ressed by them most holy martyrs and confessors. The
Cainites, as Moses before intimated, very soon surpassed the other
descendants of Adam in numbers and activity. Although they were
compelled to revere their father Adam, yet they adopted all possible
means of oppressing the Church of the godly, and especially so after
the death of the first patriarch, Adam. By such wickedness, these
Cainites helped to bring on the flood as retribution.

13. This power and malice of the Cainites caused the holy patriarchs
to teach and instruct their Church with increased zeal and industry.
What numerous and powerful sermons may we suppose were preached by
them in the course of these most eventful years! There is no doubt
that both Adam and Eve testified of their original state of innocence,
described the glory of paradise and warned their posterity to beware
of the serpent, who, by tempting them to sin, had caused all these
great evils. How constant may we suppose them to have been in
explaining the promise of the blessed seed! How earnestly must they
have exhorted the hearts of their followers to be moved neither by the
splendor of the Cainites nor by their own afflictions.

14. All these particulars Moses omits to record, both because they
could not be described on account of their infinite variety of detail
and because the revelation of them is reserved for that great day of
deliverance and glory!

15. Likewise the flood, in spite of its horror, is described with the
greatest brevity because he wished to leave such things to the
meditation of men.

16. For the same reasons Moses has purposely given us, in these first
five chapters, as briefly as possible, a picture of the original and
primeval world. It was an admirable condition of life, and yet that
primeval age contained a multitude of the worst of men, in consequence
not more than "eight souls" were saved from the destroying flood! What
then, may we conclude, will be the state of things before the last day
shall come, seeing that even now, under the revealed light of the
Gospel, there is found so great a host of despisers of it that there
is cause to fear that they will fill the world ere long with errors
and prevail to the extinction of the Word altogether.

17. Awful is the voice of Christ when it utters the words,
"Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the
earth?" Lk 18, 8. And in Matthew 24, 37-38, our Lord compares the last
days with the day