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CHAPTER 5: The Universal Corruption of Man - Preparation for the
Flood. (GENESIS 6)
IT is a remarkable circumstance that all nations should have preserved in their
traditions notices of the extraordinary length to which human life was at the first
protracted. We can understand that knowledge of such a fact would be most readily
handed down. But we should remember, that before the "flood" the conditions of
vigor, constitution, climate, soil, and nourishment were quite different from those on
which the present duration of life depends. A comparison between the two is
therefore impossible, for the best of all reasons, that we have not sufficient
knowledge of the primitive state of matters. But this we can clearly see, that such
long continuance of life was absolutely necessary, if the earth was to be rapidly
peopled, knowledge to advance, and, above all, the worship of God and faith in that
promise about a Deliverer which He had revealed, to be continued. As it was, each
generation could hand down to remote posterity what it had learned during the
centuries of its continuance. Thus Adam was alive to tell the story of Paradise and the
fall, and to repeat the word of promise, which he had heard from the very mouth of
the Lord, when Lamech was born; and though none of the earlier "fathers" could have
lived to see the commencement of building the ark, which took place in the year 1536
from the creation, yet Lamech died only five years before "the flood," and his father
Methuselah - the longest-lived man - in the very year of the deluge. If we try to
realize how much information even in our own days, when intercourse, civilization,
and the means of knowledge have so far advanced, can be gained from personal
intercourse with the chief actors in great events, we shall understand the importance
of man's longevity in the early ages of our race.
But, on the other hand, it was possible to pervert this long duration of life to equally
evil purposes. The rare occurrence, during so many centuries, of death with its terrors
would tend still more to blunt the conscience; the long association of evil men would
foster the progress of corruption and evil; and the apparently indefinite delay of either
judgment or deliverance would strengthen the bold unbelief of scoffers. That such
was the case appears from the substance of Lamech's prophecy; from the description
of the state of the earth in the time of Noah, and the unbelief of his contemporaries;
and from the comparison by our Lord (Matthew 24:37- 39; Luke 17:26) between "the
days of Noe" and those of "the coming of the Son of man," when, according to St.
Peter (2 Peter 3:3, 4), there shall be "scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and
saying, Where is the promise of His coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all
things continue as they were from the beginning of creation."
The corruption of mankind reached its highest point when even the difference
between the Sethites and the Cainites became obliterated by intermarriages between
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