love, His steadfast will for the good of all. Even when it shows itself in the flood and the earthquake; even though it break up the fountains of the great deep, and destroy from off the earth both man and beast, yet it is, and was, and ever will be, the anger of The Lamb—a patient, a merciful, and a loving anger. Therefore the Lord says: “Yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” One hundred and twenty years more he would endure those corrupt and violent sinners, in the hope of correcting them. One hundred and twenty years more would God’s Spirit strive with men. One hundred and twenty years more the long-suffering of God, as St. Peter says, would wait, if by any means they would turn and repent. Oh, wonderful love and condescension of God! God waits for man! The Holy One waits for the unholy! The Creator waits for the work of His own hands! The wrathful God, who repents that He has made man upon the earth, waits one hundred and twenty years for the very creatures whom He repents having made! Does this seem strange to us—unlike our notions of God? If it is strange to us, my friends, its being strange is only a proof of how far we have fallen from the likeness of God, wherein man was originally created. If we were more like God, then the accounts of God’s long-suffering, and mercy, and repentance, which we read in the Bible, would not be so strange to us. We should understand what God declares of Himself, by seeing the same feelings working in ourselves, which He declares to be working in Himself. And if we were more righteous and more loving, we should understand more how God’s will was a loving and a righteous will; how His justice was His mercy, and His mercy His justice, instead of dividing His substance, who is one God, by fancying that His mercy and His justice are two different attributes, which are at times contrary the one to the other.