CAIN AND ABEL.
THE GENESIS OF RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE.
—CAIN THE BIGOT
— ABEL THE BELIEVER

by Julia McNair Wright
Published 1872

MAN from his narrow outlook over the world studies and classifies the phenomena of his fellow-men in a hundred different forms: he talks of races, creeds, colors, and periods; of Greek and barbarian; and again divides and subdivides.

The Lord God, with the sweep of infinite vision, regards each eternity-bound soul with an eye single to its unchangeable destiny. Before him the countless generations separate into two great bands, as they shall stand on the mighty day of his last assize; those who have accepted justification in the Beloved, and those who have clung to their own righteousness, or have “cared for none of these things.”

From the very earliest history of the race we mark this distinction. When Eve, our mother, had two sons at her side, they were the types and leaders of these two forever-divergent lines of humanity. Of these babes, who learned in the land of Eden, but outside of the Paradisaic gate, the language of infancy from the pair who had never been children, one was a saint of God, the other a rebel sinner.

And, as a picture of what should come to pass in all the history of the ages, we find the first parents seeing and judging, not as God; and the sinner Cain so comporting himself through a long course of years that he is accounted a true child of glory. It is the forever-repeated story—echoed in Samuel’s choice among Jesse’s sons, and in the arguments of Job’s three friends—of man drawing his conclusions from his own perverse idea, and from some shining outward show, and God gazing unchallenged and undeceived upon the secret heart.

Adam and Eve, each perfect in kind, but not in degree or attainment, forfeiting their high estate, passed weeping out of the Edenic portal and the Edenic dispensation; beyond them lying four other dispensations, through which humanity must wander wearily before the heir of the Universe should come into his own again.

These, our parents, had a glorious promise, the shining sun of their hope, to light their troublous way, and they looked for its immediate realization. They could not apprehend that a thousand of our toilsome, earthly years are to our Father as a watch in the night; that all time is present to him, while before us it stretches a boundless future. The sorrowing pair did not know that generations must die like the falling of autumn leaves, and centuries be added to centuries before the Deliverer should come to enter into his priesthood by the sacrifice of himself; and centuries more before he should claim his kingdom and bruise the Serpent unto death.

We are not to suppose that those who had sat under the shadow of the tree of life, who had talked with God in the garden, and the shrine of whose worship was the glory between the Cherubim, keeping the way to their lost home, were left to grope blindly in the dark regarding their Redeemer. They expected a personal Saviour, divinity in the flesh; they apprehended the God and man two distinct natures mysteriously united in one personality. This they knew assuredly by a direct revelation, for they had no God of history or Providence to look to, and what they knew of him must have been unfolded by himself. We see that they expected the human flesh and nature in their Jehovah, else Eve would not have seen him in her new-born son; while we are equally sure they apprehended his divinity, because the terms of salvation were the same for them as for others—there is no name given but that of the God-man, whereby men may be saved; and Paul speaks of the faith of Abel as identical with that of the Church after the days of Jesus.

But it was not necessary that the long ages of preparation for his advent should be unfolded; for it is not for us to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath kept in his own hand; nor was it important that they should be taught the wonder of his conception; that was the destined lesson of a later day. All that was needful they were told. God, co-equal Son of the Father, coming in the flesh to vindicate his sovereignty, to save the souls of his chosen, to subdue the revolted earth unto himself. Having learned this much, our parents’ ardent desire outran the stately progress of the divine intention, and grasped at immediate restoration. They did not yet realize the tremendous consequences, the full importance of their transgression.

Time finite has never yet, can never compass an expression for the infinite: it is not in man to invent a name for his Creator, upon which that Creator will set the seal of his acceptance. No more was such power in her, the mother of the living. God must first have revealed himself to Eve as Yahveh, Jehovah, the Angel of the Covenant, before she could so denominate him on whom her hopes were set.
When Eve first looked upon her man-child, her anxiety was mother of her confidence, that here was the Deliverer, and she cried, “I have borne a man, the very Jehovah.” It was the mother love and hope expressed in its most unlimited degree. Mothers even yet have immense hope, and reach immense disappointment.
We cannot be shocked at Eve’s language or expectation when we feel how her knowledge of time was limited, as well as her knowledge of the degree in which humanity was to have part in the person of the Mediator. Her language holds a subjective truthfulness, and the strong light of her hope. The bitter, the terrible disappointment of our first parents in this their son was a sharp portion of their ordained punishment.

But there was no immediate awakening to the truth.

On the birth of Abel we find our first mother in a different frame of mind. She calls him not the very God, but the perishable! Abel.

Whether by this time the slow physical development, the weakness, or the traces of human depravity in her eldest—born had discouraged her; whether she named her second son perishable, because she esteemed him without the divine element of his brother; or whether, having been possessed of the Coming One, she thought no other worthy of her rejoicing.

We cannot tell; but we know that here, as elsewhere, God chose the weak things to confound the mighty, and the despised to put to nought the pride of men.

There is no doubt that the mother’s idea of her two sons entered largely into their training. God can make use of every foolishness of human nature to further his own designs, and in these brothers he was to set forth a lesson for all coming years.

The primary duty which God assigns a married pair is the training of their children. It is evident that this is the first affair of their lives, because of all their possessions to which they can put their hands the children are immortal, and their training is work of weal or woe for eternity. Now-a-days we find the cares of business, the laws of custom, the diversions of fashion, putting the education of the children out of its legitimate pre-eminence. Adam and Eve had no such cares and customs, and we doubt not that they gave themselves ardently to the culture of the first children of the race.

Here, too, often we are treated to low views of the mental, moral, and religious standing of the first household. Forgetting that the race, like the stream and the Church, is purest nearest its source, the scholar no less than the homilist has frequently given currency to opinions which are as opposed to the laws of our nature as they are contrary to the direct teachings, or the legitimate inferences of Scripture.

Equally doubtful have been our estimates of their means of instruction. Theirs were the halcyon days of humanity, and they themselves, regarded in the light of their early promise, and their unrivalled advantages, its brightest flowers.
How then shall we account for the character of Cain? What was the antecedent preparation which, despite so many and great restraining influences, culminated in the ruin of the hopes and peace of the first family?
We have spoken of maternal disappointments; and we opine that Adam and Eve, like many other parents, worked out much of the destruction of their own hopes. We frequently see parents, by taking no means or the wrong means to secure the fulfillment of their high aims, coming short altogether, and breaking their hearts over their broken dreams!

In explication of this, we must turn to Cain’s supposed mission and the central idea of his earliest education. In this study we may find perhaps that Cain, like Jacob and some other sons, received more from his mother than her blessing.
The sorrows of their earthly exile, and the bitter sense of high offending against their God, filled, the lives of Adam and his wife with the cry, caught up by Paul, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” and stung them to put the most generous interpretation upon the one promise given for their consolation. Thus they assigned Cain his mission, in their eagerness running before the face of Providence. Thus think Luther, Philippi, Tayler Lewis, Lange, Edwards, and many others.

When the sons grew to manhood, to Cain were given the privileges of birthright. He, as the eldest born, was the legitimate proprietor of the earth, and took his father’s earliest avocation, the tilling of the ground. He was also trained in expectancy of the religious headship; and the worship of the Lord was the occasion of the real unfolding of his character.

“ It is very probable,” says Edwards, “that sacrifice was instituted immediately after God revealed the covenant of grace as the foundation on which the custom of sacrificing was built. That promise was the first stone laid towards this glorious building, the work of redemption; and the next stone was the institution of sacrifices, to be the type of the great sacrifice.”

Now upon Cain, as the future head of the family, the priesthood would devolve; he should lead the worship of the household of earth in this divinely appointed way. The position in itself was sufficient to keep a man humble, reminding him constantly of his sin and the sin-offering; but if his over-eager parents taught him that he was the foreordained seed, to bruise the serpent’s head, and regain Paradise; if he looked on himself as the strong intercessor, whose arm should bring salvation to his parents and his brother, here was a false idea, sufficient to insure his ruin and the double disappointment of parental wishes.
However great the religions privileges of Cain—and they were incalculable—however grand his mental superiority, yet continuous training in his parents’ belief that he was the Promised One, and its logical sequence of personal holiness and infallibility, would pervert the highest gifts, and press the rarest attainments into the service of bigotry.

Whenever Adam, “God’s long-loved husbandman,” talked of his fair, lost garden; whenever the mother of men grew discouraged with her strange lot, fugitive from Paradise, and in melancholy was

“like a spirit strayed who lost the way,
Too venturesome among time farther stars,
And hardly cares, because it hardly hopes,
To find the way to Heaven:”

would be suggested to their son his high destiny as their restorer and avenger. The loftiest aspirations, the most soul-subduing anticipations, the richest faith and piety left to humanity, would be thins perverted to minister to the egoism of Cain.

Theudas, Mahomet, Pius IX., and a host of others have risen to the summits of fanaticism with far less claim to a heavenly mission than Cain could show.

Taught in the spirit of his mother’s words, and viewing his mission in the full sense and solemnity with which they announced it to him, there could be no limit to the prerogatives which in time he would arrogate to himself. To him would of right belong the pre-eminence by a law of heaven.

Supremacy in morals and in religion, with full authority to regulate and protect their interests, has ever been the slogan of fanatics. To guide and guard his family in the worship of God, gain his favor, claim and secure the honors of a Deliverer, as projected by poor human reason, and seen in the light of his own fancy, was very probably the fatal ambition of Cain.

Parents often come to realize the fallacy of some cherished idea; and bitterly to lament some error in their conduct to and training of their children, so late that an uncontrollable impetus has sent those children on a course of evil doing. Long after the parent has bemoaned his folly or his crime, he is forced to harvest its bitter increase; he awakes to truth while his child is blinded still; the beloved son is the victim of his father’s short-comings, and revenges it upon that father’s head.

As Cain grew to manhood, Adam and Eve, who carried golden memories of hours when God walked with them, who knew what the veiled glory of Deity was like, found in their son only humanity without divinity! Lo, he was like their fallen and fallacious selves; there may have been no overt act of wrong, but they who had held communion with spirits from on high saw that their son possessed the taint of the transgression that had lost them Paradise; he was not like God, who had questioned and condemned them, and even while condemning had consoled! He was not like the angels, bright servants of his will; he was not even like themselves when they dwelt in Eden.

But while they awoke to a realization of this truth, their son grew more confirmed in misbelief.

Meanwhile Abel, the younger brother, was proving that human nature thrives best in lowliest places. He had not been taught to trust in himself; faith had been time lesson of his infancy, and faith reaching past his elder brother, took hold on God. His mother had called him “a vapor,” “vanity,” “a breath.” His name, instead of crowning him with glory, like that of his elder brother, told of the shortness of his life, the insufficiency of his strength, or the fact that for him, younger brother of the all-sufficent deliverer, was reserved no mission upon earth. His name, however, did not rob him of his immortality; vanity as he was, he should endure forever, and he reached after his eternal home, and rested his love upon the Everlasting Father. Abel, the vapor, drawn up to heaven as the dew is exhaled by the sun, comes again like that dew descending to bless the ages with the record of his faith and his acceptance.

Excluded from the hope of personal honor, as expected by his brother, and which formed in that primitive society the only object of ambition; with a mind left singularly free to follow the teachings and worship of the True Deliverer, wandering alone with his sheep, with no care or prospect to drive from his mind the legends of Eden, the converse of the King of kings, and the promise of the blessing yet to be, there fell to the lot of Abel the happiest encouragements to faith and humility.

Thus far back on the very verge of human history stand two grandly representative men—types ever after of our own race in all that is dark and conflicting and holy and peaceful. Educated and inspired by sights and sounds which will probably never be repeated short of millennial days, they lived and moved and died, and dying left a personal contrast so sharp and conspicuous that it is marvellous that all the world under its influence has not been saved from that religious intolerance before whose door lies the blood of righteous men that has flowed from Abel to the present, a dark stream “crying unto God from the ground.”

To these two brothers belonged traditions undimmed by time, and unequalled since the morning stars sang together, of their ancestral Paradise, with its bright river, whence flowed four royal streams in beds of gold and gems. There were fruits and flowers of which Hesperides is but a faintly remembered dream; pleasures were there which never pulled upon the senses; conscience unchallenged, and singing sweetly in the bosom, and above all, and including all, as the atmosphere in which we live amid move, the benedictions of the Father, in his gifts and in his presence.

These memories of their forfeited home, together with the cause and incidents of their exile, and the promise and means of restoration, formed a staple of instruction, which others of earth’s children, however favored, have never known. Obviously, we must consider their character in the light of their singular parental training, and their ineffable surroundings.

We are apt to misjudge the character of Eve’s first-born in the light of subsequent events. We see him a murderer, a fratricide; the obstinate rebel who will not yield when God stoops to reason with him; who does not feel penitence; who is merely in horror of consequences when his sin has found him out. We regard him with anger or disgust, we condemn him from the beginning, and neglect to see that if Cain had lived in the present day he would have doubtless been, until the direful moment of his fall, “a fair and flourishing” professor of religion.

Until the day when, in fierce wrath, Cain slew his brother, he had had no great temptation, and had consequently been guilty of no great sin. In his own way he was a religious man he had a zeal for God, he had made up his own mind why and how God ought to be worshipped, and he was ready to prescribe rules for men in their service, and for Deity in his acceptance. We hold Cain the very prince and exponent of moralists. In his soul lay, planted maybe by paternal hands, the root of self-righteousness, which should flower into deadly poison; but its leafage was goodly to the eye; Cain was the industrious cultivator of the earth, the precisian in worship, the self-constituted example for succeeding generations. God, recognising Cain’s lofty position as a landmark of the ages, took the most efficient and summary means to show how poor a thing is self-righteousness, how cruel, unholy, and heaven-condemned that intolerant religion of the letter that would force all mankind to its own measure; and how frail is that morality that is not established upon divine grace.

God had already set forth the grand principle that without shedding of blood is no remission of sins. There has been suggested the fanciful idea that Abel killed the firstlings of his flock, that wearing their skins for his covering line might typify himself as clothed upon with the righteousness of his Mediator; but this is aside from the present theme. Doubtless the dead lamb showed forth death as the necessary and unavoidable consequence of sin; the flowing blood showed that, whereby sin can alone be washed away; the innocent victim proclaimed that the sinless might and would die for the guilty. Abel laying his hand upon the lamb to slay it, laid in spirit his sins upon the Lamb of God: from time immemorial we find the lamb the ordained sin-offering, and with such sin-offering, Abel, the sinner, came up before the presence of his Maker.

But how came Cain?

He came with an offering which God afterwards not only permitted, but commanded to be brought to his altar; but Cain brought it in an order of his own. Cain brought the fruit of the ground, a thank-offering—but he brought it first, and brought it only.

Now a thank-offering is well-pleasing unto God, provided it be preceded by a sin-offering. Our soul should bless the Lord for all his benefits; but the benefits must be recognized as flowing to us through the grace of Jesus, our Saviour, our Sin-offering.

Cain had, as he considered it, no sins to be done away.

At first, as he offered no opposition to his brother’s form, and had doubtless seen it used before, he may have felt perfectly willing to have his parents and his brother recognize themselves as sinners, and shed blood as a token of their guilt, need, and self-abnegation. Or, Cain may have arrogated to himself the right of decision as to the mode of worship, and have concluded that its end was thanks rather than petition; that the unbloody offering was less cruel, and every way more excellent than the bloody; and that man was to be his own judge as to what he should bring before his God.

Here, then, the two brothers appeared before the faming Sword-symbol between the cherubim keeping the way of the tree of life, to have the guiding principles of their hearts tested by their Maker. They are the models and leaders of all who have worshipped before God, from that day until the present. Christ describes their exact counterparts four thousand years later: “Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, the other a Publican. And the Pharisee stood, and prayed thus with himself: Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other men are.” Here is the thank-offering, here is Cain. “And the Publican, standing afar off, would not so much as lift his eyes up to heaven, but stood and smote upon his breast, saying, Lord, be merciful to me a sinner!” Here is the spirit of Abel, and the desires for a sin-offering.

The Scripture does not delay, in the very opening of its momentous records, to furnish us circumstantially a mere murder case, such as newspapers are rife with. No, it throws, of high design, into tragic prominence the two representative types of society, intolerant bigotry, and humble faith; and we see in this early record, what history in all ages continues to teach us, and what Christ plainly set forth in speech—the inexorable certainty with which religious opinions bring the sword, whenever these opinions have asserted control over nations or individuals. The conflict between Cain and Abel was one of religious conviction; it was a kind of prophecy, a precursor of what must ever be earth’s bitterest chastisement until the end of this dispensation.
“ And God had respect unto Abel and his offering,”—therefore the offering of Abel was no human invention, nor had it a finite signification; it was evidently of Divine prescription. The true worship of God can have no human origin; to be acceptable it must be appointed by God himself. “Oh, that I knew where I might find him! How much less shall I answer him, and choose out my words to reason with him,”—is the cry of our humanity.

Man could no more invent his way of access to God, than he could invent the rainbow, or the law of gravitation. “But unto Cain and his offering he had not respect.” The fruit-offering was made in a wrong time and spirit. Cain came before the Lord to offer thanks, when he should have brought repentance; or, at best, he came to consecrate himself and his valuable services— supposing, like many another, that hereby he did his Creator great honor—when he should have looked to the Mediator, and craved an atonement.
To this offering God had not respect. We know not how the Divine choice manifested itself, whether in fire descending, in the blazing of the cherubim-guarded sword; whether by the ineffable smile of the Highest, or a voice speaking to the worshippers. However it was, the election was made, and Cain, called his mother’s joyous possession, had lost his birthright and high prerogative. Through self-righteousness his sin had been made to show forth; through self-confidence he lost his lofty estate. Thus goes the history of the world, and thus often the blessing of the first-horn becomes his greatest curse; if high honor is not girt about with humility, if loftiness is not twined to lowliness, the normal blessing is transformed to the prerogative of guilt and wretchedness.

And Cain was very wroth. There had been a devil couchant, unnoticed heretofore in his spiritual coat of arms; in a twinkling it became a devil rampant and domineered over Cain. And now we catch a trace of something hereditary. Envy reached up and overshadowed the whole heart of Cain. We have here a trait similar to that of Eve.

“So when deceived,
She fell by great desire to rise.”
Or as Milton represents her, as self-communing, thus:
“In plain then, what forbids he but to know,
Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise?
Such prohibitions bind not.”

The “Book of Wisdom” in the Apocrypha, declares that the first motive of the first sin was envy. The first sin of man came from a demoniacal temptation, and manifestly behind that lay some early demoniacal sin. This does not explain the essential origin of sin, nor how it could arise in the spirit world; but it lays bare its genesis among men; Satan envies against the Highest; he also envies unfallen man, and plots his ruin; and the means to his end is to instill in the heart of Eve envy of the knowledge of the gods. “Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat of the tree? ... For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened; and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

Envy is the root of ambition. Eve envied the knowledge she had not, and from this root sprung up ambition, to be as the gods knowing good and evil; from this stem of ambition unfolded the leaf and deadly fruit of her disobedience and its train of ills.

“Her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat!
Earth felt the wound; and nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.”

Terrible was her punishment: the loss of the Eden-home, the sharpness of the curse, but not the lightest part of it, was to see developed in her son in tenfold strength, her own envy and ambition!

Every race of man retains the story of our first parent’s loss. The Zendavesta tells of Ahiram bringing death to Rajomord, and adds the story of Meschia and Meschiane; the Scandinavians have the fall of Asen, and the death of Baldur, the beautiful; the Greeks embalm the same memory in the legends of Prometheus, and the age of god. Egypt, Ethiopia, China, and Mexico, have traces of our heritage and its loss; but sweet and simple, clear and grand in its ungarnished truthfulness, stands the revelation of the genesis of sin, and its close successor the genesis of religious intolerance.

The third chapter of the first book in the Bible gives the architype of the one, the fourth chapter follows with the form of the other. Cain assumes something for himself which God never gave him—the right to dictate the manner in which his Creator should be approached in worship. Cain has no heart worship, but he brings a ritual of his own, and leaving out that which God particularly demands, sorrow for sin, and desire for forgiveness; he insists upon acceptance. God bends to reason with the work of his hands!

“ Why art thou wroth,” demands the Lord, seeing the face of Cain blackened and bowed down, because of his fierce ambition to be first, and his envy against tine younger brother so strangely preferred before him.

Nor does the Almighty fail to point out the reason of his rejection of Cain. He has not done well. He has ordained his own way, without taking counsel of God. But now that he has done ill, God tells him there is yet a way of escape, i. e. by a Sin-offering, by such an offering as Abel had brought, holding in itself an intimation of the Redeemer’s blood, setting forth in type the essentials of salvation, atonement by life blood!

Cain’s poor offering lay alone, unpresentable, unacceptable, holding no intimation of his lost estate and the way of restoration—a religion without Jehovah, the Covenant Angel! A religion beginning and ending in thankfulness! But thankfulness must come after self-abnegation, after penitent faith. The view God took of that fruit-offering on Cain’s altar was, “this ought ye to have done, but not to leave the other undone!”

True Christian thankfulness, the thankfulness accepted of God, is grounded upon a right appreciation of the person and work of Jesus Christ.
God continues his argument on this wise: “It is true you have held yourself as the future head of this human family; the birth-right is yours, but it is no sinecure; you forfeit it by marking out your own way and worship, and asserting your holiness in the presence of the Holy One. Do you wish to regain the birthright; to be accepted and preferred? Take, then, the only way; come to Me in humility with a sin-offering in your hand: lay your guilt on Him who shall come—then, and not until then, you shall be reinstated, your brother shall be your subordinate; to you shall be his desire, and thou shalt reign over him.
Here was a plain way set before Cain, he could be the ruler of the coming generation, he could reign over his brother; but at what price?

Only by ruling in humility and in the fear of God. Only by at every act of worship proclaiming himself a sinner, crying after a Christ.

The price was too heavy. The self-righteous Cain could not, would not pay it.
Instead of humility, hate rose in his heart. His immense privilege of being instructed and reasoned with by God, increased his condemnation. Thus often do men make their opportunities of salvation to be millstones about their necks!

He would not yield to his brother; he would not admit that brother’s God-given superiority; he would not brook the ever-recurring insult of seeing a sin-offering made, mutely asserting that all men are sinners. He would not escape by God’s proffered way, so he chose a way of his own; and lo, the moralist, the self-righteous one, the man who had no sin to cover, becomes a murderer!
He will not permit this religion of faith, of which Abel is the personification, to exist. This hated creed of the sinful soul saved by blood-bought grace, by that only, shall not endure. Cain will blot it out; he will strike from his path this man, brother though he is, who dares believe and worship in a way different from his own.

It was no new thing that Christ told his disciples, “I come not to send peace on earth, but a sword.” For the first Christ-promise to the first family woke the deadly feud, and wet the ground with brother’s blood.

This was the first war, and it was a religious war. True, there was but one engaged on a side, but that took two-thirds of the men on the face of the earth; judged by this comparison, it was a very great war indeed. It also continued until one side—and that the right one—was completely blotted from existence.

Cain may have considered that in this achievement he had gotten the better of God, in having destroyed his favored worshipper.

The result was only to show that all power, all resources, are in the keeping of the Eternal One, and that his cause can never perish. The voice of Abel’s blood cried to God from the ground. God might have revivified that gory corpse. In place of that, he raised up another seed to Adam, instead of Abel whom Cain slew: Seth the righteous, a man in the spirit and power of Abel.
From Abel began the noble army of martyrs. His death which appeared a defeat, was the inception of victory. The beginning of Old Testament history is marked by the death of Abel for his faith; the New Testament shows us the bloody deed—its counterpart, in a more awful form—the murder of Jesus the God-man; thence flows the purple tide of martyr blood across the earth, but hike the Danube strewn with the ashes of Huss, it carries life wherever it goes! Every drop of this blood is seed of the Church.

Out of this strife between brothers before the altar of God, in the land where the sword of the Lord glowed between the cherubim, have come the motive and the coloring of all the wars in the world’s history.

The altar, the centre of faith and pious act, from that hour became the centre of the terrible and the destructive, for it is the religious idea that in some shape or another is the motive power of humanity, in even its worst developments.
In the wars of the present day, religion is more an impelling principle than is generally thought; unwind the twisted threads of national ambition and political intrigue, and among them, perhaps strongest of all, if most hidden, we shall find the religious idea.

The more clearly Cain has his wrong set before him, the more obdurate does he become; the moralist having the saving efficacy of his morality questioned, changes in an instant to the fanatic Here is a right creed, and a wrong creed; and it is at once apparent that they cannot exist in peace together.

It is also noteworthy that the aggression is from the side, from the creed, that is in the wrong.

Christ did not say he came “to bring not peace but a sword,” because his followers should push their doctrines by the sword. But because evil cannot permit truth to flourish unassailed at its side. Error demands all the world as the legitimate territory of its growth, and attacks with the sword the Christ-kingdom where-ever it lifts up its head.

But though religious wars are horrible evils in themselves, they are not necessarily evils in their results. There are some plants that grow into best strength and beauty by being thoroughly well pruned, and we find the church striking deep its roots, spreading and establishing itself under the very influence of religious persecution. Thus God turns the wrath of men unto his own high praise.

“ It must needs be that offences come, but woe unto that man by whom the offence cometh!”

When Cain was wroth his countenance fell. God set his mark on Cain. There has been much discussion as to what this mark was. When Cain was angry his lowering brow, and features deprived of the inner light of peace and hope, revealed his earth-born passion. When he slew his brother, darker grew the traces of his misery and sin. Sin writes its history on the human face; it wrote its painful and pitiful lines upon the countenance-fallen Cain.

“From thy face shall I be hid!” cries Cain, feeling his birthright and his celestial inheritance lost forever.

He wanders forth from the Eden-land, but not alone; for while his mother rejects him as the destroyer of her hopes, and the murderer of her son, his wife cleaves to him and shares his hopeless exile.

Cain and Abel were not men merely for the age in which they lived, they were the grand exponential religionists who appear in every generation. Abel is the man who can give up father, mother, brother, life, everything, for his faith; who seals his belief with his blood, and dying rises into higher being. He is the heroic spirit which shall never perish, which lives in many ages, when it is not called into extreme action. There are men who could and would die for conscience sake, who are not ordained to do so; but when occasion demands men to suffer to the bitter end for a principle, there are men ready to meet the emergency; just as when Elijah thought the fear of the Lord lost, and lo, there were seven thousand hero souls in Israel who had not bowed the knee to Baal.

Cain is the relentless bigot, who shall assert himself until the end of time. He is the man who lays down a pattern of his own, and is resolved to cut all men to fit it. He considers every variation from his own standard an aspersion cast upon his judgment, and a doubt of his future safety.

In the present day the spirit of Cain may be by strong measures repressed for a time, but it is neither dead nor asleep, it is biding its opportunity. Though the Cain spirit may not now have the power and the daring to develop as it did when the valleys of Piedmont were full of corpses; when blood flowed over the Netherlands like the food the hardy Hollanders let in from the sea; when Philpot and Latimer were led to the stake; when Bartholomew’s Massacre appealed to Heaven for vengeance; or when it pursued men like wild beasts in the fastnesses of Scotland; it is still ubiquitous, and shall live until the Son of Man comes in his glory.

In the study of men and times we must ever estimate this spirit of religious intolerance, this dominant, autocratic spirit of creed and form, at what it is worth, as a leading idea, and a tremendous power in society.

The Bible takes up great themes and questions in their order. Creation is the first grand fact before us, and it is explained as far as need be. Sin, in its cause, its effect and its antidote, is handled next; and, third theme, comes the rise, the development and the animus of religious intolerance. It is set before us as something ever to be met, to be endured; to serve us, as we may wrest from it the sharp, sure means of arriving at a purer devotion, a loftier faith, a more abundant reward.

Differences in sect may be needful and beneficial to our motley-minded human race; these can exist without the bigotry that would force our creed upon our brother, whether he will or no. The diverse sects may cordially unite in the evangelization of the world; in philanthropic work, in deeds beautiful in the sight of Heaven, the succor of the weak and poor.

“For one in generous thought and deed,
What mattered in the sufferer’s sight
The Quaker matron’s inward light,
The Doctor’s mail of Calvin’s creed?
All hearts confessed the saints elect
Who, twain in faith, in love agree,
And melt not in an acid sect
The Christian pearl charity!"

These fifteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis mean very much more to the student than to the casual reader of Scripture. Take the seventh verse: if here hattoth is translated not sin, but, as it doubtless may be, sin-offering, we get a new light and interest at once. “Sin lieth at the door,” like a wild beast ready to spring; this is the idea of many excellent commentators, and indeed is the gist of our common version of the clause. Then the latter portion of the verse refers to sin, and here is a wonderful diversity of opinion. “Unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt reign over him.”

But read hattoth “a Sin-offering.” Then we have the passage running thus: “a Sin-offering lieth at the door,” that is, “a remedy is at your door; in your reach; the Sin-offering, a vicarious sacrifice provided by God, pregnant with prophetic meaning; the revelation of the “Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” Here is a method to set Cain at one with his Maker; it is his acknowledgment of soul guilt, and living faith in the Coming One. Now if he accepts that Sin-offering he regains his birthright, and has what he claims, supremacy over his brother. By serving God, in God’s way with a Sin-offering, Cain becomes spiritual head of the family. “Unto Cain shall be Abel’s desire, and Cain shall rule over him”—the same expression which we have in Chap. 3: 16; and this meets the idea of Cain, and his grand cause of provocation. Read Sin-offering instead of “sin” and we have God preaching a full gospel to Cain; giving him great light, and every opportunity of restoration. But if we read merely “sin,” we have God uttering a mere truism, and talking aimlessly with Cain, without suggesting any remedy in his direful exigency.