THE THEORY OF THE EARTH. BOOK II

    chief ingredients of the Golden Age, so much celebrated by the Ancients. I know there were several other differences betwixt that Earth and this, but these are the original; and such as are not necessary to be premis'd for the general Explication of Paradise, we reserve for another place. We may in the mean time observe how preposterously they go to work that set themselves immediately to find out some pleasant place of the Earth to fix Paradise in, before they have consider'd or laid any grounds to explain the general conditions of it wheresoever it was. These must be first known and determin'd, and we must take our aim and directions from these, how to proceed further in our enquiries after it; otherwise we sail without a Compass, or seek a Port and know not which way it lies. And as we should think him a very unskilful Pilot that sought a place in the new World, or America that really was in the old; so they commit no less an error that seek Paradise in the present Earth, as now constituted, which could only belong to the former, and to the state of the first World: As will appear more plainly in the following Chapter.

CHAP. II.

The great Change of the World since the Flood, from what it was in the first Ages. The Earth under its present form could not be Paradisiacal, nor any part of it.

THE Scheme of this World passeth away, saith an holy Author; The mode and form both of the Natural and Civil World changeth continually more or less, but most remarkably at certain Periods, when all Nature puts on another face; as it will do at the Conflagration, and hath done already from the time of the Deluge. We may imagine how different a