good, and without excuse for refusing to love, adore and serve their Creator, had not as yet the lessons of restraining fear, inculcated in the history of divine providence, very fully impressed upon them? Man was as yet, perhaps, comparatively inexperienced in the bitter consequences of defection from his Creator and his Sovereign. Perhaps the voice of history, speaking in examples of terror and of admonition, had been as yet scarcely heard. True, the transgression of Adam had banished him from Paradise; cherubim, and a flaming sword, which turned every way, guarding with unceasing vigilance the entrance to that celestial garden of life, and happiness, and beauty, announced to them the irreparable consequences of disobedience to Jehovah; Cain had gone forth from the presence of the Lord, a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, which henceforth refused to yield him of her strength; yet in comparison with the rich annals of the divine administration of the world, which we have for our instruction and our warning, theirs must have been but meagre and imperfect. The ruins of a deluged world, the early story of the patriarchs, the records of the Jewish nation, with the abundant illustrations which they afford of the ways of God to man, the united voice of universal history, sacred and profane, for a long series of ages, the resplendent light, the life and immortality of the Christian dispensation, the astonishing miracle of the divine nature manifested in the human form, all these, had they existed then, as they do now, it would seem that their influence could not have been other than to mitigate the degenerate character of the age. Most probably, the laws and institutions of civil society had not obtained any considerable degree of perfection. They are a plant of tardy growth. We have some intimations on this point in the sa cred sketch of the antediluvian times. What gave I slew a man who wounded me, If Cain, who slew his brother unprovoked, was protected by the denunciation of seven-fold vengeance, then Lamech, who slew a man in self-defence, shall receive seventy times seven-fold protection. Reflect upon the progress of society, and consider the obstacles to advancement which exist in its incipient stages, and you will easily apprehend the character of those early times. In accordance with what I have suggested in regard to the absence of civil restraint, is the incident of the giants. Their mere name in the Hebrew expresses as by one graphic stroke their entire character. They are denominated "Fallers upon," "INVADERS.”* The dominion of the flesh * Our word giant implies prodigious stature. The Hebrew word thus translated, does not necessarily imply it. That these giants were men of great physical strength and size, is probable. That they were a superhuman race, we have no reason for believing. reigned in them without control. They regarded neither the sacred rights, with which nature has invested the human person, nor the rights of private property which social convenience has established. They neither feared God nor regarded man. The offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men, imitated their example. The result, in anticipation of which, God had resolved to cease from using means to reclaim the race, came to pass. Such a result was in perfect accordance with nature. The whole course of subsequent experience confirms the assertion. These children became mighty men, which were of old, men of renown.” They were distinguished heroes of the ancient world. Here too we fall upon an incident, which, while it has the air of truth, serves to describe still more fully the character of the times. It was the era of the predominance of the physical, over the intellectual and moral constitution of man. 66 As the infancy of the individual, so the infancy of society is the period in which human life seems to consist in the perceptions of the senses, and in physical action. It is the age of the body. The powers of reflection, of judgment, of reasoning, of moral perception, though they early exist in a greater or a less degree, are held in low esteem, and have but little sway. The poetry which describes primitive times, and the histories of the earliest ages of all nations, fabulous though they be in many of their details, still, founded on general grounds of truth, are full of illustrations of this point. They celebrate the achievements of the hand and arm. Their theme is physical excellence. They speak of conflicts of heroes with monsters and with Gods-of giant statures-of feats of Herculean strength-of mountains, piled on mountains by mortal hands-of the attempts of mortals to scale the heavens, and to dethrone the Gods themselves. Fables in their incidents, they are, notwithstanding, the voice of the remotest antiquity, the expression of the character of the earliest ages. But to resume our narrative: with these considerations before us, with reference to the condition of society in the old world, we are prepared to comprehend the import of the sacred writer, when he declares in the most emphatic terms the universal corruption of mankind. The crisis anticipated, had now arrived. What God had foreseen, he is now represented as beholding. The light of the Church had now ceased to shine. Its preserving savour was now gone. The cup of human depravity was full. "The wickedness of man was great on the earth, every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually." "The earth also was corrupt before God." In the sight of God, the moral constitution of the whole human race had lost every principle of soundness and vitality. It had become a mass of corruption and putridity: "and the earth was filled with violence." The giants, the invaders, and the mighty men prevailed. "And God looked upon the earth, and behold it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth." CHAPTER II. IN the preceding chapter, I endeavoured to develop the spirit of the sacred history of the antediluvian degeneracy. This history seems to be composed of brief annals or of traditionary fragments; but they are such that they exhibit the great outlines of the subject. They present us with the features of a picture, which we can in a good measure fill up for ourselves. For the features indicate the general character of the finishing. Like the ancient monuments of art, spared by the hand of time, through many ages, to tell the story of their builders, the several particulars recorded here,— human longevity, the infancy of the world, the story of Cain and of Lamech, the distinctive name early given to the worshippers of Jehovah, the union of the pious and the impious, with its consequences, the giants or invaders, the mighty men, the corruption, the violence, all serve to portray the character of the antediluvian age. They show it to have been the era of the dominion of the physical man. These particulars are but brief incidents in the history but they are incidents of such a kind, that, like the hieroglyphic emblems of antiquity, though single pictures to the eye, every one of them speaks pages to the mind. But the time had now come, when, in the providence of God, to be thus carnally-minded was to bring forth death. "It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created, from the face of the earth; both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air: for it repenteth me that I have made them." How changed was man from that image of his Maker in which he came forth from his creating hand! Those lineaments divine, the placid and heavenly countenance which the Creator himself contemplated with satisfaction, and which, with the other works of his creation, he pronounced "very good," alas! how changed! The grateful emotion of pleasure is now turned to repentance, and to heartfelt grief. Man, and the |