therefore,
entertain the hope concerning the papists, our adversaries, that they
pray. We pray for them and plant ourselves like a wall against the
wrath of God and, without doubt, it is by our tears and groanings that
they are saved, if, perchance, they will repent.

185. It is a terrible example, that God has spared not the first
world, for which Noah, Lamech and Methuselah set themselves like a
wall. What, then, shall we expect where such walls do not exist, where
there is no Church at all? The Church is always a wall against the
wrath of God. She feels pain, is tormented in her soul, prays,
intercedes, instructs, teaches, exhorts, as long as the judgment hour
is not here but coming. When she sees these ministrations to be
unavailing, what else can she do but feel grievous pain at the
destruction of the impenitent? The pain of the godly fathers was
augmented by the sight of so many relatives and kindred at one time
going to destruction.

186. This pain Moses could not express in a better and more graphic
description than to say that God repented of having made man. Before,
when he describes man's nature as having been formed in God's image,
he says that God beheld all that he had made and it was very good.
God, then, is delighted with his creatures and has joy in them. Here
he absolutely alters that statement by one altogether at variance with
it--that God is grieved at heart and even repents of having created
man.

187. It was Noah and the other fathers who felt this through the
revelation of the Holy Spirit; otherwise, they would have shared those
thoughts of joy and would have judged according to the earlier
prophecy that God had delight in all his works. Never would they have
thought that the wrath of God was such as to destroy not only the
whole human race, but also all living flesh of sky and earth, which
surely had not offended, yea, the very earth also; for the earth,
because of man's sin, had not retained after the flood its pristine
excellence. Some have written, as Lyra reminds us, that by the flood
the surface of the earth was washed away three hands deep. Certain it
is that paradise has been utterly destroyed through the flood.
Therefore, we possess today an earth more deeply cursed than before
the flood and after the fall of Adam; though the state of the earth
after the fall could not compare with the grandeur of its primeval
state before sin.

188. These disasters, therefore, the holy fathers saw