t there. For this
"face" he had left with his parents, who lived where they had paradise
on their side, or toward the west. When Cain fled from his home he
went toward the east. So the posterity of Cain was separated from the
posterity of Adam, having paradise as a place of division between
them. The passage, moreover, proves that paradise remained undestroyed
after Adam was driven out of it. In all probability it was finally
destroyed by the deluge.

242. This text greatly favors the opinion of those who believe that
Adam was created in the region of Damascus, and that, after he was
driven out of paradise for his sin, he lived in Palestine; and hence
it was in the midst of the original paradise that Jerusalem, Bethlehem
and Jericho stood, in which places Jesus Christ and his servant John
chiefly dwelt. Although the present aspect of those places does not
altogether bear out that conclusion, the devastations of the mighty
deluge were such as to change fountains, rivers and mountains; and it
is quite possible that on the site which was afterward Calvary, the
place of Christ's sacrifice for the world's sin, there stood the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil, the same spot being marked by the
death and ruin wrought by Satan and by the life and salvation wrought
by Christ.

243. It is not without a particular purpose, therefore, that Daniel
uses the striking expression: "The end thereof (of the sanctuary, the
sacrifice and the oblation) shall be with a flood," Dan 9, 26. As if
he had said, The first paradise was laid waste and utterly destroyed
by the mighty deluge, and the other, future paradise, in which
redemption is to be wrought, shall be destroyed by the Romanists as by
a flood.

244. We may carry the analogy further by stating that as Babel was the
cause of the destruction of the Jewish people, so this disaster had
its beginning with Cain and his offspring, who settled in that part of
the earth where, at a later day, Babylon was founded. These are my
thoughts and views, derived partly from the fathers. Though they may
not be true, they are yet probable, and have nothing ungodly in them.
And there can be no doubt that Noah, after the flood, saw the face of
the whole earth altogether changed from what it was before that awful
visitation of the wrath of God. Mountains were torn asunder, fountains
were made to break forth and the courses of the rivers themselves were
wholly altered and diverted into other channel