And the Lord said to Noah: “Go in thou and all your house into the ark: for you I have seen just before me in this generation. Of all clean beasts take seven and seven, the male and the female. But of the beasts that are unclean two and two, the male and the female. Of the fowls also of the air seven and seven, the male and the female: that seed may be saved upon the face of the whole earth. For yet a while, and after seven days, I will rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and I will destroy every substance that I have made, from the face of the Earth.” And Noah did all things which the Lord had commanded him. And he was six hundred years old, when the waters of the flood overflowed the earth. And Noah went in and his sons, his wife and the wives of his sons with him into the ark, because of the waters of the flood. And of beasts clean and unclean, and of fowls, and of every thing that moves upon the earth, two and two went in to Noah into the ark, male and female, as the Lord had commanded Noah. And after the seven days were passed, the waters of the flood overflowed the earth. In the six hundredth year of the life of Noah, in the second month, in the seventeenth day of the month, all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the flood gates of heaven were opened: And the rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. In the selfsame day Noah, and Sem, and Cham, and Japheth his sons: his wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, went into the ark: They and every beast according to its kind, and all the cattle in their kind, and every thing that moves upon the earth according to its kind, and every fowl according to its kind, all birds, and all that fly, went in to Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein was the breath of life. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in on the outside. And the flood was forty days upon the earth, and the waters increased, and lifted up the ark on high from the earth.Thanks be to God.
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
“All flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth” (Genesis vi. 12). The terrible lesson, then, which men had received by being driven out of Paradise in the person of our First Parents had been without effect. Neither the certainty of death, when they would have to stand before the Divine Judge — nor the humiliations which attend man’s first coming into this world — nor the pains and fatigues and trials which beset the whole path of life — had subdued men’s hearts or brought them into submission to that Sovereign Master whose hand lay thus heavy upon them. They had the divine promise that a Saviour should be given to them and that this Redeemer (who was to be the Son of Her that was to crush the Serpent’s head) would not only bring them salvation, but would moreover re-instate them in all the happiness and honours they had lost. But even this was not enough to make them rise above the base passions of corrupt nature. The example of Adam’s nine hundred years’ penance, and the admonitions he could so feelingly give that had received such proofs of God’s love and anger began to lose their influence upon his children. And when he at last descended into the grave, his posterity grew more and more heedless of what they owed to their Creator. The long life which had been granted to man in this the first Age of the World was made but a fresh means of offending Him who gave it. When, finally, the sons of Seth took to themselves wives of the family of Cain, the human race reached the height of wickedness, rebelled against the Lord and made their own passions be their god.
Yet all this while they had had granted to them the power of resisting the evil propensities of their hearts. God had offered them His grace by which they were enabled to conquer pride and concupiscence. The merits of the Redeemer to come were even then present to Divine Justice, and the Blood of the Lamb, slain, as Saint John tells us, from the beginning of the world (Apocalypse xiii. 8) was applied, in its merits, to this, as to every generation, which existed before the Great Sacrifice was really immolated. Each individual of the human family might have been just as Noah was, and like him have found favour with the Most High, but the thought of their heart was bent upon evil, and not upon good, and the Earth grew covered with enemies of God. Then it was that it repented God that He made man (Genesis vi. 6), as the Sacred Scripture forcibly expresses it. He decreed that man’s life on Earth should be shortened in order that the thought of death might be ever before us. He, moreover, resolves to destroy, by a universal Deluge, the whole of this perverse generation, saving only one family. The world would thus be renewed and man would learn from this awful chastisement to serve and love this his Sovereign Lord and God.
