“The viciousness of mankind,” that excellent person says, “occasioned the flood; and very probably God thought fit to drown the world for these two reasons; first to punish the then living offenders; and next to prevent mens plunging into those prodigious depths of impiety, for all future ages. For if in the short term of life, which is now allotted to mankind, men are capable of being puffed up to such an insolent degree of pride and folly, as to forget God and their own mortality, his power and their own weakness; if a prosperity bounded by three-score and ten years, (and what mortal's prosperity, since the deluge, ever lasted so long?) can swell the mind of so frail a creature to such a prodigious size of vanity, what boundaries could be set to his arrogance, if his life and prosperity, like that of the Patriarch's were likely to continue eight or nine hundred years together? If under the existing circumstances of life, mens passions can rise so high; if the present short and uncertain enjoyments of the world, are able to occasion such an extravagant pride, such unmeasurable ambition, such sordid avarice, such barbarous rapine and injustice, such malice and envy, and so many other detestable things, which compose the numerous train of vice,—how then would the passions have flamed, and to what a monstrous stature would every vice have grown, if those enjoyments which provoked and increased them, were of eight or nine hundred years duration? If eternal happiness and eternal punishment are able to make no stronger impressions upon men's minds, so near at hand, it may well be imagined that at so great a distance, they would have made no impression at all; that eternal happiness would have been entirely divested of its allurements, and eternal misery of its terrors; and the Great Creator would have been deprived of that obedience and adoration, which are so justly due to him from his creatures. Thus, the inundation of vice has in some measure, by the goodness of God, been prevented by an inundation of water. That which was the punishment of one generation, may be said to have been the preservation of all those which have succeeded. For if life had not been thus clipped, one Tiberius, one Caligula, one Nero, one Louis XIV. had been sufficient to have destroyed the whole race of mankind; each of whose lives had they been ten times as long, and the mischiefs they occasioned multiplied by that number, it might easily be computed how great a plague one such long-lived monster would have been to the world.”