IT was not very pertinent to a discourse concerning the growth of the
city of London to thrust in considerations of the time when the whole
world will be fully peopled; and how to justify the Scriptures concerning
the number of people mentioned in them; and concerning the number of the
quick and the dead that may rise at the last day, &c. Nevertheless,
since some friends, liking the said digressions and impertinences
(perhaps as sauce to a dry discourse) have desired that the same might be
explained and made out, I, therefore, say as followeth:—
1. If the number of acres in the habitable part of the earth be under
50,000,000,000; if 20,000,000,000 of people are more than the said number
of acres will feed (few or no countries being so fully peopled), and for
that in six doublings (which will be in 2,000 years) the present
320,000,000 will exceed the said 20,000,000,000.
2. That the number of all those who have died since the Flood is the sum
of all the products made by multiplying the number of the doubling
periods mentioned in the first column of the last table, by the number of
people respectively affixed to them in the third column of the same
table, the said sum being divided by 40 (one dying out of 40 per annum
out of the whole mass of mankind), which quotient is 12,570,000,000;
whereunto may be added, for those that died before the Flood, enough to
make the last-mentioned number 20,000,000,000, as the full number of all
that died from the beginning of the world to the year 1682, unto which,
if 320,000,000, the number of those who are now alive, be added, the
total of the quick and the dead will amount but unto one fifth part of
the graves which the surface of Ireland will afford, without ever putting
two bodies into any one grave; for there be in Ireland 28,000 square
English miles, each whereof will afford about 4,000,000 of graves, and
consequently above 114,000,000,000 of graves, viz., about five times the
number of the quick and the dead which should arise at the last day, in
case the same had been in the year 1682.
3. Now, if there may be place for five times as many graves in Ireland
as are sufficient for all that ever died, and if the earth of one grave
weigh five times as much as the body interred therein, then a turf less
than a foot thick pared off from a fifth part of the surface of Ireland,
will be equivalent in bulk and weight to all the bodies that ever were
buried, and may serve as well for that purpose as the two mountains
aforementioned in the body of this discourse. From all which it is plain
how madly they were mistaken who did so petulantly vilify what the Holy
Scriptures have delivered.