The Antediluvians

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 24, 1871

The Antediluvians.

An article from Prof. Taylor Lewis, in one of our exchanges, gives the following striking description of the lawless race destroyed by the flood. As it was in the days of Noah, so, says Christ, it shall be in the days of the Son of Man. And that the picture finds in a great degree its counterpart in our own times, Mr. Lewis bears good testimony, when, in another part of his article, he speaks of “our own age,” as an age of “civilization, and crime, and blood, and boasting, and nominal religion, and impious, God-rejecting self-sufficiency.”

Physical degeneracy now prevents the production of corporeal monsters; but alas! a man with the frame of a pygmy, may be as huge and hideous an embodiment of sin, as if he could boast the strength and stature of the mightiest giant. In moral obliquity, the men of this generation are fast rivaling their renowned prototypes; and the leprosy of sin is striking so deep into this fallen world, that the waters of a flood would not now be sufficient to “wipe out the stain.” Nothing will do it short of those purifying fires to which it is reserved, before whose intensity, even the elements themselves shall melt.

Of the antediluvians Mr. Lewis says:—

Their great crimes had been a predominant lawlessness, a contempt of divine authority, and a consequent dissolution and subversion of all conserving human institutions whose life and strength are derived from it. The primitive ordinance of marriage, with its sacred oneness, had been utterly broken down. “They took them wives (women of all whom they chose.” Sense ruled. “Free love,” free lust, were everywhere predominant. It was the universal passion, held in check by no law, human or divine. Red-handed murder followed, as it has always done. “The earth was filled with violence,” its cup of evil was full to the brim, and flowing over. “There were giants in those days”—nephilim—strange men, monsters, as it should be rendered, monsters physically and morally, giants in wickedness, of vast abnormal strength, it may be, arising from a precocious or unnatural development, yet tending fast to a bodily as well as a spiritual deformity, demanding their extinction in mercy to a future race. Such was the result of individualism, that lawless spirit (anomia, as the apostle so significantly styles it), acknowledging no higher rule than its own consenting will, no righteousness in the Heavens, no social power regarded as the delegated representative of any divine authority upon earth. God suffered man to try the awful experiment of government founded solely on human impulses, that is, no government at all. The inevitable catastrophe came at last. The long, long suffering justice could no more endure the sight. Crime unpunished was fearfully tainting the universal moral atmosphere. God said, I will wipe out man from the face of the earth.” The original word denotes the effacing of a stain, of a pollution that can no longer be endured. Hence it has been called a baptism, a washing, or cleansing of the earth. This thought of sin as a taint, or of crime unpunished as a foul contagion, a spiritual nuisance, ever breeding a moral and social death, ever increasing in malignity, and therefore insufferable, or to be extirpated at any sacrifice, is fallen out of our emasculated modern ethics. The loss of it is sadly enfeebling our jurisprudence. We need, therefore, to study the Scriptures, and especially the contemned Old Testament, to recover the tone and vigor of the idea. The world has not yet got beyond the spirit of that old book. We should beware, too, how we speak of it as obsolete, even in the letter. “Heaven and earth,” says the merciful Saviour, “shall pass away, but not one jot or tittle of the law shall fail.” In the very beginning of revelation, this awful example is presented to us. Christ came not to change or weaken the impression. In language most terse and solemn does he speak of it as a just judgment upon a lawless and irreclaimable race: “The flood came and swept them all away.”