[41] We must not suppose that the impiety of the Cainites was of a dogmatic kind. How could those primitive men, living so near the Fountain-head of revelation, conversing with those who had witnessed the rise and first development of man's marvellous history, endowed with that quick, intuitive science which, in the operations of external nature, revealed to them the agency of invisible spirits, witnessing the wondrous manifestations of God's love and power, the active ministry of his messengers of light; and, lastly, engaged themselves in a close communication with the infernal powers; how could they, I say, fall into atheism or any other species of speculative unbelief? Their impiety was of a more practical nature, displaying itself in a daring violation of the precepts of Heaven, and in the practice of a dark, mysterious magic. By the allurements of sense, and the fascination of their false science, they by degrees inveigled the great mass of mankind into their errors. Their vast powers, supported and strengthened by infernal agency, were calculated to introduce disorder and confusion in the economy of the moral and physical universe, and to let loose on this probationary world the science of the abyss. What do I say? The barrier between the visible and invisible world would have been broken down--Hell would have ruled the earth, had not the Almighty by an awful judgment buried the guilty race of men and their infernal knowledge in the waters of the Deluge. In the race of Cham, however, which perpetuated so many traditions of the early Cainites, some fragments of this ante-diluvian science of evil were preserved; and traces of it may still be discerned among the worshippers of Siva in India.--_Trans._ [42] Noah affords another striking example of a wonderful prolongation or delay of time. The first nine Patriarchs of the primitive world propagated their race at the mean or average term of the hundredth year of their lives:--some near that period--others considerably earlier--and others again much later. But in the case of Noah we find that, to the mean term of a hundred years, four hundred were yet added; and that the Patriarch was five hundred years of age when he propagated his race. The high motive of this evidently supernatural delay may be traced to the fact that, although during this long prophetic period of preparation, the holy Seer well foresaw and felt firmly assured of the judgments impending over a degenerate and corrupt world, it was not equally clear to him that he was destined by God to be the second progenitor of mankind, and the renovator of the human race. But that great doom of the world, already foretold by Enoch, Noah probably expected to be its last end; and hence perhaps might consider the propagation of his race as not altogether conformable to the divine will, till the hidden decrees of the Eternal were more fully and more clearly revealed to him. [43] Entitled Ju-Kiao-li, or the Cousins.