635. All understanding of truth and will for good perished during the last days of the Church before the Flood. This is meant by what has been stated in the previous and present verses. The people before the Flood were so steeped in dreadful persuasions and filthy desires that not one trace of those goods and truths could be seen. But with those called Noah remnants were left, which however were unable to produce anything belonging to the understanding or the will, only rational truth and natural good. For a person's character determines what it is that remnants can effect. By means of remnants those people were capable of being regenerated. There were no persuasions to thwart or swallow up the Lord's activity by way of remnants. Persuasions, or deep-rooted false assumptions, impede all such activity, and unless they are rooted out beforehand a person cannot possibly be regenerated. These matters will in the Lord's Divine mercy be dealt with later on.