of blessing is dissolved, and the opposite state, is that of being cursed: for, as it was said, all cursing comes to men through the entering in of evil, which faith alone cannot prevent. That man may be in such a faith, and yet in a state of condemnation, is plain, from its being written, "The devils believe, and tremble." (James ii. 19.) It is a fearful state, to know what is right, and do it not. The Lord has thus described it: "Every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it." (Matt. vii. 26, 27.)

But the nature of the curse which befel Cain, is more particularly described, by its being said to him, "When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength: a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” (Gen. iv. 12.) Adam was told that the ground was cursed, and would bring forth thorns and thistles: and now, Cain was informed, that it should not yield her strength. Every one who will reflect, must see that the statement is not intended to express any hindrance to the natural prolification of the land; and also, that something of a spiritual character must be meant. Natural laws and spiritual laws operate distinctly from each other. The spiritual laws by which a man becomes good, and the natural laws by which his land becomes productive, are of two different kinds. There may be an analogy between them, but they are not dependent on each other for their effects. It is a natural law, that if the earth be tilled, it will produce its increase, whether the man who tilled it be good or bad. The good man's garden will not grow him fruits, if he be inattentive to the natural laws of production. The bad man's ground is not barren, if he duly attend to the requirements of the soil. It is plain, then, the statement made to Cain, namely, "When thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength," is designed to announce, not a physical result, but a consequence of the action of some spiritual law. What this is, will presently appear.

It will be remembered, that in a former chapter, it was shown that the ground was an emblem of the natural state, or mind, of the celestial man; and also, that his fall consisted in his descent from his celestial condition into that natural state, or mind, again; and thereby, carrying into it the seeds of transgression. It then

CAIN TILLING THE GROUND.

187

became his work to till this ground, which denoted, the rooting up, by means of repentance, the weeds and briers, the thorns and thistles, of transgressive life, and the cultivation of the natural mind, for the reception of the seeds of truth and goodness. But this important duty, by which it was intended to raise him out of his corruptions, had not been properly attended to. The people, it was seen, became divided into sects, and that of Cain cultivated the ground of the natural mind, so as to produce the erroneous persuasion, that faith was all that was necessary to form the religious character, and to realize religious hopes. By this, they fell into the deeper wickedness of extinguishing all spiritual good, they rose against Abel and slew him. Hence their faith became a heresy; for the faith that rejects charity, as a means of acceptance with the Lord, is not from heaven, but from fallen man. The ground of Cain was still the natural mind of the people so called; but, by the destruction of charity, it became infested with false notions, both of religion and themselves. The will having become corrupt, the understanding partook of the depravity. When men commence to love what is evil, they soon begin to think what is false. The head is soon seduced, when the heart is foul; so that heresies arise among mankind from the prevalence of evil. Men are expert in reasoning in favor of the things they love, they strive to believe what they desire. Cain's love had now become the love of self, for he had hated and destroyed his brother, and all his notions and opinions acquired a tincture from this iniquity, and thus his faith became a heresy. It was the heresy of believing, that mere knowledge and persuasion would save, which now constituted the ground of his natural mind. To till this ground, was, to cultivate this heresy but he was told, that it would not yield its strength. Providence mercifully interrupts the course of the wicked; and God designs that interruption to be a blessing, but they receive it otherwise. It disturbs their loves,—it hinders their pursuits, and so retards the progress of malignity. And is not this an actual blessing? Most certainly it is! Still, it is regarded as a misfortune and a curse, by those who are its subjects. The people, called Cain, tilled their ground, — they cultivated the heresy into which they had fallen: they were informed, that it should not yield her strength, — that it could not bring forth acceptable fruits. In other words, they were told, that the good and excellent things of heaven could not grow out of a perverted mind. We cannot gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles.

:

Religious heresies have never been productive of any good to society: it is impossible, in the nature of things, that they should; because, in such case, the ground of the natural mind, is not tilled to bring forth virtue, but to grow arguments and opinions for the maintenance of the schism. How many have quarrelled, and fought, and died, in the defence of an opinion, which time, and the advancement of knowledge, have proved to be false! How many heresies have arisen in the church, which have successively perished, with the sole exception of a name in history! Their professors tilled this heretical ground, with assiduity and zeal, but it did not improve the condition or enlarge the virtues of society: it served rather to increase their subtlety, and impart severity to their characters, and hence the heresies have passed away. This result is in agreement with the apostolic statement, "If this council, or this work, be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest, haply, ye be found to fight against God." (Acts v. 38, 39.)

The natural mind, infested with schismatical notions about religious things, howsoever it may be cultivated, does not yield its strength: falsehood and fallacy weaken its powers, and prevent it from going to those sources which furnish information. The cultivation of error, instead of yielding the intellectual strength of the mind, develops its weakness; and this, together with its nonproduction of benefits and use, brings it into merited disgrace and ruin: and in these facts, we learn in what the curse of Cain consisted. When the heresy which destroyed charity in the church began to be cultivated by itself, it was found to produce no fruits of moral and spiritual use, and to yield no strength of intellectual knowledge. Cain's water was nought and his ground was barren, so that he became “a fugitive and vagabond in the earth.” *

These things are predicated of the religious state of Cain, rather than of their physical and outer condition. A fugitive is one who runs away from the demands of duty, and a vagabond is a wanderer who has no settled habitation. The people called Cain had these two epithets applied to them, with the view of expressing the idea that they had, as to their will, ran away from the love of goodness, and that, as to their understanding, they had no settled conception of truth. The same words are applied in the

*Septuagint renders this passage, "groaning and trembling on the earth." The above, however, is the more correct expression of the original Hebrew.

historical portion of the Scriptures to other parties, with a like signification. The terms fled and wander, also denote the same ideas; which an instance will sufficiently illustrate. The prophet Isaiah, speaking "of the valley of vision," says, "All thy rulers WANDER together, they are bound by the archers: all that are found in thee are bound together which have FLED from far." (Isaiah xxii. 3.) Where, by the valley of vision, is represented the phantasy of a religion of faith without charity: the wandering of its rulers denotes the unsteady condition of its knowledges: all that were found in it, under such circumstances, are mere perversions of good, and hence they are said to have "fled from far." The Lord, and all genuine goodness, are far away from such a state. Thus Cain was called a fugitive, to denote that his affections had run away from good; and he is pronounced to be a vagabond, to signify the wandering character of his understanding in respect to truth; whence we learn, that all those who, like him, profess and cherish a religion of faith which is not grounded in charity, are pronounced to be fugitives and vagabonds in the church.

CAIN'S COMPLAINT

CHAPTER XVI.

AND APPREHENSIONS: THE MARK SET UPON
HIM FOR HIS PRESERVATION.

"The goodness and love of God have no limits or bounds, but such as his omnipotence hath and every thing that hath a possibility of partaking of the kingdom of heaven, will infallibly find a place in it."— LAW's Appeal, p. 88.

WHEN the affections of men fly away from what is good, and their thoughts are turned away from what is true, they are necessarily brought into a state in which pain must be experienced and danger apprehended. We say, this is the necessary consequence of such a procedure, because, it is a Divine law, that a sense of happiness and security springs out of the love and practice of what is wise and virtuous; and consequently, that a departure from that law, must be attended with opposite results. This was a condition, of which Cain had now become sensible, and to record it, he is said to have exclaimed, "My punishment is greater than I can bear." (Gen. iv. 13.)

Perception, which then stood in the place of that which was conscience in after-ages, was not entirely destroyed; there yet

remained some of its corrective impulses and suggestions, and these gave rise to those utterances of deep despair. Nor was the painful sensations of their present state the sole cause of their hopelessness: they had a foresight of calamity in the future, and hence Cain is described to have said unto the Lord, "I shall be driven from thy face, and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me." (Gen. iv. 14.) Such were the natural anticipations of a religious community, who were in the process of being convinced that they had extinguished the good and falsified the truth, which God had mercifully entrusted to their care and observance. It is plain, that the dread which is declared, does not relate to the fear of natural life being destroyed, but to the alarm occasioned by a perception of the danger to which spiritual life was exposed. According to the literal sense, there was only himself, with Adam, and his mother, then in existence. Who, then, was he to fear? By whom could such a deed of death be done?*

But, on the admission that there were other persons, of whose origination and existence the history does not speak, we can hardly suppose that every one of them would have been so exasperated by his iniquity, as to be ready to take upon himself the power of inflicting judicial vengeance. In our own time, the great mass of mankind shrink in dismay from such an idea. An executioner is instinctively felt to be a horrid character. This, however, is not the subject treated of: this will be very apparent after a moment's attention to the peculiar structure of the sentence which expresses the fear, namely, "Every one that findeth me, shall slay me." Now "every one "that found him could not do it; † he had but one life to lose, and this could not have been taken by every one with whom he came in contact. It is therefore evident, that the statement does not relate to the infliction of natural death, and

* In the note at page 69, is cited, the supposition on which a large number of persons may be considered as existing in the time of Cain. Those who have adopted that view, to avoid the difficulty which the literal sense of this portion of the history suggests, seem not to have observed that by such an opinion they are in collision with the apostle, who asserts, that Enoch was the seventh from Adam. Jude 13.

Cain's words may be thought to be only a general, and loose expres. sion of his fears that some one would avenge themselves upon him: but no one who considers that revelation is verbally accurate, and that every expression is significant of an appropriate idea, can reasonably adhere to such a notion.