God's own Son, you make it a cruel and repulsive rite which could hardly have been thought acceptable to a gracious, though offended, divinity. But when you consider all sacrifices as typifying that of Christ, and suppose them instituted by divine revelation, you remove all strangeness from the ordinance itself, and sufficiently explain its universal adoption.

We conclude then that Adam was not left to invent a religion for himself, when he carried with him from Paradise a prophetic notice of the seed of the woman. God probably taught him, and, through him, his family and descendants, that, until the deliverer should appear on the earth, victims must be slain, betokening consciousness that sin needed an expiation, and testifying faith in that which God had covenanted to provide. And if sacrifice were thus at first divinely appointed, the approaching God with any other offering than that of a slain animal must have been highly offensive, as indicating a determination to devise a religion, rather than conform to what had been prescribed.

It is this which appears to have been the offence of Cain. We read in the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, of an assembling of the family of Adam for purposes of religion. We are told that "Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord." But of Abel we read that he

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brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof." The oblation of Cain had no reference to

the appointed mode in which sin would be pardoned:

it was only a token of thanksgiving, an acknowledgment of God as the God of providence, by whose bounty the earth was overspread with the fruits and the flowers. But the oblation of Abel was strictly sacrificial. It was of "the firstlings of his flock,” and therefore proved him obedient to divine revelation, and aware of the necessity of a propitiation for sin. In the words which precede our text, the Apostle states that "by faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain." It would be hard to define wherein the faith was exhibited, if not in the nature of the offering. Cain, as well as Abel, displayed faith in the existence of God, and owned in Him the Creator and Preserver. But Abel alone displayed faith in an appointed expiation, conforming himself, on a principle of faith, to what had been made a fundamental article in the theology of the guilty. Thus Cain was the first Deist, the first who held that reason was sufficient for man's guidance, and that all professed revelation might be rejected as unnecessary. His was the earliest display of that haughty temper which still produces most disastrous results, which leads men to an idolatry of their own powers, and a supercilious refusal of assistance from above.

And against Deism, in this its first disciple, was the sacrifice of Abel a stern and noble declaration. It was a sacrifice, which, as procuring both the favour of God and the death of the offerer, testified that there should be no forgiveness without propitiation,

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and no righteousness without persecution. Almighty may be said to have taken the very first opportunity of showing that He will not tolerate the substitution of reason for revelation, that there is but one way in which He will grant access to the guilty, and that those who approach by that way must expect the enmity of a world, too proud for a system of suretyship, or too depraved for one of self-denial. So that, by and through his sacrifice and its consequences, was Abel the energetic preacher of the great scheme of redemption, the witness to our race, in the very infancy of its being, of a Mediator to be provided, and a Mediator to be rejected. And not only then. He sealed his testimony with his blood, but he was not silenced by death. We still We still go to his sepulchre, when we seek an eloquent and thrilling assertion of the peril of swerving from the revealed will of God. He rises up from the earth, which drank in the blood of his offering, and then of himself, and warns the self-sufficient that their own guidance can lead them to nothing but destruction. His voice comes piercingly from the remotest depths of time, attesting that he who adopts a Deistical creed has nothing to secure him against the worst crimes, but that, abandoned to the meteor which he has preferred to "the true light" from heaven, he may possibly descend, with Cain, from one enormity to another, till he sink beneath the vengeance of the being whom he may reject as a Saviour, but cannot escape as a Judge. I hear the utterances of this slaughtered

worthy. They are utterances, loud and deep, against any one amongst us, who is too philosophical for the Gospel, or too independent for a Redeemer. They denounce the rationalist who would make his theology from creation, the self-righteous who would plead his own merit, and the flatterer who would think that there may be a path to heaven, which is not a path of tribulation. They are more than the utterances of any other of the righteous, who may have been bold in the proclaiming, and firm in the suffering for truth. They are more, because Abel was the first of "the noble army of martyrs," a martyr when the world seemed too young to furnish a murderer, and when therefore, in dying, he might prove of human depravity, that it asked no time for growth, but was the giant and the infant at once. They are more, as having all the impressiveness of the earliest protest, the urgency and energy of a testimony against error in the moment of birth, the pathos and persuasiveness of a warning that rose up with evil, and exposed its malignity so soon as it had shown its existence. And if, whilst we have the history of Abel to which to refer, we shall never want convincing evidence as to the effects of the fall, or the tendencies of Deism, or the supremacy of revelation, or the identity of the patriarchal with the Christian religion, or the invariableness of persecution for righteousness' sake, then, delivering as he does, in and through the sacrifice by which his faith was displayed, a homily on points of universal interest, the

Apostle might well deny that he has been, or ever is, silent, affirming of him in the present tense, that "by it, he, being dead, yet speaketh."

And now let us consider the fact alleged in our text under the light of a recompense to Abel. The manner in which the fact is introduced, indicates, as we have already said, that it was part of the reward procured to Abel by his faith, that he should be a preacher to every generation. But that with which a righteous man is rewarded must be a real good, and, as such, may justly be sought by those who copy his righteousness. This opens before us an interesting field of inquiry. If Abel were recompensed by the being appointed, as it were, a preacher to posterity, it seems to follow that it may fitly be an object of Christian desire to do good to after-generations, and that it is not necessarily a proud and unhallowed wish, to survive dissolution, and be remembered when dead. It cannot indeed become us as Christians to make our own fame or reputation our end; but it is another question, whether Christianity afford no scope for the passion for distinction which beats so high, and prompts to so much.

And whilst we know that there is a consecrating power in Christianity, by which it lays hold on human passions and sanctifies them into instruments for good, we are not hastily to conclude that there can be no place in religion for what is called ambition. Indeed, if it were not too bold an expression, we might declare Christianity constructed for the ambi