thing called life, which you can never imitate." Again, I said,
that Noah's children, having been accustomed to the violence and
bloodshed on the earth before the flood, might hold man's life
cheap; that, having seen in the flood men perish just like the
beasts around them, they might have begun to think that man's life
was not more precious than the beasts'. They might have all gone on
at last, as some of them did, to those horrors of cannibalism and
human sacrifice of which I just now spoke. Now, here, again comes
in God's covenant, "Surely the blood of your lives will I require.
At the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of
every man's brother will I require it. Whoso sheddeth man's blood
by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made He
man." This, then, is the covenant which God made with Noah for
perpetual generations, and therefore with us, the children of Noah.
In this covenant you see certain truths come out into light; some,
of which you read nothing before in the Bible, and other truths
which, though they were given to Adam, yet had been utterly lost
sight of before the flood. This has been God's method, we find from
the Bible, ever since the creation,--to lead man step by step up
into more and more light, up to this very day, and to make each sin
and each madness of men an occasion for revealing to Him more and
more of truth and of the living God. And so each and every chapter
in the Bible is built upon all that has gone before it; and he that
neglects to understand what has gone before will never come to the
understanding of what follows after. Why do I say this? Because
men are continually picking out those scraps of the Bible which suit
their own fancy, and pinning their whole faith on them, and trying
to make them serve to explain every thing in heaven and earth;
whereas no man can understand the Epistles unless he first
understand the Gospels. No man will understand the New Testament