Tales of the loveliness of Eden,--of the glories of the creation,--of
the blessedness of the primeval state,--of the days before the fall;
remembrances of the "mother of all living" in the days of her holiness,
when she was as beautiful as the world created for her home, in all the
dewy sweetness of the morning of its existence,--of the wisdom of man
before he yielded to the voice of temptation, when authority was
enthroned upon his brow, and all the tribes of the lower creation did
him homage;--of the good spirits who watched over to minister unto and
bless them;--of those dark, unholy and accursed ones, who came to tempt,
betray and destroy them,--were recounted as events of which those who
described them had been the witnesses. And from the remembrances thus
preserved and transmitted by tradition, each generation obscuring or
exaggerating them, have descended what we call fables of
antiquity,--great facts, now dimly remembered and darkly presented, as
shadowed over by the mists of long ages.

How must the hearts of the descendants of Shem have thrilled as they
heard from him the history of by-gone times--of a world which had passed
away! How much had the great patriarch of his race, himself, beheld? He
had seen the glory and the beauty of the world before the flood. It was
cursed for the sin of man, in the day of his fall--but slowly, as we
measure time, do the woes denounced by God often take effect, and,
though excluded from Eden, the first pair may have seen little change
pass over the face of the earth. The consummation of this curse may have
been the deluge; and those who dwelt on the earth, before this calamity
swept it with its destroying wing, may have seen it in much of its
original beauty; while those who outlived that event witnessed a
wonderful change.

From that frail fabric, the ark, which proved the second cradle of the