man, neglecting the Divine commands, fell into the present mortal and afflicted condition, and exchanged his former divine enjoyment for the present earth, subject to the curse. The descendants of this one, having filled our earth, and proved themselves much worse, excepting one here and another there, commenced a certain brutal and disorderly mode of life. They had neither city nor state, no arts or sciences, even in contemplation. Laws and justice, virtue and philosophy they knew not, even in name. They wandered lawless through the desert, like savage and fierce animals, destroying the intellectual faculty of man, and exterminating the very seeds of reason and culture of the human mind, by the excesses of determined wickedness, and by a total surrender of themselves to every species of iniquity.
Hence, at one time they corrupted each other by criminal intercourse; at another, they murdered; and at others, fed upon human flesh. Hence too, their audacity, in venturing to wage war with the Deity himself; and hence those battles of the giants, celebrated by all. Hence too, their attempts to wall up the earth against heaven, and by the madness of a perverted mind, to prepare an attack upon the supreme God himself. Upon these men, leading a life of such wickedness, the Omniscient God sent down inundations and conflagrations, as upon a forest scattered over the earth. He cut them down with successive famines and pestilence, with constant wars and thunderbolts, as if to suppress the dreadful and obdurate disease of the soul, with his more severe punishments. Then it was, when the excess of malignity had nearly overwhelmed all the world, like a deep fit of drunkenness overshadowing and beclouding the minds of men — then it was, that the first begotten wisdom of God, existing before all creatures, and the self-same pre-existing word, induced by his exceeding love of man, appeared at times to his servants, in visions of angels; at others, in his own person. As the salutary power of God, he was seen by one and the other of the pious in ancient times, in the shape of man, because it was impossible to appear in any other way. And as by these pious men, the seeds of godliness had been already scattered among the mass of mankind, and the whole nation that claimed its origin from those ancient Hebrews, continued
