounded; how their speech was alter'd, how many tongues it was divided into, or whether they were divided at all, and how many subdivisions or dialects have been made since that, by which means very few of God's creatures, except the Brutes, understand one another, or care one farthing whether they do or no.

In all these things Satan, who, no doubt, would make a very good chronologist, could settle every Epocha, correct ever Calendar, and bring all our accounts of time to a general agreement, as well the Grecian Olympiads, the Turkish Heghira, the Chinese fictitious accounts of the world's duration, as our blind Julian and Gregorian accounts, which put the world, to this day, in such confusion, that we neither agree in our holy days or working days, fasts or feasts, nor keep the same sabbath in any part of the same globe.

This great Antiquary could bring us to a certainty in all the difficulties of ancient story, and tell us whether the tale of the siege of Troy, and the rape of Helen was a fable of Homer or a history, whether the fictions of the Poets are form'd from their own brain, or founded in facts, and whe-