11,628 months, 50,388 weeks, 353,928 days, 8,494,272 hours,
521,656,320 minutes, and 36,299,879,200 seconds!
How came he to live so long? Ah, that is easily enough explained. He
loved life and the world,--both were beautiful to him. And one day he
spoke his wish in words. "Oh, that I might live a thousand years!" he
cried.
Then looking up straightway he beheld an angel, and the angel said:
"Wouldst thou live a thousand years?"
And Methuselah answered him, saying: "As the Lord is my God, I would
live a thousand years."
"It shall be even so," said the angel; and then the angel departed out
of his sight. So Methuselah lived on and on, as the angel had promised.
How sweet a treasure the young Methuselah must have been to his parents
and to his doting ancestors; with what tender solicitude must the old
folks have watched the child's progress from the innocence of his first
to the virility of his later centuries. We can picture the happy
reunions of the old Adam family under the domestic vines and fig-trees
that bloomed near the Euphrates. When Methuselah was a mere toddler of
nineteen years, Adam was still living, and so was his estimable wife;
the possibility is that the venerable couple gave young Methuselah a
birthday party at which (we can easily imagine) there were present
these following, to-wit: Adam, aged 687; Seth, aged 557; Enos, aged
452; Cainan, aged 362; Mahalaleel, aged 292; Jared, aged 227; Enoch,
aged 65, and his infant boy Methuselah, aged 19. Here were represented
eight direct generations, and there were present, of course,
the wives and daughters; so that, on the whole, the gathering
must have been as numerous as it was otherwise remarkable.
Nowhere in any of the vistas of history, of romance, or of
mythology were it possible to find a spectacle more imposing than
that of the child Methuselah surrounded by his father Enoch,
his grandfather Jared, his great-grandfather Mahalaleel, his
great-great-grandfather Cainan, his great-great-great-grandfather
Enos, his great-great-great-great-grandfather Seth, and his
great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Adam, as well as by his
great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Eve, and her feminine
posterity for (say) four centuries! How pretty and how kindly dear old
grandma Eve must have looked on that gala occasion, attired, as she
must have been, in all the quaint simplicity of that primeval period;
and how must the dear old soul have fretted th
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