reserve this awful record for its proper time and place.
Let us now do that which Moses does in the present chapter, who wants
us to consider the exceeding splendor of this primeval age of the
world. Adam lived beyond the age of his grandson Enoch, and died but a
short time before Noah was born. A hundred and twenty years only
intervened between the death of Adam and the birth of Noah. Seth died
only fourteen years before Noah's birth. Enosh and the rest of the
patriarchs, except Enoch, lived at the same time with Noah. Thus by a
comparison of the figures, we shall ascertain that quite a number of
gray-headed patriarchs, of whom one lived seven hundred, and another
nine hundred years, were contemporaries, and teaching and governing
the Church of the godly.

10. The exceeding glory of the primitive world consists in this, that
it contained so many good and wise and holy men. We are by no means to
think that all these are merely common names of plain and simple men.
They were the greatest heroes and men of renown that the world ever
witnessed, next to Christ and John the Baptist. In the last day we
shall behold and admire the real majesty of all these worthies, and
then we shall truly behold the mighty deeds which these mighty men
wrought. Yes, it will then be made manifest what Adam did, what Seth
did, what Methuselah did, and the others; what they suffered from the
old serpent; how they comforted and fortified themselves, by their
hope in the promised seed, against all the harm and violence of the
world, that is, of the Cainites; what craft they experienced; what
injuries and hatred and contempt they bore for the glory of the
blessed seed to be born from their lineage. We are assuredly not to
imagine that these great and holy men lived without severe afflictions
and innumerable crosses. All these things, I say, shall be revealed at
the last day.

11. And it is an undertaking, as I said, full of profit and pleasure
now to contemplate with our minds, as with open eyes, that happy age,
in which so many patriarchs lived contemporaneously, nearly all of
whom, except Noah, had seen and known their first father, Adam.

B. The Glory of the Cainites.

12. Also the Cainites had their glory. Among them were men most
eminent in the liberal arts, and the most consummate hypocrites, who
gave the true Church a world of trouble, and harassed the holy
patriarchs in every possible way. We may justly call all those who
were thus opp