opagation
transmitted to posterity, was denied by one Pelagius who so set up the
heresy which goes by his name and which the Catholic faith, as is known,
at once banished from its bosom. So the human race that sprang from the
first man and mightily increased and multiplied, broke into strife,
stirred up wars, and became the heir of earthly misery, because it had
lost the joys of Paradise in its first parent. Yet were there not a few
of mankind whom the Giver of Grace set apart for Himself and who were
obedient to His will; and though by desert of nature they were
condemned, yet God by making them partakers in the hidden mystery, long
afterwards to be revealed, vouchsafed to recover fallen nature. So the
earth was filled by the human race and man who by his own wanton
wilfulness had despised his Creator began to walk in his own ways. Hence
God willing rather to recover mankind through one just man than that it
should remain for ever contumacious, suffered all the guilty multitude
to perish by the wide waters of a flood, save only Noah, the just one,
with his children and all that he had brought with him into the ark. The
reason why He wished to save the just by an ark of wood is known to all
hearts learned in the Holy Scriptures. Thus what we may call the first
age of the world was ended by the avenging flood.

Thus the human race was restored, and yet it hastened to make its own
the vice of nature with which the first author of transgression had
infected it. And the wickedness increased which had once been punished
by the waters of the flood, and man who had been suffered to live for a
long series of years was reduced to the brief span of ordinary human
life. Yet would not God again visit the race by a flood, but rather,
letting it continue, He chose from it men of whose line a generation
should arise out of which He might in the last days grant us His own Son
to come to us, clothed in human form. Of these men Abraham is the first,
and although he was stricken in years and his wife past bearing, they
had in their old age the reward of a son in fulfilment of promise
unconditional. This son was named Isaac and he begat Jacob, who in his
turn begat the twelve Patriarchs, God not reckoning in their number
those whom nature in its ordinary course produced.[51] This Jacob, then,
together with his sons and his household determined to dwell in Egypt
for the pu