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so commend themselves to our hearts and feelings, that we have only to read them in contrast with any of the fabulous accounts of the heathen, to see what is distorted tradition, and what is the word and the inspiration of God.

What a flood of light does this book pour on that very part of the history of our race where without it our darkness would be midnight!

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CHAPTER V.

THE GENEALOGY, AGE, AND DEATH OF THE PATRIARCHS, FROM ADAM TO NOAHTHE PIETY AND TRANSLATION OF ENOCH SIGNIFICANT NAMES.

THIS chapter reads as if it were a tombstone; it seems to be almost a series of epitaphs - but epitaphs briefly told; the very brevity with which they are told more strikingly indicating the vanity of the life of man. Almost all that is recorded of each of the antediluvian patriarchs whose names are given in this catalogue, is, that he lived, that he had a family, and that he died. These are the landmarks of the biography of each man. The varieties are incidental; these are the prominent and standing characteristics. There is something almost melancholy, or, if not melancholy, at least impressive, in this-that, however long each lived, death did come. One lived seven hundred, another eight hundred, another nine hundred, another one thousand years; but the common issue is appended to the biography of all, and each, whatever his dignity, his rank, his age, his wealth, his circumstances, his piety, or his crimes, "lived and died.”

We read, in the commencement of the chapter, that Adam had a son in his own likeness. "Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth." "In his own likeness," moral and physical: moral, subject to the sinful passions of man; and physical, subject to the ills and aches of mankind, and also inheriting that diseased moral condition which Adam and Eve had introduced when they "brought death

into the world and all our woe." Each man's son is more or less in his likeness; and each generation has the generic character of all that has preceded it.

This great age of the patriarchs is remarkable. Some have tried to explain it away, and to show that the years were, not solar, but lunar ones; in other words, that they were months, and not years. But this is untenable; and the proof is clear and conclusive that their ages were numbered by solar years, and that they lived to the protracted ages here recorded. There may have been reasons for this. The first may have been that the earth had just been brought into a new condition. Although the earth may have existed hundreds of thousands of years before Adam, yet the earth was then brought into a new condition. Two at first were placed on it; and, from the protracted age of the patriarchs, the births being many and the deaths being few, the earth came in a short time to be rapidly populated. It has been shown, by those who are competent for the investigation, that the earth, at the time of the flood, had a population not less than that which it now has upon it. I mean, by taking into consideration the long lives of the patriarchs, the number of children that were born to them, and the fact of a death occurring only in four, five, or six hundred years, the calculation has been made, by those who are competent to do so, that the population of the globe, at the time of the flood, must have been very large indeed. There is another reason why the age of the patriarchs may have been so long, namely, in order to preserve and perpetuate God's truth whilst there was no written revelation. They had then no Bible, that is to say, no written documentary proof of God's great purpose, or of the gospel preached to Adam and Eve in Paradise. But, by reason of the very great age of the patriarchs, there was but one link between Adam and Noah, and that intermediate link might tell Noah what he heard Adam say; and thus one alive

at the end of two thousand years would be as thoroughly, from personal knowledge and intercourse, acquainted with the truth as we should be now in a life of a very few years. There was a time, therefore, when only tradition did exist; we do not deny that tradition existed then; and we do not object to tradition now, except when tradition refuses to submit to the proper judge, namely, the written and inspired record. But there was tradition then; and only by tradition, except in so far as God interposed, could they tell what the gospel was, and what man's hopes and destinies also were; and the protracted age of the patriarchs, rendering few links necessary in two thousand years, may have been permitted, partly that the truth, not yet written, for reasons into which we need not now enter, might be transmitted more clearly from sire to son, and that thus all might be thoroughly acquainted with it. But still, while all these may have been ends, I think the great reason existed in the fact that the effects of the fall were not instantaneous, but gradual. And when we read, at the time of the flood, of God shortening man's life to one hundred and twenty years, we are again taught that man's age, even after sin had smitten his frame with all its sicknesses and sufferings, was, as we know, very protracted. And this long age of nine hundred years, or a thousand years, was that to which men lived after sin was introduced, though it was gradually shortened as sin seemed through and by man to gain the mastery. After the flood it was shortened once more, and this last shortening was to one hundred and twenty years. There is no evidence from the Bible that man should not live, humanly speaking, and by the laws of his physical organization, at least one hundred and twenty years. Life is now as a matter of fact very much shorter, since we find numbers dying at twenty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy. But perhaps a great deal of this may not be God's law, but man's fault. God has placed us in a world where certain conditions are

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requisite to a healthy life; and it will be found that, where those physical conditions are attended to, and, along with those, moral conditions too, for nothing so wastes and wears physical existence as sin in the life, and the consciousness of it in the conscience, - a long life will be the result. I say, were it not for many things existing in this world, arising from a high state of civilization, human life would still be protracted to a much longer period. At least, the last shortening did not reduce it to seventy. And, as I told you in a former explanation, that complaint in the Psalms, "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow," 99 this complaint was uttered by Moses in the wilderness, in a state of suffering; and by it he says that, instead of their living, as it was appointed, to one hundred and twenty years of age (for he himself lived to that age), their years were reduced in this wilderness state to seventy, but implying that, out of that wilderness state, they would be the usual number. Thus there was a gradual shortening of human life after the fall, until, after the flood, it was reduced to one hundred and twenty years.

Evidently, in those days they must have made great progress in science. A man's apprenticeship to a business must then have been not less than a hundred years; and at five or six hundred years of age he was only reaching the maturity of his knowledge, and enjoying the result of his previous investigations. Everything in those days must have attained a great state of perfection. What we arrive at now in the course of several generations, one generation storing up its discoveries for the next to operate upon, - they arrived at in individual biographies, the discoveries of one hundred years serving to one person as the means of new inductions and discoveries during the next hundred years. But it is equally plain that, as there must have been vast knowledge, there

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