certain relation to Jesus Christ; they must be persons, who are destined to be excluded from such an inheritance 1."

After the foregoing anticipation concerning different communities of people, from the New Testament, in which there are many such notices, we return to the early communications in the third of Genesis. We there find that, after the ensnarement of our first parents, the earth is cursed, and Satan, the intellective serpent who deceived them, is cursed also. But it nowhere appears that this strong and rebellious spirit is banished from the earth. On the contrary, God tells him that there shall be enmity between his seed and the woman's seed. This incidentally proclaims two different seeds as dwellers upon the earth, and, in corroboration of the view here taken, the very next sentence of punishment, consequent upon the fall, informs the woman that she will be subject to a multiplied conception. The words are, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." Thus sorrow precedes the conception, and also takes place upon the birth of children. Adam is alike doomed to sorrow "all the days of his life," and the same word denotes the sorrow of each. But this kind of sorrow, denounced by the same word on each, cannot mean the bodily, the exclusive pains of child-birth, because in that the man has no part. In fact, the term

1 Greswell on the Parables.

sorrow does not so properly belong to bodily pain as to mental suffering, and sorrow is the penalty inflicted alike upon both. Now, what sorrow could exceed that of Adam and Eve, if they found that, by the multiplied conception, other and baser seed would now be sharers in the newly organized world, which had been originally destined solely for themselves and their own exclusive posterity?

The intimation of good and bad seed, with enmity between them, is followed up in the very next chapter with the information, that the two firstborn male children of Adam and Eve were at such enmity, that the wicked brother slew the righteous one. This original difference between them must be apprehended, because God, who knew the inward spirits of all flesh, while he was favourable to the offering of Abel, would not accept that of Cain, before any earthly crime was attributed to him.

The distribution of good and bad seed in the flesh is often related in the Old Testament, and incontrovertibly described and illustrated by our Saviour himself in the thirteenth chapter of St. Matthew, 25th verse. “But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way 1." If this plain explanation is considered,

1 The strength of the argument here adverted to, is contained in our Saviour's own interpretation of the parable to his disciples in which he expressly states that it is really himself that sows the good seed, and that it is really Satan that sows the bad seed.

with reference to the ordination of God concerning the multiplied conception, as set forth in the third of Genesis, we shall then see a specific and probable cause for the extreme sorrow of Adam and Eve, when the multiplied conception was denounced. And to show us that the slain brother Abel was intended good seed from heaven, God himself, with the knowledge of the woman, supplied another good seed to fill up his place. "For God, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew," Genesis iv. 25. If, for a series of reasons which are yet to come, it is admitted, on the other hand, that Cain was of bad seed, the ascendency of his progeny in the world after the fall appears to be foreshown by the Deity himself, when he says to Cain, in mitigation of his avowed favour to Abel. Genesis iv. 7. "And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt RULE over him." Still, this did not assuage Cain's enmity, and, for more reasons than are explained to us, he effected the murder of his brother. And our Saviour corroboratively says, in speaking of Satan, “he was a murderer from the

V. 36. "And his disciples came unto him saying, Declare unto us the parable of the tares of the field.

V. 37. "He answered and said unto them, He that soweth the good seed is the Son of Man;

V. 38. "The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; V. 39. "The enemy that sowed them is the DEVIL; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels."

BEGINNING." If God, moreover, had not supplied another seed of the divine nature, Cain, (being the first born,) would, after the death of Abel, have become chief inheritor of this world, according to the signification of his name " ACQUISITION." But Adam and Eve, having acknowledged their beguilement by the serpent, brought up their children to sacrifice unto the Lord; and never manifesting any disposition to proceed in their disobedience, evidently became objects of divine mercy; and, in proof of this, God appointed, exclusive of Adam's common descendants, that other good seed, Seth, in whose line their redeeming Saviour was eventually to be born. This lineage, pure and especially appointed, must be considered as abhorrent of Cain's descendants, and there must be a spiritual enmity between them; while Adam's seed forms apparently a third description of the human race. And it is far from a strained inference to suppose, that, when God supplied a substitute for murdered Abel, he saw that it was requisite to be done, as a revival or perpetuation of that good seed, which Satan's device had sought to destroy, and put out of the world, as an obstacle to his own pre-eminence.

Cain was "wroth" with God, and "went from his presence" into another land, where he built a city. Can we suppose that, under such a state of guilt, wrath, and banishment from the presence of the Lord, Cain would bring up his children to " call upon his name?" When we read, therefore, Genesis,

vi. 26. "Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord," or to "call themselves by the name of the Lord," or, as others translate the passage, "then men profaned in calling themselves by the name of the Lord," do we not at once see that the last translation is the true one, and that Cain's seed here receive specifically the term of men, which when emphatically applied in Scripture, distinguishes them from those who are termed the sons of God? Thus there may have been three different and distinct seeds in the world, the children of Adam, the children of Cain, and the children of Seth. There are, however, in the sacred books only two genealogies. That of Adam includes Seth, and the sons and daughters which were born to him after Seth. No mention is made in it of Cain, and the New Testament concurs in the exclusion. His genealogy stands alone in another chapter. Cain is therefore negatively ejected, and it is naturally to be expected that his much marked, and distinctly separated progeny, will receive some specific term by which they may be described in Scripture. cordingly, in the next chapter but one, the sixth, we come upon such complete evidence concerning two different sorts of people dwelling upon the earth, that it cannot be called presumptive, but positive and incontrovertible. One community is denominated, the children of God; and the other, the children of men. The spiritual difference also between them was so great, that God forbade inter

Ac