not inflict immediate death upon the murderer, yet he may be said to have subjected him to many deaths, until it seemed good to him to cut him off from the face of the earth. The curse upon Cain was in the following words: "And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength. A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be on the earth." Cain expostulated with his Maker in regard to the intolerable burden of his guilt and misery; and seemed now to fear the face of man, dreading lest every one who found him should slay him. To satisfy him that this should not be the fact, God gave a sign to Cain; or, as it is commonly understood, impressed a mark upon him; concerning the nature of which it would be trifling even to conjecture. The miserable wretch is now driven away from the altar and house of God; and is separated from his parents, and from all his brothers and sisters, except his own. wife, who followed her worthless husband into the land of Nod: thus verifying the declaration made at the institution of marriage: "For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined to his wife, and they shall be one flesh." The same is true in regard to the woman. How many children had, during more than a century, been born unto our first parents, we have no means of knowing. It is pretty clear, however, that Abel died childless; and we may infer from what is said about appointing Seth as a seed in the place of Abel, that his parents were not easily comforted, on account of the premature and unnatural death of such a son. And if there were, besides those mentioned in the record, many other children of the original pair, it would seem that none of them were like Abel; otherwise, it would not have been necessary to raise up a child to take his place. Cain seems to have been the father of a numerous posterity; and among them were found ingenious men, who became distinguished throughout all ages as the inventors or improvers of the useful, and even of some of the fine arts. We learn from this, that God may grant worldly prosperity to man while under his curse. Probably a large portion of the inhabitants of the earth before the flood were the descendants of Cain. Their skill in the arts, so necessary to the refined comforts of human society, would give them a great influence among men. With these, the practice of having more than one wife seems first to have made its appearance. Lamech is the person to whom belongs this bad distinction; and the names of his wives were, Adah and Zillah.

SECTION IV.

SETH AND HIS POSTERITY.

No transactions of any of the children of Adam are mentioned in the brief history of Moses, except the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, and the cruel murder of the latter by his envious brother. To Seth, who was the successor of Abcl, there was born a son, in the hundred and fifth year of his age. The name of this son, from whom all the inhabitants of the earth since the deluge have descended, was Enos. Adam was one hundred and thirty years old when Seth was born. It is therefore probable that Cain and Abel were more than a hundred years of age when the latter was murdered, but no mention is made of the age of Adam at the birth of his first-born. The plan of the writer is to give the age of the father at the birth of those sons only through whom the genealogy is reckoned. Commonly, it is presumable, that these were the first-born of their respective fathers; but of this there is no certainty. Indeed, in the case of Cain, we know that the contrary was the fact. At the birth of his grandson Enos then, Adam and Eve were two hundred and thirty-five years of age. Enos was ninety years old at the birth of his son Cainan, at which time Adam had reached the age of three hundred and twenty-five years. To Cainan a son was born in the seventieth year of his age, which was in the three hundred and ninety-fifth year of Adam's life. The son of Cainan was named Mahalaleel, to whom, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, there was born a son by the name of Jared. This occurred in the four hundred and sixtieth year of the life of Adam.

Jared was one hundred and sixty-two years of age when Enoch was born, one of the most excellent and remarkable men who ever lived. He was a prophet, and a man so distinguished for piety, that at the age of three hundred and sixty-five years, he was taken to heaven without dying. This remarkable event occurred in the eight hundred and fifteenth year of Adam's life. But this holy man was married, and at the age of sixty-five had born to him Methuselah, who is the oldest man mentioned in Scripture. It was three hundred years after the birth of this son, that God took Enoch to himself. At the age of one hundred and eighty-seven years, a son was born to Methuselah called Lamech. And in the hundred and eighty-second year of Lamech's life, another very remarkable person was born, namely, Noah. From an inspection of this genealogical table, it will appear that Adam was living at the same time with Methuselah for two hundred and forty-three years, and died

only sixty-five years before the birth of Noah. It is also evident, that Adam lived a number of years after the translation. of Enoch, and was living during the whole time of his continuance upon earth. On account of the ages to which these early patriarchs lived, many generations inhabited the world at the same time. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech, (eight successive generations,) were alive together. Among these Adam would, of course, hold the chief authority. He was not only the father of the whole race, but the source of information to them all. Adam had been created in a state of perfection of all his faculties of mind and body; had conversed with his Maker, before sin had perverted his powers; and had received upon his entrance on the world such a stock of knowledge, as was absolutely neces sary in his condition. It has sometimes been inquired, whether the antediluvians had any form of civil government; to which it may be answered, with certainty, that in the beginning, the patriarchal form existed, and no other; that is, the oldest person governed when there was any necessity for authority. Adam, by his care and government of his children, would acquire such an authority over them as to constitute him their natural ruler; and his superiority to all others, in knowledge, would serve to render his influence still greater. For nearly a thousand years, this first man ruled his numerous and increasing posterity; except that Cain and his descendants appear to have formed, for a long time, a separate society, and had no connexion with the children of Seth.

SECTION V.

GREAT CORRUPTION OF MANNERS, THE CONSEQUENCE OF INTERMARRIAGES BETWEEN THE DESCENDANTS OF SETH AND THOSE OF CAIN.

BUT when the population of the earth was much increased, an intercourse by marriage took place between these two portions of mankind. "The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all that they chose." It is not said that these daughters of men were the descendants of Cain; but the supposition is by no means improbable. Cain was driven out from the face of God, that is, from the place where God made himself known. He and his family were, therefore, in a manner, expelled from the primitive church. But they had probably increased in wealth, luxury, and the arts, above the other posterity of Adam. For a long time, we may presume, it would have been deemed

impious to hold any intercourse with the murderer: but at length this distance was diminished; visits were paid from one party to the other. And the young men who belonged to the line of Seth, seeing the daughters of Cain that they were very beautiful, soon formed marriages with them. This connexion seems to have been the source of a grievous corruption of manners. God, however, continued to warn and reprove the people by his Holy Spirit, either immediately by striving with their consciences, or by raising up prophets, who were inspired of God to instruct and preach. He was, however, now almost prepared to abandon them, and to say, "My Spirit shall not always strive with man," yet he determined, in his mercy, that he would wait with them for a further period of one hundred and twenty years.

Their

That the marriages above mentioned had an intimate connexion with the corruption of manners which ensued, is expressly asserted. Of their children it is said, "The same became mighty men, which were of old, men of renown." renown, doubtless, was not for good actions, but for high-handed violence, injustice, and oppression. "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."

SECTION VI.

THE DELUGE-THE ARK.

THE Almighty now resolved that he would destroy man whom he had created, from the face of the earth; "for," speaking after the manner of men, "it repented the Lord that he had made man upon the earth." In surveying the millions who now peopled the globe, there was only one man who found favour in the eyes of the Lord. This was Noah, the son of Lamech. As has been mentioned, he was born about sixty-five years after the death of Adam, was a preacher of righteousness, and was directed to prepare an ark for the salvation of himself and family, which consisted of no more than eight souls. Accordingly, Noah set to work to cut down and prepare gopher wood, or wood of a light and resinous quality, of different kinds. This is the first specimen of a vessel for the water, of which we have any account. The dimensions of the building and its interior arrangements were divinely directed. It had a door on the side, and a window or sky-light, which was

probably on the top. How much derision and mocking the pious patriarch underwent, while engaged in erecting this edifice, may be left to conjecture. The probable size was about five hundred feet in length, eighty feet in breadth, and about fifty feet in height, which was abundantly large enough for all the purposes for which it was intended.

The ark being completed, and the season of grace and forbearance, already mentioned, having come to an end; and Noah and his three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, and their wives, having received a command to enter into the ark, took "of clean beasts by sevens, the male and the female," that is, probably, seven of each sex, "and of beasts that were not clean, two, the male and the female." If we have rightly interpreted the former passage, four of each species of unclean animals were taken in. Within seven days after Noah had entered the ark, the flood commenced. This was in the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the seventeenth day of the second month of the year. If the original year commenced about the autumnal equinox, as is commonly supposed, then the deluge began, according to the dates here given, about the first week in our November. It is not the business of the historian to account for events, but to state them accurately. This event was probably produced by a miraculous interposition; but if otherwise, no reason of man can ever do more than form conjectures, which, however plausible, can give no satisfaction to the mind in pursuit of truth. "The fountains of the great deep' are said to have "been broken up; and the windows, or cataracts of heaven were opened, and the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights." After this continual rain of forty days, the water was so increased that the ark began to float; and soon the increase of the water was so exceedingly great, "that all the high hills that were under the whole heaven. were covered;" consequently, all the animals that breathed upon the earth and air, except such as could live in the water, died. And there was a general and total destruction, not only of life, but of all the buildings which man had erected. Their cities, however populous, were swept away. The wealth of the world was buried beneath the deep. The cattle of a thousand hills were seen no more. "Noah alone remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." "And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days." If we reckon these days from the commencement of the rain, their end would be about the 20th of February: but if, which is the most probable, they begin with the time when the waters completely covered the earth, and began to raise up the ark, they will bring us to the close of April. The latter reckoning is most probable, because they mark the period in which the waters