The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church: Containing the Sermones Catholici, or Homilies of Ælfric, in the Original Anglo-Saxon, with an English Version. Volume I.Aelfric, Abbot of Eynsham
Religion
The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church: Containing the Sermones Catholici, or Homilies of Ælfric, in the Original Anglo-Saxon, with an English Version. Volume I.
Aelfric, Abbot of Eynsham
Sermons, English (Old)
{21} With two things had God endowed this man's soul; that is immortality
and with happiness. Then through the devil's treachery and Adam's guilt we
lost the happiness of our soul, but we lost not the immortality: that is
eternal and never ends, though the body ends, which shall again, through
God's might, arise to everlasting duration. Adam then was continuing in
this life with toil, and he and his wife begat children, both sons and
daughters; and he lived nine hundred and thirty years, and then died, as
had been promised him for that sin; and his soul went to hell.
Now some men will inquire, whence came his soul? whether from the father or
from the mother? We say, from neither of them; but the same God who created
Adam with his hands, createth every man's body in his mother's womb: and
the same who blew into Adam's body, and gave him a soul, that same giveth a
soul and life to children in their mother's womb, when they are created;
and he letteth them have their own will, when they are grown up, as Adam
had.
Then there was rapidly a great increase of people, and very many were
turned to evil, and exasperated God with various crimes, and above all with
fornication. Then was God so exasperated through the wicked deeds of men
that he said, that he repented that he had ever created mankind.
Nevertheless, there was one man righteous before God, who was called Noah.
Then said God to him, "I will destroy all mankind with water, for their
sins, but I will preserve thee alone, and thy wife, and thy three sons,
Shem, and Ham, and Japhet, and their three wives; because thou art
righteous and acceptable unto me. Make thee now an ark, three hundred
fathoms long, and fifty fathoms wide, and thirty fathoms high: roof it all,
and smear all the seams with tar, and then go in with thy family. I will
gather in to thee of beast-kind and of bird-kind mates of each, that they
may hereafter be for foster. I will send a flood over all the earth." {23}
He did as God bade him, and God shut them within the ark, and sent rain
from heaven forty days together, and opened, to meet it, all the
well-springs and water-torrents of the great deep. The flood then waxed and
bare up the ark, and it rose above all the hills. Then was everything
living drowned, save those who were within the ark, by whom was again
established all the earth. Then God promised that he would never again
destroy all mankind with water, and said to Noah and to his sons: "I will
set my covenant betwixt me and you for this promise: that is, when I
overspread the heavens with clouds, then shall be shown my rainbow betwixt
the clouds, then will I be mindful of my covenant, that I will not
henceforth drown mankind with water." Noah lived in all his life, before
the flood and after the flood, nine hundred and fifty years, and then he
departed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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