Part 19 (1/2)
12. As G.o.d, who is by nature most kind, cannot refrain from gracing and showering us with various gifts: health, property, wisdom, skill, knowledge of Scripture, etc., so we cannot refrain from priding ourselves upon these gifts and flaunting them. Wretched is our life when we lack the gifts of G.o.d, but twice wretched is it when we have them; for they tend to make us doubly wicked. Such is the corruption of original sin, though all but believers are either unaware of its existence or regard it a trivial thing.
13. Such corruption is perceptible not only in ourselves but in others. How property inflates pride though it occupies relatively the lowest place among blessings! The rich, be they n.o.blemen, city-dwellers or peasants, deem other people as flies. To even a greater extent are the higher gifts abused--wisdom and righteousness.
Possession of these gifts, then, makes inevitable this condition--G.o.d cannot suffer such pride and we cannot refrain from it.
14. This was the sin of that primeval world. Among Cain's descendants were good and wise men, who, nevertheless, before G.o.d were most wicked, for they prided themselves upon their gifts and despised G.o.d, the author. Such offense the world does not perceive and condemn; G.o.d alone is its judge.
15. Where these spiritual vices exist and flourish, the lapse into carnal ones is imminent. According to Sirach 10, 14, sin begins with falling from G.o.d. The devil's first fall is from heaven into h.e.l.l; that is, from the first table of the Law into the second. When people begin to be G.o.dless--when they do not fear and trust G.o.d, but despise him, his Word and his servants--the result is that from the true doctrine they pa.s.s into heretical delusions and teach, defend and cultivate them. These sins in the eyes of the world are accounted the greatest holiness, and their authors alone are reputed religious, G.o.d-fearing and just, and held to const.i.tute the Church, the family of G.o.d. People are unable to judge concerning the sins of the first table. Those who despise G.o.d sooner or later fall into abominable adultery, theft, murder and other gross sins against the second table.
16. The purpose of my statements is to make plain that the old world was guilty, not only of sin against the second table, but most of all of sin against the first table by making a fine, but deceptive and false show of wisdom, G.o.dliness, devotion and religion. As a result of the unG.o.dliness which flourished in opposition to the first table, there followed that moral corruption of which Moses speaks in this chapter, that the people polluted themselves with all sorts of l.u.s.t and afterward filled the world with oppression, bloodshed and wrong.
17. Because the unG.o.dly world had trampled both tables under foot, G.o.d came to judge it, who is a consuming fire and a jealous G.o.d. He so punishes unG.o.dliness that he turns everything into sheer desolation, and neither government nor the governed remain. We may, therefore, infer that the world was the better the nearer it was to Adam, but that it degenerated from day to day until our time, when the offscouring and lowest filth of humanity, as it were, are living.
18. Now, if G.o.d did not spare a world endowed with so many and great gifts, what have we to hope for, who, offal that we are, are subject to far greater misfortune and wretchedness? But if it please G.o.d, spare the Roman pontiff and his holy bishops, who do not believe such things! I now come to my text.
Vs. 1-2. _And it came to pa.s.s, when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of G.o.d saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose._
19. This is a very brief but comprehensive account. The text must not be understood to mean that the world did not increase until the five hundredth year of Noah. The more ancient patriarchs are embraced in this statement. This is demonstrated by the fact that Noah had no daughters. The reference in the text to ”daughters” certainly must be understood as referring to the by-gone age of Lamech, Methuselah, Enoch and others. The world, accordingly, was corrupt and evil before Noah was born, particularly when licentiousness began to prevail after the death of Adam, whose authority, as the first father, they feared.
20. I have said that Noah was a virgin above all others; I may add he was the greatest of all martyrs. Our so-called martyrs, compared with him, have infinite advantage in strength received from the Holy Spirit, by which death is overcome and all trials and perils are escaped. Noah lived among the unrighteous for six hundred years, and like Lot at Sodom, not without numerous and dire perils and trials.
21. This was, perhaps, one reason why Father Lamech gave his son the name Noah at his birth. When the holy patriarch saw evil abounding in the world, he entertained the hope concerning his son that he should comfort the righteous by opposing sin and its author, Satan, and restoring lost righteousness.
22. However, the wickedness that began then, not only failed to cease under Noah, but rather grew greater. Hence Noah is the martyr of martyrs. For is it not much easier to be delivered from all danger and suffering in a single hour than to live for centuries amid colossal wickedness?
23. The opinion before expressed I maintain, that Noah abstained from matrimony so long that he might not be compelled to witness and suffer in his own offspring what he saw in the descendants of the other saints. This sight of man's wickedness was his greatest cross, as Peter says of Lot in Sodom (2 Pet 2, 8): ”That righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their lawless deeds.”
24. Accordingly, the increase of humanity of which Moses speaks has not reference alone to the time of Noah, but also to the age of the other patriarchs. It was there that the violation of the first table commenced--in the contempt manifested for Jehovah and his Word. This was followed later by such gross offenses as oppression, tyranny and lewdness, which Moses explicitly mentions and names first as the cause of evil. Consult all history, study the Greek tragedies and the affairs of barbarians and Romans of all times, and you find l.u.s.t the mother of every kind of trouble. It can not be otherwise. Where G.o.d's Word remains unknown or unheeded, men will plunge into l.u.s.t.
25. l.u.s.t draws in its train endless other evils, as pride, oppression, perjury and the like. These sins can be attacked only as men, through the first table, learn to fear and to trust in G.o.d. Then it is that they follow the Word as a lamp going before in the dark, and they will not indulge in such scandalous deeds, but will rather beware of them.
With violation of the first table, however, the spread of pa.s.sions and sins of every description is inevitable.
26. But it seems strange that Moses should enumerate in the catalog of sins the begetting of daughters. He had found it commendable in the case of the patriarchs. It is even enjoyed by the unG.o.dly as a blessing of G.o.d. Why, therefore, does Moses call it a sin?
I reply, he does not condemn the fact of procreation as such, but the abuse of it, resulting from original sin. To be endowed with royal majesty, wisdom, wealth and bodily strength is a goodly blessing. It is G.o.d who bestows these gifts. But when men, in possession of these blessings, fail to reverence the first table, and by means of these very gifts do violence to it, such wickedness merits punishment.
Therein is the reason for Moses' peculiar words: ”The sons of G.o.d saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose,” without consideration of G.o.d or of law, natural or statutory.
27. The first table having been despised, the second shares the same fate. Desire occupies the princ.i.p.al place and in contempt for procreation it becomes purely b.e.s.t.i.a.l; whereas G.o.d has inst.i.tuted matrimony as an aid to feeble nature and chiefly for the purpose of procreation. But when l.u.s.t in this manner has gained the upper hand, all commandments, those that go before and that follow, are ruthlessly broken and dishonored. Parental honor becomes insecure; men do not shrink from doing murder; from alienating property, speaking false testimony, etc.
28. The word _jiru_, ”saw,” does not merely signify ”to view,” but ”to view with pleasure and enjoyment.” This meaning often occurs in the psalms, for instance: ”Mine eye also hath seen my desire on mine enemies,” Ps 92, 11; that is, shall with pleasure see vengeance executed upon my enemies. The meaning here is that, after turning their eyes from G.o.d and his Word, they turned them, filled with l.u.s.t, upon the daughters of men. The sequence is unerring that, from the violation of the first table, men rush to the violation of the second.
After despising G.o.d they despised also the laws of nature and, as they pleased, they married whom they chose.
29. These are rather harsh words, and yet it is my opinion that l.u.s.t continued hitherto within certain limits, inasmuch as they neither committed incest with their mothers, as later the inhabitants of Canaan, nor polluted themselves with the vice of the Sodomites. Moses confines his charge to their casting aside the legal trammels set by the patriarchs and recognizing in their matrimonial alliances no law but that of l.u.s.t, selecting only as pa.s.sion directed and against the will of the parents.
30. It seems the patriarchs had strictly forbidden to contract alliances with the offspring of Cain, just as, later, the Jews could not lawfully mingle with the Canaanites. Though there are not wanting those who write that incestuous marriages existed before the flood, blood-relations.h.i.+p being held to be no barrier, I yet infer from the fact that Peter has extolled the old world, that such incestuous atrocities did not exist at that time, but that the sin of the ancient world consisted rather in men marrying whom they pleased, and as many wives from the Cainites as they chose, ignoring parental authority and controlled alone by pa.s.sion. It is, therefore, a harsh word--”All which they chose.”
31. I have shown, on various occasions, that the two generations, or churches, of Adam and Cain were separate. For, as Moses clearly states, Adam expelled the murderer from his a.s.sociation. Without doubt, therefore, Adam also exhorted his offspring to avoid the church of the evil-doers and not to mingle with the accursed generation of Cain. And for a while his counsel or command was obeyed.
32. But when Adam died and the authority of the other patriarchs became an object of scorn, the sons of G.o.d who had the promise of the blessed seed and themselves belonged to the blessed seed, craved from the tribe of the unG.o.dly, intercourse and espousal. He tersely calls the sons of the patriarchs the ”sons of G.o.d,” since to them was given the promise of the blessed seed and they const.i.tuted the true Church.