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.