FIRST THINGS. CHAPTER XIV. The First Deist. In the history of our first parents, the first birth must have been an event of deep interest. What mother, from the days of Eve to the present hour, ever realized such an event without those commingled emotions of solicitude, tenderness, responsibility, and joy, which none but the heart of a parent knows? Cain and Abel, it has been generally believed, were twin brothers. Two flowers there were that thus early bloomed on this barren earth, though the flowers of Eden were thus blighted. The "mother of all living" looked upon her first-born, and exclaimed in transports of gladness, "I have gotten a man from the Lord!” There was nature in all this; and was there not faith in it also? God had said, "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." This promise of the Messiah was not given to a reprobate. Our first parents were to be the founders of true religion in the very world upon which they had brought the curse of their apostasy; and this simple and childlike exclamation of Eve, while it evinces her gratitude and a sweet sense of her dependence, shows that she was no castaway. Nor is it at all improbable, that these few words contained the germ of a stronger faith, and that she had the secret hope that her first-born son was the promised "seed of the woman." It is an interesting fact, that God was not pleased to give our first parents posterity, until he had revealed this gracious promise; and it is a delightful truth, in its relations to those who die in infancy, that no child of Adam was ever born, except under the mediatorial reign of the promised Saviour. Cain and Abel began their existence under the announced reign of this Prince of Peace; yet, as they commenced it under a broken covenant, they inherited the character, not of their unfallen, nor of their restored parents, but the character which they possessed as fallen and depraved creatures. We know little of the early history of these two first-born of the human family; the brief hints furnished by the sacred historian, show that they were very different men. different men. It is obvious from the whole narrative that they were religiously educated, and that they employed their religious training to very different ends. Their parents were acquainted with God, and had cultivated the most delightful intimacy with him before they fell. They were unhappily too well acquainted with the snares of the tempter; and God had graciously made them acquainted with the way of salvation by his Son, and with the only way of worshipping him acceptably and with godly fear. These great truths they could not but have instilled into the minds of their children, by example, instruction, and prayer. Abel Religious instruction, even where most faithfully imparted, exerts a widely different influence upon different minds. This difference was strongly marked in the character of Cain and Abel. was a pious young man ; Cain was ungodly. Abel was a believer in God's truth; Cain was an unbeliever. Abel was a Christian; Cain a Deist. Abel died an unnatural, yet a happy death; Cain lived to wander a vagabond in the earth, and died none can tell where, with this only epitaph upon his grave, "That wicked one, who slew his brother." Nor was this first-born of the human family the last one of the race whose entrance into the world was greeted with exultation, but whose subsequent character and conduct overwhelmed |