Not only does the mercy and justice of God lead us to conclude that He will not come in wrath to judge the world without giving ample warning of His purpose; but His dealings with our race, or with a chosen part of it, on momentous occasions in the past, supply us with precedents upon which to base an assurance that we shall be warned in an effective manner of Christ's coming. Thus we find that for one hundred and twenty years Noah was commissioned to warn the antediluvian world of God's purpose to bring a deluge upon the earth. The time was sufficiently extended, and the message which Noah declared so startling, that it could not fail to be borne to the utmost limits of the inhabited world. The story of the "folly of Noah," materialized in an ark, was doubtless told and retold everywhere, though it may have been in derision, and that patriarch himself, with the assistance of his sons, could, during the long period of probation, reach many of the ancient cities and preach in person to the people.