"The conduct of Lot in the mountain whither he had retired scarcely admits of explanation. It has been generally supposed that his daughters believed that the whole of the human race were destroyed, except their father and themselves. But how they could have thought so, when they had previously tarried at Zoar, it is not easy to conceive; and we can not but regard the entire case as one of those problems which the Scriptures present as indeterminate, on account of a deficiency of data on which to form any satisfactory conclusion."[1]
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: