From the very creation, God not only reigned over all men “naturally” by His might; but also had “peculiar” subjects, whom He commanded by a voice, as one man speaketh to another. In which manner He “reigned” over Adam, and gave him commandment to abstain from the tree of cognizance of good and evil; which when he obeyed not, but tasting thereof, took upon him to be as God, judging between good and evil, not by his Creator’s commandment, but by his own sense, his punishment was a privation of the estate of eternal life, wherein God had at first created him; and afterwards God punished his posterity for their vices, all but eight persons, with an universal deluge; and in these eight did consist the then “kingdom of God.”