The theory of this book makes the whole story tangible, consistent, and probable.

We have seen that, prior to the coming of the comet, the human race, according to the legends, had abandoned itself to all wickedness.  In the Norse Sagas we read: 

     Brothers will fight together,
     And become each other’s bane;
     Sisters’ children
     Their sib shall spoil;
     Hard, is the world,
     Sensual sins grow huge.”

[1.  “The Patriarchal Age,” vol. i, p. 388.]

{p. 328}

In the legends of the British Druids we are told that it was “the profligacy of mankind” that caused God to send the great disaster.  So, in the Bible narrative, we read that, in Lot’s time, God resolved on the destruction of “the cities of the plain,” Sodom, (Od, Ad,) and Gomorrah, (Go-Meru,) because of the wickedness of mankind: 

Chap. xviii, verse 20.  “And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous”—­

therefore he determined to destroy them.  When the angels came to Sodom, the people showed the most villainous and depraved appetites.  The angels warned Lot to flee.  Blindness (darkness?) came upon the people of the city, so that they could not find the doors of the houses.  The angels took Lot and his wife and two daughters by the hands, and led or dragged them away, and told them to fly “to the mountain, lest they be consumed.”

There is an interlude here, an inconsistent interpolation probably, where Lot stays at Zoar, and persuades the Lord to spare Zoar; but soon after we find all the cities of the plain destroyed, and Lot and his family hiding in a cave in the mountain; so that Lot’s intercession seems to have been of no avail: 

Verse 24.  “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.”

Verse 25.  “And he overthrew those cities, and all the cities of the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.”

It was a complete destruction of all living things in that locality; and Lot “dwell in a cave, he and his two daughters.”

And the daughters were convinced that they were the

{p. 329}

last of the human race left alive on the face of the earth, notwithstanding the fact that the Lord had promised (chap. iii, verse 21), “I will not overthrow this city,” Zoar; but Zoar evidently was overthrown.  And the daughters, rather than see the human race perish, committed incest with their father, and became the mothers of two great and extensive tribes or races of men, the Moabites and the Ammonites.

This, also, looks very much as if they were indeed repeopling an empty and desolated world..

To recapitulate, we have here, in due chronological order: 

1.  The creation of the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them.