But there was no permanent restraining power; no fixed standard of judicial command; and so, when the flood dried, the tide of sin set in again, streaked only with some veins of nobleness. On the plains of Shinar pride fancied that it could build a tower that should overtop the All-seeing Providence; and it had to be humbled by a confusion of tongues, scattering the builders. Even Noah, a just man for his times, so pure in _that_ comparison, that he was carried over on the waves from a drowned generation, to install a new one, had scarcely seen the many-colored splendors of the promise in the rainbow, before he was drunken of overmuch wine. Abraham himself, so full of trust that his trust finally saved him; strong enough in the power of it to lay his son on an altar; at an earlier age stained his tongue with a cowardly falsehood, calling his wife his sister for safety’s sake—first pattern of politicians of mere expediency—and was rebuked for it by a Pharaoh, who had seen less of the heavenly visions than he. Sodom, with its indescribable pollutions, was not far from Beth-el—house of God. Jacob received a revelation from opened heavens; yet he over-reached his brother to appropriate the family blessing, and defraud his father-in-law. Throughout the whole of this patriarchal era, reaching from Adam to Joseph, and covering, by the common computation, twenty-three hundred years, there were beautiful virtues, flowering into the light by the spontaneous energy of nature, but poisoned in many spots by the slime of sensuality. The human stock threw out its forms of life with a certain negligence, as the prodigal force of nature does her forests—as a boy swings his limbs in the open air. There were heroic acts; but they were dispersed over intervals, with dismal contrasts of meanness and cowardice between. There were ardent prayers; but foul passions often met and put to flight the descending hosts of the angels of God. Character needed a staunch vertebral column to secure its uprightness. No permanent sanction lent impregnability to good impulses. Even the saint, whose spirit rose nearest to heaven, walked on the verge of some abyss of shame. For though Abraham believed, Moses had not yet legislated, nor Christ died.