thus rightfully gave the preference to his brother's offering. God claimed the heart of Abel, and Abel gave him his heart. God claimed also the heart of Cain; and though he had brought all the fruits of the earth and laid them on the altar, God would have said to him as he did to the Jews, in the days of the prophet, "Bring no more vain oblations." The religion of a Deist is like the religion of Cain.

The subject matter of their offerings was also essentially different. "Cain brought of the fruits of the ground an offering unto the Lord;" Abel brought "of the firstlings of his flock, and the fat thereof." The offering of Cain appears to the eye of human reason the more natural one of the two. And here was his error; he followed the leadings of his blinded reason. "The world by wisdom knew not God." The light of nature shows man that he has sinned, but does not show him how he may find mercy. God is holy, and cannot look on sin; man is sinful, vile to abjectness, and desperately wicked. Between reflections upon the character of God and the character of man, human reason sees no ground for hope. Man wants a religion, which God will accept; and would fain offer religious services that will be acceptable to God. This is a discovery which human reason cannot make; left to itself, its devotions are undevout; its worship, sin; its piety

impious; its religion an outrage upon the divine rectitude.

The field of human invention in this article of man's relation to the Deity began to be very early explored; nor did its discoveries differ widely from the rationalism and deism of subsequent ages. The savage of the desert satisfies himself with offering to God the fruits of his harvest-field; the more enlightened rationalist of the present age satisfies himself with offerings which have no respect to Him, through whom alone there is access; while the self-righteous religionist satisfies himself with going about to establish a righteousness of his own, by the deeds of the law. The veriest infidel is satisfied with such a religion. Human reason is never more at fault, than when it sets itself to invent for itself a religion. It is the mere religion of thought and intellect; it has no solace for the conscience, and leaves the soul barren, and feeding on husks. It exerts no practical influence. It neither enlightens, nor converts, nor comforts, nor sanctifies. It is the merest delusion, if a man satisfy himself with such a religion. He may have sensibility and emotion, but they are not right emotions. They may rise to transcendental hopes, and romantic joys; but they are mere excitement, and leave the soul under the dominion of sin. Men are now, and ever have been prone to devise their own systems of religious worship,

in opposition to the only acceptable worship which God has revealed in his word. There is nothing for which they more need the divine direction, and a special revelation from heaven, than to enable them to answer the inquiry, "Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the most high God?" They must be instructed by heavenly love and wisdom; else will their own ignorance, and error, and presumption, lead them farther from God in those very acts of religious worship by which they propose to draw nigh to him.

This instruction God condescended to give to Cain and Abel. The foundation of all acceptable worship was laid in the promise, that the seed of the woman should bruise the head of the serpent. Without this they had been without hope. God early taught them to draw nigh to him through the promised Saviour, and in the offering of those sacrifices which prefigured the Christian atone

ment.

The institution of sacrifices was as old as the introduction of sin; the necessity of them is founded upon the fact that man is a sinner. "Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission." It is "the blood that maketh atonement for the soul." We find, that Adam and Eve, immediately after their apostasy, instead of remaining covered with their scanty protection of fig-leaves, were covered

with the skins of animals. Yet, at that period, the original grant for food was confined to the vegetable creation; the permission of it was not until after the flood. The inference is a natural one, if not unavoidable, that the skins with which they were clothed were those of animals which, by the divine appointment, were offered in sacrifice. This truth is strongly implied in the phraseology, that "God made coats of skins and clothed them." It was not their own invention, nor their own work; they had no right, of their own will, to slay the lambs of the flock for this, or for any other purpose; it was of God's invention and God's appointment. God thus taught them that the foundation of their hope was not only in the promised seed of the womam, but in the sacrifice of that promised Saviour. The sacrifices he thus appointed shadowed forth to them the necessity and the reality of that one great sacrifice which took the place of all others, the blood of which possessed a higher value than the blood of bullocks and of goats.

This was their religion, and this the way in which they drew nigh to God. This was the religion which God taught them, and which they taught these two sons. And this is the only religion the Bible knows, and the only religion that meets the exigencies of men as sinners. Here there is a refuge for the guilty. Here is that victim whose blood

speaketh better things than the blood of Abel, and which has made all the reparation which the most excited conscience demands. The devices of men here disappear before the wisdom of God. Here are pardon, and holiness, and eternal life. A religion that does not accomplish this is no religion; it is infidelity; it is deism, which leaves the dark, unpardoned, uncomforted, depraved mind, still dark, and without God and hope.

This is the religion which Abel accepted and practised, and which was rejected by Cain; and therefore, we say that the one was a deist, and the other was a Christian.

Behold in Cain the first deist which the world ever saw. It is a melancholy fact, that this firstborn of man should have been a deist; yet was he a worthy representative of those who reject the religion of Christ, and lean to their own understanding and the inventions of men. This is the distinguishing characteristic of all deists. Amid all the various phases which their systems exhibit, the one and main object of them all is to set aside the Christian revelation, and substitute natural religion, the religion of reason, the religion of Cain in its place. Herbert professes to believe in God, but regards the doctrines of Christianity as fables and dreams. Blount assails the doctrine of a Mediator as unworthy of God, and magnifies the oracles of reason. The Earl of Shaftesbury, with a