man recognized God in nature, and not merely understood, but immediately perceived, and, as it were, saw, that He was there, therefore nature also was, in a certain measure, transparent to his eye in God. And although his knowledge of nature was in the highest degree simple, still did it even on that account penetrate more deeply into its inmost secrets. It was rendered thereby more thoroughly vital and endued with power. One might almost call it a natural force within him, similar to and akin to those without him. For generally in those early ages of the world, man possessed many higher energies and living powers in and over nature, which subsequently were entirely withdrawn from him, or which in later times, as wonderful phenomena, formed singular exceptions to man’s ordinary endowments. We are, perhaps, only too much disposed to imagine that the ancient race before the Flood resembled in every particular a later and even the present generation. Our conceptions of it, as regards both its virtues and its vices, are in nowise great and wonderful enough. In the first place, it is highly probable that the atmosphere of the globe was at that period totally different from what it is in the present day, and that consequently both the food and manner of living in those days were also dissimilar from our own. If any reliance is to be placed on the best and oldest historical testimonies on these points, we can scarcely doubt that the primeval race--at least the generations immediately preceding the Deluge--were of gigantic stature, and that their mental powers and faculties were on a correspondent scale of magnitude. In perfect conformity with these other proportions, the Scripture also assigns to those antediluvian races a duration of existence, which, as compared with our own standard of the average life of man, is equally gigantic. And so little of antecedent improbability is there in this statement, that to get rid of it commentators have been forced to have recourse to the most far-fetched and arbitrary, and, in fact, most untenable and groundless hypotheses.