Nor has God ceased to act still in the same way. When he punishes sins he still curses at the same time the earth also. Thus in the prophet Zephaniah, God threatens that he will consume the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea, Zeph. 1:3. Hence the fact is that many of our rivers have in this age a far less number of fishes than in the memory of our forefathers. The birds also are much fewer in number than they once were, etc. God threatens also, Is. 13, that He will punish in this same way the sins of Babylon. For when men are taken away by God's judgments the beasts of the earth also disappear and monsters and destroying wild beasts alone remain, Is. 13:21, 22. For example Canaan was one of the most fruitful lands; but now it is said to be as it were a mere pickle-tub of unfruitful saltness, according to the divine threatening in the 107th Psalm. If then such calamities are inflicted of God as the punishments of the particular sins of nations, what destructions and desolations must we consider the universal punishment of the Flood to have wrought? Let no one be offended therefore at Moses saying that four rivers, which are at this day widely distant from each other and have now different fountains, flowed from one source in the garden of Eden. For as I have here repeatedly observed we are not to think that the form of the world now is the same as it was before the sin of Adam. Origen was indeed of this opinion himself, and yet he turned aside to the vainest allegories. The Nile indeed exists to this day, so does the Ganges. But as Virgil says concerning the destruction of Troy, "A cornfield now flourishes where Troy once stood," so if any one had seen the Nile and the other great rivers mentioned by Moses in their primitive beauty and glory he would have beheld them to be far different from what they are now. For not only are their sources altered, but their qualities and their courses are also changed; just as all other creatures are also deformed and corrupted. Hence it is that Peter affirms "That the heaven must receive Christ until the times of the restitution of all things," Acts 3:21. For Peter here intimates, that which Paul also testifies, that the whole creation was subjected to vanity, Rom. 8:20, and that the restitution of all things is to be hoped for; the restitution not of man only, but of the heaven and the earth, of the sun and of the moon, etc.