derer, as justice demands, is to render themselves childless. Ah! how do the difficulties and distresses of their fallen estate increase upon the guilty men every day! The cause which was too hard for Adam to determine, God takes into his own hand. "And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother?" Gen. iv 9. Offences committed in secret, and offenders, whose power and station bid defiance to earthily tribunals, fall properly under the immediate cognizance of Heaven. Behold the th is set, and the judgment opened. How meek and gentle is God with this murderer! He would draw confession from his mouth, not as a snare, hut as an indication of contrition. The end which God has in view, in making inquiry after blood, is, not the 'conviction and punishment; but the conviction, pardon, and recovery of the criminal. What a question," Where is thy brother?" put by God himself to the wretch whose hands were yet reeking with his blood! What heart, hardened through sin, dictated the reply, "I know not, am I my brother's keeper?" Is this the eldest hope of the first human pair? Is he not rather the first-born of that accursed being, who is a liar and a murderer from the beginning? "I know not:" Falsehood must be called in to cover that wickedness which we are ashamed or afraid to avow. "Am I my brother's keeper?" How dreadful is the progress of vice! How crime leads on to crime! Envy begets malice; malice inspires revenge; revenge hurries on to blood; blood-guiltiness seeks shelter under untruth, and untruth attempts to support itself by insolence, assurance, and pride: and haughtiness of spirit is but one step from destruction. Ah, little do men know, when they indulge one evil thought, or venture on one unwarrantable action, what the issue is to be! They vainly flatter themselves. it is in their power to stop when they please. But passion, like a fiery and unmanageable stced in the hands of an unskilful rider, by one inconsiderate stroke of the spur, may be excited to such a pitch of fury, as

no skill can tame, no force restrain; but both horse and rider are hurried together down the precipice, and perish in their rage.

A

The milder, and more indirect admonitions, and reproofs of God's word and providence, being misunderstood, slighted, or defied, justice is concerned, and necessity requires, to speak in plainer language, and to bring the charge directly home: and that severity is most awful, which was preceded by gentleness, patience, and long-suffering. God at length awakes to vengeance; " And he said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground," Gen. v. 10. And mark how every creature arms itself in the cause of God. The dead earth is represented as acquiring sensibility, and refusing to cover blood: the silent ground becomes vocal, and loudly accuses the criminal: the stones of the field are at war with him who has made God his foe: nay, the earth is made not only the accuser, but the punisher of the guilty; for this new transgression it falls under a heavier curse. Adam for his offence was doomed to eat bread with the sweat of his brow; was doomed to labor, yet to labor in hope of increase; but Cain shall spend his strength for nought and in vain. The ground shall present greater rigidity to the hand of cultivation shall cast out the seed thrown into it, or consume and destroy it, or at best produce a lean and scanty crop. Cain and the earth are to be mutually cursed to each other. It seems to tremble under, and shrink from, the feet of a murderer; it refuses henceforth to yield unto him her strength, and considers him as a monstrous, mishapen birth, of which she is ashamed, and which she wishes to destroy. He considers it as an unnatural mother, whom no pains can mollify, no submission reconcile. "A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth." When the mind is changed, every thing changes with it: when a man is at discord with himself, he is eternally from home. The

spacious world, Cain's hereditary domain, is become a vast solitude; of a home is turned into a place of exile. The person whom all men shun is every where a stranger; he who is smitten of his own conscience, is continually surrounded with enemies.

The same principle which engages men in criminal enterprises, in the hope of impunity, throws them into despair, upon the denunciation of punishment. As they formerly expected much higher satisfaction from the execution of their wicked purposes, than the most successful villany ever could bestow; so now, their own guilty minds outrun the awards of justice itself; and the awakened conscience does ample vengeance upon the offender at length, amply vindicates the cause both of God and man. This is strikingly exemplified in the case of Cain. His recent boldness and insolence are a strong contrast to his present dejection and terror. He now sinks under the apprehension of intolerable chastisements, and forebodes great er evils than his sentence denounced. His banishment he considers as far from being the greatest of the calamities of his condition; he feels himself excluded, hidden from the gracious presence of God; and deserted of his Maker, liable to fall by the hand of every assailant. But God remembers mercy in the midst of anger and the life which he himself was graciously pleased to spare, no one else must, on any pretence whatever, presume to take away. He only who can bestow life, has a right to dispose of it.

Ye over-curious enquirers, who must needs be informed of every thing, what does it concern you to know, by what mark God distinguished Cain, to prevent his being killed by any one who might take upon himself to be the avenger of blood? Speculation and conjecture, which with some pass for illustration and knowledge, are not the objects of these exercises; but whatever assists faith, whatever supports a sound morality, whatever conveys real information, inspires a

taste for goodness, represses inordinate and sinful desire; whatever teaches gratitude and love to God, and good-will to men, that we would carefully observe, and earnestly inculcate. As it is no part of our inten-. tion to wander into the regions of speculation, under a pretence of elucidating the sacred history, it is still less so, to enter the lists of controversy. Your Lecturer has, no doubt, his opinions and prejudices, like other men his prejudices, however, he is confident to say, are on the side of truth, and virtue, and religion : his opinions, he has no inclination dogmatically to propose; he neither wishes to make a secret of them, nor expects any one, much less the world, implicitly to adopt them. He is conscious of a desire to do good; not over anxious about fame; happy in the affection of many friends, and unconscious of having given cause to any good man to be his enemy. Forgive a digression, suggested by the occasion, not rambled into through design; proceeding, not from the desire a man has to speak of himself, but from a wish, by doing it once for all, to cut off all future occasion of speaking in, or of, the first person. We return to the history.

"It shall come to pass," says guilty, trembling Cain, "that every one that findeth me shall slay me. This is one of the many passages of scripture, which the enemies of religion have laid hold of, and held forth,. as contradictory to other parts of revelation, in the view of invalidating and destroying the whole. Here, they allege, Moses is inconsistent with himself; in deriving the whole human race from the common root of Adam, and at the same time supposing the world so populous at the time of Abel's murder, as to excite in Cain a well grounded apprehension of the public resentment and punishment of his crimes. Either, say they, there were other men and women created at the same time with, or before Adam and Eve; or else Cain's fears are groundless and absurd. A learned and ingenious critic has taken the trouble to refute this.

objection, by instituting a calculation founded on obvious probabilities at least, by which it appears, that at the time of Abel's murder, the world was sufficiently peopled, on the Mosaic supposition, That all mankind descended from Adam, to render the public justice an object of well-grounded apprehension to guilty Cain, We pretend not to assert, that the calculation of a modern author is a demonstration of a fact so remote: if it be probable, it is sufficient for our purpose, that of doing away one of the cavils of infidelity. The birth of Seth is fixed, by the history, in the one hundred and thirtieth year of Adam: it is therefore reasonable to place the death of Abel two years earlier, or near it; that is, in the one hundred and twentyeighth year of the world. "Now though we should suppose," says the calculator, * "that Adam and Eve had no other sons in the year of the world one hundred and twenty-eight but Cain and Abel, it must be allowed that they had daughters, who might early marry with those two sons. I require no more than the descendants of these two, to make a very considerable number of men upon the earth, in the said year one hundred and twenty-eight. For supposing them to have been married in the nineteenth year of the world, they might easily have had each of them eight children in the twenty-fifth year. In twenty-five years more, the fiftieth of the world, their descendants in a direct line would be sixty-four persons. In the seventyfifth year, at the same rate, they would amount to five hundred and twelve. In the one hundredth year, to four thousand and ninety-six; and in the one hundred and twenty-fifth year, to thirty-two thousand seven hundred and sixty eight.' Now, if to this calculation we add the high degree of probability that Adam had many more sons besides those mentioned in the record

I

Dissert. Chronol. Geogr.. Critiq. sur la Bible. Ime. Dissert. journal de Paris, Jan. 1712. Tom. li. P 6.