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seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel." The serpent guilefully assumed to be your friend. I tear off his mask and expose him in his true nature; I ordain eternal enmity between serpent and woman, and pre-eminently between the serpent's seedthe children of the devil-and the great, distinguished Personage known as "the seed of the woman. This enmity underlies the mighty conflict of the agesChrist and Satan each leading on his host to battle and no peace or even truce arresting hostilities till the victory of the King of Kings shall be complete and ineffably glorious. Thus the first relation between serpent and woman-that of assumed but treacherous friendship-develops into everlasting enmity-God, her real friend, becoming in the person of his incarnate Son, born of woman-her champion and the mighty antagonist of Satan and all his offspring. Here and thus mercy breaks in upon this scene of sin and ruin, and God begins the wonderful process of making the wrath of Satan the occasion of his own infinite glory. The words which put so tersely the result of this great conflict take their shape and borrow their drapery from the guise under which Satan here appears that of the crawling serpent. He shall wound the heel of his opponent-the natural place for the serpent's bite; but his own head bruised and crushed, shall end the fight. -This first promise of God to our fallen race sweeps the eye over the whole vast field of moral conflict between Christ and Satan, and testifies of glorious victory over Satan as the sublime result. It was inexpressibly kind in the Lord to bring in these gleams of light and hope upon the trembling souls of the first sinning pair before he proceeded to speak of the specific forms of suffering that must righteously come upon them and their offspring as the testimony of God's displeasure against sin. Having said this, he proceeds to the curse upon woman-sorrow in the birth of offspring; and the curse upon man-toil and struggle for subsistence on a soil prolific in noxious growths and demanding labor as a condition of fruitfulness.

Yet let the minor points of this scene sink into the shade in the presence of the sublime glory of the great first promise. In the light of this we see that though Satan plotted the ruin of the race, yet God counter

plotted the ruin of Satan and the salvation of the masses of mankind. When it might have seemed that all was lost, it proved that this extremity was God's great opportunity, for his strong arm was made bare for help and real victory. This is the birth-hour of most momentous issues. Sin came in upon Eden and upon earth; and many a bitter sorrow, many a cup of suffering and woe, must needs follow in its train; but Redemption comes in also; it enters upon its co-ordinate work to save the soul from sin and from eternal death and to bring in everlasting righteousness. The history of our world in its most vital aspects is foreshadowed here in this first short meeting of their Maker with this sinning pair. The spoken recorded words were few, but their significance was momentous; the sweep of their bearing, the issues of the divine policy here indicated, were destined to fill up the ages of time with stirring and strange conflict, and to send their influence down through the endless ages of man's being and of God's kingdom.

CHAPTER VII.

FROM THE FALL TO THE FLOOD.

1. Notes on special passages.

In Gen 4: 1 our English version stands-"I have gotten a man from the Lord." Some critics construe these words of Eve to mean-By the help or blessing of the Lord; but the more direct and obvious sense of the original is this: "I have gotten a man, the Lord". as if she assumed that this, her first-born son, was really the promised divine "seed of the woman who was to bruise the serpent's head. The current objection to this construction is that it is too far in advance of Eve's theology :-to which however the obvious reply is-Who knows how far advanced Eve's theology may have been? Her imagination may have outrun the actual revelation at that point made. All we can say is that these words are recorded as indicating her thought, and that this is the most natural sense of her words.

In the Lord's expostulation with Cain (4: 6, 7) we read: "If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?" but better-Would there not be an elevation-i. e. of countenance, a cheerful looking up, instead of that fallen, sullen look spoken of in the previous verse. "And if thou doest not well, sin lies crouching at the door”—sin being personified and thought of as some animal, perhaps the serpent, ready to allure him on to deeper, more damning crime: "And its (not his) desire is toward thee"-its Satanic purpose is to ensnare and ruin thee: "but thou shouldst rule over it”. in the sense of mastering its temptations, commanding them down and ruling them out from thine heart.

The speech or rather song of Lamech to his two wives (4: 23, 24) must be assumed to have a close connection with the occupation and skill of Tubal-Cain, "a workman in brass and iron." Consciously strong and boldly overbearing in view of this new invention and production of death-weapons, he proudly sings: "I have

slain (or could slay) a man for wounding me-a young man-for any hurt inflicted upon me; and" (there being in this case some real provocation; Cain had none) "if Cain would be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and seven." The lenity shown to Cain was bringing forth its fruits; the invention of improved death-weapons was also contributing to fill the earth with bloody violence. These little facts indicate the state of society which culminated in so filling the earth with violence that God was compelled to wash out its blood-stains and its degenerate race with the flood.

2. Abel's offering, and the origin of sacrifices.

Abel kept sheep; Cain tilled the ground. "In process of time" (Heb. "at the end of days")-the stated time for worshiping God with offerings-Cain "brought of the fruit of the ground"-an unbloody offering: Abel "brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat." The reference to their "fat" proves that these animals, lambs of the fold, were slain in sacrifice.- -The record informs us that God looked with favor upon Abel's offering, but not upon Cain's. It does not concern us to know how God signified his approval of Abel's sacrifice, whether by fire from heaven consuming it, or otherwise; but it does concern us to ascertain if we can why he approved it.

We have some rays of light on this point from the writer to the Hebrews who says: "By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts." Now the simplest idea of faith, the one element always present in it, is bowing to God's authority with implicit confidence in his word. But in this case bowing to God's authority implies that God had given some word in reference to bloody sacrifices-the offering of a lamb by shedding its blood upon the altar. And if God had given any such word of command, it is certainly to be presumed that he had also given at least this general idea, that the blood of the innocent lamb took, in some sense, the place of the blood of the guilty offerer, so that the sacrifice would imply the confession of guilt, and also faith in a bloody substitute of the Lord's own providing.-Prosecuting our investigations we find this broad fact of history bearing on the

case, viz. that Noah, Abraham and Isaac built altars wherever they were sojourning and offered bloody sacrifices thereon. Further, God directed Noah to preserve in the ark clean animals by sevens, but animals not clean only in pairs-two of a species-a fact which can not be reasonably accounted for save with reference to their customary use in sacrifice. We have then before us the well-established fact of the early custom of bloody animal sacrifices.

How came this custom into existence?

It did not originate with men-certainly not with good men. Apart from divine suggestion, they could not have supposed that the slaughter of an innocent animal would be pleasing to God. The presumption would be utterly against this. They could not have thought out the divine idea of atonement for sin by the death of Christ, God's own incarnate Son: the very supposition is absurd, for it supposes that men were able to sound the infinite depths of God's wisdom and of his love, and to grasp the relations and bearings of his vast moral government with a reach of thought, not human but divine. Yet further; it is not supposable that, having excogitated and discovered the grand idea of atonement, they could have devised the plan of prefiguring this atonement by the bloody sacrifice of the most innocent, harmless and lovely of the animal races. And further, if they could have thought out this miracle of God's wisdom and love-both the divine idea of atonement, and the expediency of illustrating it for ages by a foreshadowing system of bloody sacrifices-it would still have been the height of presumption in them to have started this system of sacrifices without God's special and sanctioning appointment.

We are therefore shut up to this alternative: Either · the whole system of altars and bloody sacrifices, as practiced by Abel, Noah, Abraham and Isaac, was an unmeaning farce-a thing of no significance, a mere amusement or fancy, meaning nothing and good for nothing; or, God himself originated the system and enjoined it, and these good men were observing it in obedience to special revelation from God.Here it will be readily seen that the first side of this alternative is perfectly precluded by the fact that God approved their