The discussion now going on between our clergymen and certain
unbelievers touching the question of Cain and his wife will surely
result beneficially, for it will set everybody to reading his Bible
more diligently. Still, the biography of Cain is one that we could
never become particularly interested in; in short, of all the Old
Testament characters none other interests us so much as does
Methuselah, the man who lived 969 years. Would it be possible to find
in all history another life at once so grand and so pathetic? One can
get a faint idea of the awful magnitude of Methuselah's career by
pausing to recollect that 969 years represent 9.69 centuries, 96
decades, 11,628 months, 50,388 weeks, 353,928 days, 8,494,272 hours,
521,656,320 minutes, and 36,299,879,200 seconds!
How came he to live so long? Ah, that is easily enough explained. He
loved life and the world,--both were beautiful to him. And one day he
spoke his wish in words. "Oh, that I might live a thousand years!" he
cried.
Then looking up straightway he beheld an angel, and the angel said:
"Wouldst thou live a thousand years?"
And Methuselah answered him, saying: "As the Lord is my God, I would
live a thousand years."
"It shall be even so," said the angel; and then the angel departed out
of his sight. So Methuselah lived on and on, as the angel had promised.
How sweet a treasure the young Methuselah must have been to his parents
and to his doting ancestors; with what tender solicitude must the old
folks have watched the child's progress from the innocence of his first
to the virility of his later centuries. We can picture the happy
reunions of the old Adam family under the domestic vines and fig-trees
that bloomed near the Euphrates. When Methuselah was a mere toddler of
nineteen years, Adam was still living, and so was his estimable wife;
the possibility is that the venerable couple gave young Methuselah a
birthday party at which (we can easily imagine) there were present
these following, to-wit: Adam, aged 687; Seth, aged 557; Enos, aged
452; Cainan, aged 362; Mahalaleel, aged 292; Jared, aged 227; Enoch,
aged 65, and his infant boy Methuselah, aged 19. Here were represented
eight direct generations, and there were present, of course,
the wives and daughters; so that, on the whole, the gathering
must have been as numerous as it was otherwise remarkable.
Nowhere in any of the vistas of history, of romance, or of
mythology were it possible to find a spectacle more imposing than
that of the child Methuselah surrounded by his father Enoch,
his grandfather Jared, his great-grandfather Mahalaleel, his
great-great-grandfather Cainan, his great-great-great-grandfather
Enos, his great-great-great-great-grandfather Seth, and his
great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Adam, as well as by his
great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Eve, and her feminine
posterity for (say) four centuries! How pretty and how kindly dear old
grandma Eve must have looked on that gala occasion, attired, as she
must have been, in all the quaint simplicity of that primeval period;
and how must the dear old soul have fretted through fear that little
Methuselah would eat too many papaws, or drink too much goat's milk.
It is a marvel, we think, that in spite of the indulgence and the
petting in which he was reared, Methuselah grew to be a good, kind man.
Profane historians agree that just about the time he reached the age of
ninety-four Methuselah became deeply enamoured of a comely and
sprightly damsel named Mizpah,--a young thing scarce turned
seventy-six. Up to this period of adolescence his cautious father
Enoch had kept Methuselah out of all love entanglements, and it is
probable that he would not have approved of this affair with Mizpah had
not Jared, the boy's grandfather, counselled Enoch to give the boy a
chance. But alas and alackaday for the instability of youthful
affection! It befell in an evil time that there came over from the
land of Nod a frivolous and gorgeously apparelled beau, who, with
finely wrought phrases, did so fascinate the giddy Mizpah that
incontinently she gave Methuselah the mitten, and went with the dashing
young stranger of 102 as his bride.
This shocking blow so grievously affected Methuselah that for some time
(that is to say, for a period of ninety-one years) he shunned female
society. But having recovered somewhat from the bitterness of that
great disappointment received in the callowness of his ninth decade, he
finally met and fell in love with Adah, a young woman of 148, and her
he married. The issue of this union was a boy whom they named Lamech,
and this child from the very hour of his birth gave his father vast
worriment, which, considering the disparity in their ages, is indeed
most shocking of contemplation. The tableau of a father (aged 187)
vainly coddling a colicky babe certainly does not call for our
enthusiasm. Yet we presume to say that Methuselah bore his trials
meekly, that he cherished and adored the baby, and that he spent weeks
and months playing peek-a-boo and ride-a-cock-horse. In all our
consideration of Methuselah we must remember that the mere matter of
time was of no consequence to him.
Lamech grew to boyhood, involving his father in all those ridiculous
complications which parents nowadays do not heed so much, but which
must have been of vast annoyance to a man of Methuselah's advanced age
and proper notions. Whittling with the old gentleman's razor, hooking
off from school, trampling down the neighbors' rowen, tracking mud into
the front parlor--these were some of Lamech's idiosyncrasies, and of
course they tormented Methuselah, who recalled sadly that boys were no
longer what they used to be when he was a boy some centuries previous.
But when he got to be 182 years old Lamech had sowed all his wild oats,
and it was then he married a clever young girl of 98, who bore him a
son whom they called Noah. Now if Methuselah had been worried and
plagued by Lamech, he was more than compensated therefor by this baby
grandson, whom he found to be, aside from all prejudices, the prettiest
and the smartest child he had ever seen. Old father Adam, who was now
turned of his ninth century, tottered over to see the baby, and he,
too, allowed that it was an uncommonly bright child. And dear old
grandma Eve declared that there was an expression about the upper part
of the little Noah's face that reminded her very much of the soft-eyed
boy she lost 800 years ago. And dear old grandma Eve used to rock
little Noah and sing to him, and cry softly to herself all the while.
Now, in good time, Noah grew to lusty youth, and although he was, on
the whole, a joy to his grandsire Methuselah, he developed certain
traits and predilections that occasioned the old gentleman much
uneasiness. At the tender age of 265 Noah exhibited a strange passion
for aquatics, and while it was common for other boys of that time to
divert themselves with the flocks and herds, with slingshots and
spears, with music and dancing, Noah preferred to spend his hours
floating toy-ships in the bayous of the Euphrates. Every day he took
his little shittim-wood boats down to the water, tied strings to them,
and let them float hither and thither on the crystal bosom of the tide.
Naturally enough these practices worried the grandfather mightily.
"May not the crocodiles compass him round about?" groaned Methuselah.
"May not behemoth prevail against him? Or, verily, it may befall that
the waves shall devour him. Woe is me and lamentation unto this
household if destruction come to him through the folly of his fathers!"
So Methuselah's age began to be full of care and trouble, and many a
time he felt weary of living, and sometimes--yes, sometimes--he wished
he were dead. People in those times were not afraid to die; they
believed in the second and better life, because God spoke with them and
told them it should be.
The last century of this good man's sojourn upon earth was
particularly pathetic. His ancestors were all dead; he alone
remained the last living reminiscence of a time that but for him
would have been forgotten. Deprived of the wise counsels of his
great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Adam and of the gentle
admonitions of his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Eve,
Methuselah felt not only lonesome but even in danger of wrong-doing, so
precious to him had been the teachings of these worthy progenitors.
And what particularly disturbed Methuselah were the dreadful changes
that had taken place in society since he was a boy. Dress, speech,
customs, and morals were all different now from what they used to be.
When Methuselah was a boy,--ah, he remembered it well,--people went
hither and thither clad only in simple fig-leaf garb; and they were
content therewith.
When Methuselah was a boy, people spoke a plain, direct language,
strong in its truth, its simplicity, and its honest vigor.
When Methuselah was a boy, manners were open and unaffected, and morals
were pure and healthy.
But now all these things were changed. An evil called fashion had
filled the minds of men and women with vanity. From the sinful land of
Nod and from other pagan countries came divers tradesmen with purples
and linens and fine feathers, whereby a wicked pride was engendered,
and from these sinful countries, too, came frivolous manners that
supplanted the guileless etiquette of the past.
Moreover, traffic and intercourse with the subtle heathen had corrupted
and perverted the speech of Adam's time: crafty phrases and false
rhetorics had crept in, and the grand old Edenic idioms either were
fast being debased or had become wholly obsolete. Such new-fangled
words as "eftsoon," "albeit," "wench," "soothly," "zounds," "whenas,"
and "sithence" had stolen into common usage, making more direct and
simpler speech a jest and a byword.
Likewise had prudence given way to extravagance, abstemiousness to
intemperance, dignity to frivolity, and continence to lust; so that by
these evils was Methuselah grievously tormented, and it repented him
full sore that he had lived to see such exceeding wickedness upon
earth. But in the midst of all these follies did Methuselah maintain
an upright and godly life, and continually did he bless God for that he
had held him in the path of rectitude.
Now when Methuselah was in the 964th summer of his sojourn he was
called upon to mourn the death of his son Lamech, whom an inscrutable
Providence had cut off in what in those days was considered the flower
of a man's life,--namely, the eighth century thereof. Lamech's
untimely decease was a severe blow to his doting father, who,
forgetting all his son's boyish indiscretions, remembered now only
Lamech's good and lovable traits and deeds. It is reasonable to
suppose, however, that the old gentleman was somewhat beguiled from his
grief by the lively dispositions and playful antics of Lamech's
grandsons, Noah's sons, and his own great-grandsons,--Shem, Ham, and
Japheth,--who at this time had attained to the frolicsome ages of
ninety-five, ninety-two, and ninety-one, respectively. These boys
inherited from their father a violent penchant for aquatics, and
scarcely a day passed that they did not paddle around the bayous and
sloughs of the Euphrates in their gopher-wood canoes.
"Gran'pa," Noah used to say, "the conduct of those boys causes me
constant vexation. I have no time to follow them around, and I am
haunted continually by the fear that they will be drowned, or that the
crocodiles will get them if they don't watch out!"
But Methuselah would smiling answer: "Possess thy soul in patience and
thy bowels in peace; for verily is it not written 'boys will be boys!'"
Now Shem, Ham, and Japheth were very fond of their great-grandpa, and
to their credit be it said that next to paddling over the water
privileges of the Euphrates they liked nothing better than to sit in
the old gentleman's lap, and to hear him talk about old times.
Marvellous tales he told them, too; for his career of nine and a half
centuries had been well stocked with incident, as one would naturally
suppose. Howbeit, the admiration which these callow youths had for
Methuselah was not shared by a large majority of the people then on
earth. On the contrary, we blush to admit it, Methuselah was held in
very trifling esteem by his frivolous fellow-citizens, who habitually
referred to him as an "old 'wayback," "a barnacle," an "old fogy," a
"mossback," or a "garrulous dotard," and with singular irreverence they
took delight in twitting him upon his senility and in pestering him
with divers new-fangled notions altogether distasteful, not to say
shocking, to a gentleman of his years.
It was perhaps, however, at the old settlers' picnics, which even then
were of annual occurrence, that Methuselah most enjoyed himself; for on
these occasions he was given the place of prominence and he was
deferred to in everything, since he antedated all the others by at
least three centuries. The historians and the antiquarians of the time
found him of much assistance to them in their labors, since he was
always ready to provide them with dates touching incidents of the
remote period from which he had come down unscathed. He remembered
vividly how, when he was 186 years of age, the Euphrates had frozen
over to a depth of seven feet; the 209th winter of his existence he
referred to as "the winter of the deep snow;" he remembered that
when he was a boy the women had more character than the women
of these later years; he had a vivid recollection of the great
plague that prevailed in the city of Enoch during his fourth
century; he could repeat, word for word, the address of welcome
his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Adam delivered to an
excursion party that came over from the land of Nod one time when
Methuselah was a mere child of eighty-seven,--oh, yes, poor old
Methuselah was full of reminiscence, and having crowded an active
career into the brief period of 969 years, it can be imagined that
ponderous tomes would not hold the tales he told whenever he was
encouraged.
One day, however, Methuselah's grandson Noah took the old gentleman
aside and confided into his ear-trumpet a very solemn secret which must
have grieved the old gentleman immensely, for he gnashed his gums and
wrung his thin, bony hands and groaned dolorously.
"The end of all flesh is at hand," said Noah. "The earth is filled
with violence through them, and God will destroy them with the earth.
I will make an ark of gopher-wood, the length thereof 300 cubits, the
breadth of it 50 cubits, and the height of it 30 cubits, and I will
pitch it within and without with pitch. Into the ark will I come, and
my sons and my wife, and my sons' wives, and certain living beasts
shall come, and birds of the air, and we and they shall be saved. Come
thou also, for thou art an austere man and a just."
But as Methuselah sate alone upon his couch that night he thought of
his life: how sweet it had been,--how that, despite the evil now and
then, there had been more of happiness than of sorrow in it. He even
forgot the wickedness of the world and remembered only its good and its
sunshine, its kindness and its love. He blessed God for it all, and he
prayed for the death-angel to come to him ere he beheld the destruction
of all he so much loved.
Then the angel came and spread his shadow about the old man.
And the angel said: "Thy prayer is heard, and God doth forgive thee the
score-and-ten years of the promised span of thy life."
And Methuselah gathered up his feet into the bed, and prattling of the
brooks, he fell asleep; and so he slept with his fathers.