ively the
lowest place among blessings! The rich, be they noblemen,
city-dwellers or peasants, deem other people as flies. To even a
greater extent are the higher gifts abused--wisdom and righteousness.
Possession of these gifts, then, makes inevitable this condition--God
cannot suffer such pride and we cannot refrain from it.

14. This was the sin of that primeval world. Among Cain's descendants
were good and wise men, who, nevertheless, before God were most
wicked, for they prided themselves upon their gifts and despised God,
the author. Such offense the world does not perceive and condemn; God
alone is its judge.

15. Where these spiritual vices exist and flourish, the lapse into
carnal ones is imminent. According to Sirach 10, 14, sin begins with
falling from God. The devil's first fall is from heaven into hell;
that is, from the first table of the Law into the second. When people
begin to be godless--when they do not fear and trust God, but despise
him, his Word and his servants--the result is that from the true
doctrine they pass into heretical delusions and teach, defend and
cultivate them. These sins in the eyes of the world are accounted the
greatest holiness, and their authors alone are reputed religious,
God-fearing and just, and held to constitute the Church, the family of
God. People are unable to judge concerning the sins of the first
table. Those who despise God sooner or later fall into abominable
adultery, theft, murder and other gross sins against the second table.

16. The purpose of my statements is to make plain that the old world
was guilty, not only of sin against the second table, but most of all
of sin against the first table by making a fine, but deceptive and
false show of wisdom, godliness, devotion and religion. As a result of
the ungodliness which flourished in opposition to the first table,
there followed that moral corruption of which Moses speaks in this
chapter, that the people polluted themselves with all sorts of lust
and afterward filled the world with oppression, bloodshed and wrong.

17. Because the ungodly world had trampled both tables under foot, God
came to judge it, who is a consuming fire and a jealous God. He so
punishes ungodliness that he turns everything into sheer desolation,
and neither government nor the governed remain. We may, therefore,
infer that the world was the better the nearer it was to Adam, but
that it degenerated from day to day until our time, when the