Now, it is manifest that such corporeal advantages and length of life which the first patriarchs of the human race enjoyed, must have been highly favorable to the development of their intellectual gifts and immediate intuition, as founded on a living natural faith, so long as they were rightly used and directed toward God, as their proper object. And in the same way their tendency to fearful corruption, under an impious and sinful employment of their great mental endowments, must be equally evident. At the same time we must confess our inadequacy to form a conception of the height to which they attained in either state which would be in any way proportionate to the truth. It is, however, an invariable principle of development, confirmed by the observation of nature, and a careful induction of historical facts, that all that is greatest and noblest, if it once begins to degenerate and corrupt, reaches in its corruption and degeneracy the worst and most fearful extremes. And so it appears to have been with this gigantic and gigantically endowed race of the antediluvian world. In modern times, a great German philosopher, who flourished toward the close of the seventeenth century, and was no less famous for his historical learning than for his mathematical discoveries, made the memorable remark, that the last sect in the whole development of Christian revelation, and toward the close of modern history--the last sect, and also the most prevalent and most fearful, would be that of atheism. This dictum, at the time at which it was pronounced, which was somewhere about the transition from the anxiety and oppression of the seventeenth century to the enlightenment and self-complaisancy of the eighteenth, must have appeared a perfect paradox. But now that its fulfillment seems, both to our eyes and understanding, so close at hand, we recognize with amazement, not to say with a slight feeling of horror, its deep oracular truth.