his eternal, ever-enduring grace are the moving cause of the whole. Surely shall one say, in the Lord have I righteousness and strength. In the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified, and shall glory! He was under no obligation to have mercy upon you, more than upon the rebel angels, or upon the thousands of your fellow-men, who are without God in the world. Well may you say, "By the grace of God, I am what I am! Not unto me, not unto me, O Lord! but to thy name give glory, for thy mercy and thy truth's sake! Your best honors be to his name! Let his glory be the animating theme. The spiritual temple rests on him. Built on his grace, it has risen; it rises now; and it shall rise; while every arch is vocal with the song, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain !"

CHAPTER XVI

The First Quarrel.

THE first promise involved a threatening. It predicted the overthrow of the seed of the serpent, and the conquests of the seed of the woman. "I will put enmity between thee and the woman; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." There was to be a conflict, a quarrel to the death between these two seeds. A judicious commentator remarks that this single declaration "stands and will stand to the end of time, an eternal demonstration that the Scripture was given by inspiration from God;" and because "it unfolds the whole history of the church and the world, through time and to eternity." These two families ever have been, and ever will be thus set in battle array, and striving for the mastery.

It is interesting to us to know how this controversy began. Melancholy to relate, it began in the immediate family of our first parents; between the fit-born sons of the first man and the first

woman. It was a religious quarrel, and arose from the facts detailed in our last two chapters Abel, the younger of the two, was a pious man. Cain was a deist; and so irritated was he at the respect which God paid to Abel's offering, and at the rejection of his own, that nothing could appease his anger until he had imbrued his hands in his brother's blood.

Thus early did the direful effects of the first apostasy show themselves; and so tremendous were they, that the first descendant of these guilty parents was a murderer and a fratricide. Wickedness is in its nature malignant; it sleeps no longer than its exciting causes sleep; it needs but to be provoked in order to be the lapper of blood. Cain was not worse by nature than other men. Like all other men until they are renewed by grace, he had no delight in truth and holiness. He loved darkness rather than light, because his deeds were evil. The carnal mind is not only enmity against God, but enmity against man. "He that saith, I love God, and hateth his brother, is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ?" Not more certainly is love "the fruit of the Spirit" and "the fulfilling of the law," than all unkindness and hatred to man is the fruit of that mother monster, enmity to God. The Apostle Paul, in describing the character of wicked men, affirms, that they are

"filled with all maliciousness"-" full of envy, murder, debate, malignity,"-" backbiters, despiteful, implacable, unmerciful." Nor is there anything that more certainly or more universally excites this malignant spirit than the truth of God. It required great obduracy on the part of Cain to resist the appeal which God made to him in regard to the unacceptableness of his sacrifice; but he did resist it unto blood. He felt the reproach most keenly when he learned that Abel's sacrifice was accepted, and that his own was a vain oblation; it made him angry with God and angry with his brother. We repeat the observation, it was, throughout, a religious controversy. And we are confirmed in the truth of this remark by the teaching of the Apostle John, where he speaks of this very subject in the following language: "For this is the message that ye have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous."

Though the first religious controversy in the world, this was by no means the last. For six thousand years this controversy has been going on, and exists in violence at the present time. Even now the great moral question is being agitated, which decides the interests of three worlds, and which involves the character and destiny of all the

generations of men even to the last judgment, and onward through interminable ages. It may be that the reader and the writer have a deeper interest in it than at first view is presented to their thoughts. The first outbreak began on the part of Satan in the garden; the next onslaught was on the part of Cain; and the battle is now going on in different forms throughout the earth.

The PARTIES in this controversy comprise the whole intelligent universe. They are composed of the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness; the kingdom of holiness and the kingdom of sin, wherever extended, by whoever upheld, and whatever may be their conquests. On one side are all godly men on the earth. By whatever name they are called, wherever born and dispersed, and by whatever peculiarities their moral training is distinguished, these all belong to the same kingdom, espouse the same cause, and are clothed with the same divine panoply. Be they who they may, that possess the faith and the works of righteous Abel, and are baptized into his spirit, they are all banded together by the same sacramental pledge, and intent on the same glorious conquests. They consist of individual men, of churches, of extended and combined families of churches, and of different ecclesiastical families, each under its own standard, and all under the standard of the cross. They are the disciples of Christ, the com