The race had been cut down to the root because in the midst of knowledge and grace it had deserted God; and Noah, as he stepped forth from the ark, began with a solemn act of reparation. He "built an altar to the Lord and offered holocausts upon it of all cattle and fowls that were clean." God accepted the sacrifice, inasmuch as it was in and through this act that He bestowed the earth upon Noah and his sons, and gave him everything that lived and moved on it for food. He consecrated afresh the life of man by ordaining that whoever took human life away, that is, by an act of violence, not of justice, should himself be punished with the loss of his own life; and He grounded this great ordinance upon the fact that man was made after the image of God. At the same time God repeated to Noah and his sons the primal blessing which had multiplied the race, and was to fill the earth with it, and made a covenant with him and with his seed for ever, a covenant to be afterwards developed, but never to be abrogated. It is to be noted that the sacred narrative dwells rather upon the sacrifice made by Noah immediately upon issuing from the ark than upon the original sacrifice offered by Adam. Of the first institution of sacrifice it makes only incidental mention, referring with great significance to those skins of beasts, of which God provided a covering for the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It is as if the rite of sacrifice, instituted as a prophecy of the future expiation of sin, might fitly supply from the skins of its victims a covering for that nakedness which sin alone had revealed and made shameful. The mention of this fact ensues immediately upon the record of the fall, before Adam is cast out of paradise. And again, by the mention of the sacrifice of Abel, and of its acceptance, it is shown that the rite already existed in the children of the first man. But now the sacrifice of Noah, and the covenant made in it, as being of so vast an import to every succeeding generation, is described at length as the starting-point of the whole renewed, that is, the actual race of man. In this sacrifice it is emphatically declared that "the Lord smelled a sweet savour," since it stood at the beginning of man's new life, coming after the waters of the deluge as the image and precursor of the Sacrifice on Calvary, which was to purify the earth, and which those waters typified.