THE BLESSEDNESS OF HEAVEN. HEAVEN A REST FROM SORROW. It is one of the most gracious promises set forth in the word of God, that there remaineth a rest for his people; a rest in heaven, purchased at a price no less costly than the blood of his incarnate Son, and reserved for all who cordially embrace the salvation revealed in the Gospel. Experience must prove, even to the worldling, that earth cannot be the place of man's final destination. Even while immersed in the business, or fascinated with the pleasures of life, he must feel that life is passing from him, and that time is hurrying on with a velocity which he cannot retard. He must be convinced, moreover, that uninterrupted and unalloyed happiness is not to be found on this side of the grave; and that the heart is often sad, and the spirit heavy laden, even when the outward appearance would lead to the supposition that all is joyous within. The apostle, indeed, fitly describes the condition of man, when he speaks of the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together until now. Sorrow, in fact, in one shape or other, is mingled in every human cup, although the draught may not in all cases be equally bitter. Man is a sinner, and consequently a sufferer: the influence of the curse denounced is still universally felt; and from exposure to suffering, man shall never be free, until, on the dissolution of the earthly house of this tabernacle, the disembodied spirit shall enter into the joy of its Lord, and the desire of the Psalmist shall be fulfilled, VOL. IV. NO. XC. PRICE 1d. "O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might flee away, and be at rest!" Sorrow may arise from a vast variety of causes. Reference is not now to be made to that most bitter root of sorrow, a deep conviction of guilt, when the arrows of God stick fast in the soul; but simply to those sources connected with man's earthly circumstances, whence so many bitter waters flow. Sorrow may arise from pain of body, from anxiety of mind, from constitutional depression of spirits, from pecuniary difficulties and losses, from the pressure of poverty, from the ingratitude. and malignity of others, from blighted hopes, thwarted expectations, and, in its most intense form, from the bereavement of those whom we have affectionately loved; and all these may be combined together, so as to render existence almost a burden. It is, in fact, impossible to enumerate the various fountains whence the streams of Marah may issue. It is not difficult, however, to know for what purpose they are permitted, namely, to withdraw the soul from the polluted streams of earthly gratification; that it may quench its thirst with that water which springeth up unto life eternal. It is well, indeed, for the believer, "troubled on every side," when he can realise this truth for his comfort, that as there is no such thing as chance or accident, but all events are under His good and gracious guidance who hath declared, "I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things;" so every afflictive dispensation is a messenger from him sent on an embassy of mercy; that it is an additional knock from that Saviour who seeks to gain admission to the heart; a fresh call to disentangle the affections from a sinful and sorrowful world, and fix them on a world of purity and joy; and that though no chastening is in itself joyous, but grievous, yet is it designed, in the counsels of Infinite Wisdom, to produce some important beneficial result. To live under this habitual impression is to enjoy a holy tranquillity of spirit and peace of mind, even under life's most afflictive dispensations. It is not to rise above the world with stoical indifference, but it is to pass through the world with an implicit trust in that Jehovah in whom "is everlasting strength.". It is not to indulge a morbid insensibility to events of an afflictive character, but it is to feel assured that "all things work together for good to them that love God." It is not to despise the chastening of a loving Father, but it is to regard that chastening as inflicted that his children may become partakers of his holiness. For such a blessed, peaceful frame of mind we ought fervently to pray it will sweeten the bitter waters; it will cause light to spring up in darkness; it will produce a calm, while all around is tempestuous; it will say to the tumultuous passions of the breast, "Peace, be still;" it will give utterance to the language of implicit resignation," The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" In addition to this holy conviction, however, that the light affliction wherewith he is tried is but for a moment, the believer is warranted to derive comfort from the gracious assurance that his sorrows must terminate with his earthly existence; that they cannot follow him into that eternal world where his conversation is now, and from whence also he looks for the Saviour, and in which God shall wipe away all tears from the eyes of his redeemed. Of the true character of the heavenly world, man, with his present limited faculties, can form no adequate conception. He is himself so weighed down with a corruptible body, that he cannot comprehend the glories of an incorruptible state. Of this, however, he is assured, that heaven will be an entire rest from sorrow in all its multifarious forms; that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed; and that every cloud will have been dispersed and every anxiety removed, in the new heavens and new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. "Blessed," said the voice from heaven, "are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them." Christian mourner, let this assurance, then, animate and cheer you in your journey through life's wilderness, that, from whatever source your trials may arise and your sorrows spring, you are rapidly progressing to a world where misery shall never enter, because sin shall not there be found. Having fled to Christ, the Saviour of sinners, and accepted his gracious invitation, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden," you have found him "a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land;" and you are warranted, amidst life's various vicissitudes, to take for your comfort the gracious promise of Jehovah, "My people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting-places; when it shall hail coming down on the forest, and the city shall be low in a low place." Say not, "The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me;" for "there hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man." Pray to be delivered from a desponding and a repining spirit; to be enabled to testify the value of Christian principles by unreserved submission to the Divine will. Let not the language of complaint proceed from your lips. You have the pledged word of the Saviour, that where He is, there shall his people be. Whatever may betide you here, nothing, you are assured, shall separate you from his love; a love vast as the universe, and boundless as eternity. Tarry, therefore, the Lord's leisure; submit with implicit resignation to his will; wait the days of your appointed time until your change come. Come it will, in God's good time. Come it may, sooner than you expect it. no. Come it must, whether you desire it or Each night you lie down, you are so much the nearer to that long night of the grave, where "the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest." Each morning that you awake, you are so much nearer the morning of a joyous resurrection; and the weary hours, as they pass heavily along, are bringing you nearer to that period when time shall be no longer, and you shall enter on the enjoyment of heaven's never-ending day. Be not dispirited; God is your friend, whoever may be your enemy. God is your portion, though destitute of earthly goods. God's reconciled countenance is beaming upon you, amidst the frowns of a faithless world. God's arm is stretched out for your defence, though your own may be feeble and paralysed. God's dwelling-place shall be your eternal home, when his ransomed "shall return and come to Zion with songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads;" when "they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." Why, then, should your soul be cast down? and why should it be disquieted within you? Hope still in God; for in heaven you shall eternally praise Him who is the health of your countenance and your God. Scripture Biography. LIFE OF CAIN. As Adam was the federal head or representative of all mankind, so in his two eldest sons seems to be represented the great distinction of mankind into saints and sinners, godly and ungodly, the children of God and the children of the wicked one. God had righteously cast our guilty parents out of paradise; but he did not "write them childless." In the midst of judgment he remembered mercy; and, as an earnest of the other blessings he had in store for them, he gave them the first blessing of increase. They were sinners, and had been made to feel the sorrow and humiliation of penitents; but God had not "forgotten to be gracious, nor shut up his loving-kindness in" final "displeasure." When Cain was born, Eve, with joy and thankfulness, said, "I have gotten a man from the Lord." It is generally understood that Eve saw, in this child, the pledge of the fulfilment of God's promise of a Seed that was to be a Deliverer from the recently inflicted curse; and that therefore she thus triumphed in him. But if she cherished great hopes of being blessed in this child, she was ere long to be undeceived by a bitter experience. We cannot but suppose that one whose character developed itselfin such unholy atrocity must have shewn early symptoms of his evil temper; and that, as a child, the outbreaks of angry violence must have been a painful earnest of worse things yet to be. The name "Abel" signifies "vanity." Whether she gave this name to the younger son from being so absorbed by her hopes in the eldest, as that any other object was at that moment "vanity," it is impossible to decide; but certainly it is a remarkable name to have been given to that one of the first two children in the world who promised the fairest, but who proved to be, as an object on which the heart could be fixed, but as vanity. How often has God “destroyed the hope of man" since that time, and established the truth of that saying, "Every man is at his best estate vanity!" (Ps. xxxix. 5). Their father gave to both these youths a calling, Even as God had given one to him in his innocency. Both employments belonged to the husbandman's calling, their father's profession; which, though it is now looked upon as a mean occupation, was then, and for ages afterwards, highly honourable. Abel's entrance on his duties is first mentioned, though he was the younger brother: this may possibly intimate that be entered first upon his calling; and if their father had exercised a discrimination of their characters, he may have influenced or guided Abel in the choice of his occupation, the keeping of sheep being more adapted to one of a pious and contemplative disposition, than Cain's more laborious duties as a "tiller of the ground." 14 Adam, and in him his descendants, had been enjoined to express their sense of their sin, of which death was the wages, and their hope of its pardon through a Redeemer, by means of the lively figure of a slaughtered animal, solemnly offered to God with prayer of confession and thanksgiving. Of the flock of sheep destined for this purpose Abel was the keeper. Cain was a tiller of the ground. The appointed day for this sacred service had come round, and Cain and Abel met to make their offerings. Abel, in all humility, brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof, and laid them on the altar, acknowledging his guilty nature, confessing his sins, and professing his hopes of forgiveness in the slaughtered victim. Cain brought only of the fruits of the ground which he tilled, thus acknowledging God as the Giver, and making a thanksgiving offering, but expressing no consciousnesss of sin, nor faith in a Redeemer. The Lord shewed his approval of the sacrifice of the first believer of all born in sin, by a manifest sign; and his aversion to the offering of the first Deist, by withholding all marks of approbation. Such preference stung the proud, rebellious heart of Cain, which, most probably, was already wounded by sundry marks of superior affection shewn to his younger brother by his earthly parents. A deadly malignity took possession of his bosom, which, as no good affection had there been fostered which could serve to quell or allay it, either expelled or turned to its account every other feeling. Preference, indeed, shewn without necessity to another by one whom we revere and love, will create, perhaps, some uneasy feeling in the best bosom; but then its unnecessary exhibition is a wanton provocation. Yet, even here, the sufferer will rather look with humility to his own deficiency, than with envy to his rival's superiority; and should the rival be unworthy, still he will patiently acquiesce in the award, satisfied with the consciousness of no inferiority, aware that partiality is inseparable from human infirmity, and determined, in every event, to overcome evil with good. But Cain was angry at the preference shewn by God, whom he had wilfully disobeyed. "Great was the forbearance and long-suffering shewn by God to this rebellious servant; but it only provoked further his stiff-necked and untameable spirit. God condescended to remonstrate with him, and asked him, when his countenance fell with the scowl of discontent upon it, 'Why art thou angry and fallen of countenance? With all things wherewith thou truly endeavourest to please me, will I not be pleased? and for those things in which thou neither hast pleased me nor canst please me, have I not provided by covenanting to accept a sin-offering? Is not this ever at hand? Why, then, was it not offered? And why be angry with thy brother? He shall still be subject to thee as younger to elder. The mark of my approbation will make no difference in this respect: I have not subjected thee to him.' "Cain listened not to God, but kept his ear exclusively open to the complaints of his own malignant spirit. Over the imaginary wrongs which it continually suggested, he brooded, until the abominable nestlings were full fledged, and their flight was immediately towards the prey. Having conceived and matured his devilish project, he asked Abel to go forth with him into the field (for, according to the Septuagint, Cain said to Abel, 'Let us go into the field'); and when he had thus drawn him to a distance from home and help, rose upon him, and slew hin. What a spectacle was then presented to the angels in heaven, as they looked down! A brother stood over the bleeding corpse of a murdered brother! Cain himself must have been exceedingly moved. For the first time he saw the death of man,-beheld a spectacle from which, at this day, our nature shrinks, although millions have already both presented and beheld it. The struggle of the last agony, the rapidly fading colour and deadly paleness, the glazed eye, and the deep parting groan; all these strange and horrible harbingers passed before his eyes, and introduced that inconceivable state which he had heard of, but never seen. To the first murderer was first revealed the form of the punishment of disobedient man it was a revelation suited to the prophet of such a school. The utter lifelessness, the very nothingness, of the brother who, a moment ago, was full of life and activity, and the sudden loneliness in which he found himself, although the body lay before him, must have been appalling, even to the heart of Cain; and all this dreadful scene had been the work of his own hand!"* Scripture Biography (Second Series). By the Rev. R. W. Evans, M.A, But "precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints;" and God, the God to whom vengeance belongeth, immediately makes inquisition for blood, and sits himself as judge. "The Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel, thy brother?" Cain is asked this question, not because God knew not his guilt, but because his former manifestations of malice towards his brother might justly make him suspected, as also because he had been last with him; but specially did God put this question to elicit a confession of his crime. To sin, however, he adds rebellion: he proves his parentage from his "father the devil," from him who was not only "a murderer from the beginning," but a 66 liar" also. He denies that he knows what has become of his brother, and unblushingly charges his Judge with folly and injustice in putting this question to him-he flies in the face of God, saying, "Am I my brother's keeper?" To this insolent reply God gives no direct answer, but declares that his own knowledge testified against him, and his justice demanded satisfaction. Murder is a crying sin- -none more so blood calls for bood-the blood of the murdered for the blood of the murderer; it cries, in the dying words of Zachariah, 2 Chron. xxiv. 22, “The Lord look upon it, and require it;" or, in the words of the souls under the altar, Rev. vi. 10, "How long, Lord, holy and true?" Jesus himself, the patient sufferer, cried for pardon for those who were the authors of his undeserved sufferings: "Father, forgive them;" but his blood cried for vengeance. Though the sufferers should hold their peace throughout, yet their blood utters a cry which pierces heaven. "What hast thou done?" said God; "the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground." It is well for us that there is a blood whose voice overpowers the loud, vindictive note of the blood of Cain's murdered brother-" the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel," Heb. xii. 24. The blood of Christ sprinkled upon the conscience is a speaking blood; it speaks to God in behalf of sinners, pleading, not as Abel's blood, for vengeance, but for mercy. It speaks to sinners, too, in God's name, pardon to their sins, peace to their souls, with the demand of obedience to Him who has "redeemed them to God by his blood." The curse pronounced upon Cain was destined to spring from that very quarter where he had chosen his portion -" from the earth." Thence the cry ascended up to God, and thence was the curse to arise. All the instruments of vengeance were at God's bidding, but he chose to make the earth the avenger of blood. If the earth give not her fruits to Cain, that which was to have been his blessing proves his curse. Accordingly, sustenance out of the earth is withheld from him: " when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength." The ground was cursed before to Adam, when its spontaneous productions were to be "thorns and thistles," its good fruits to be extorted from it by the labour of man; but it was doubly cursed to Cain-to him it should be wholly unprofitable. "Adam was sentenced to overcome the curse with the sweat of his brow, but Cain was condemned to obtain but a very imperfect reversal even with this. Adam, also, had been expelled from paradise; but Cain was expelled from the little remnant that was left of the domain of spiritual bliss. He was to be cast forth from the land of the presence of the Lord, and to be a fugitive and vagabond in the earth. On hearing this sentence, Cain expressed no acquiescence of a penitent and humbled heart; he was not even thankful that blood had not been demanded for blood-so precious in his own eyes did his intense selfishness render his own blood, so vile his brother's; but, like a hardened criminal, he remonstrated against its severity. He thought it hard, forsooth, that he, who had robbed his brother of the whole of this world, should lose any part of it himself: 'My punishment is greater than I can bear!' he cried, and complained that the sentence went farther even than its terms implied. 'It shall come to pass,' he said, ' that (vagabond and fugitive as I shall be) every one that findeth me shall slay me.' God condescended to assure him against this consequence, by saying, that whosoever slew Cain, vengeance should be taken on him sevenfold.' In addition, he set a mark upon him, to warn every one against slaying him: this, probably, gave both a more fearful and public example than his death would have done. Thus was the first murderer gibbetted alive, as it were, and sent forth a wanderer over the wide earth, with the mark of infamy upon him. As he went from land to land, he was sacred indeed from violence, but it was the manifest curse of God which made him sacred. Men loathed and avoided him; and if they gave him support, it was under the impression of doing God's will in prolonging the existence of so beneficial an example of his wrath. With unspeakable awe they beheld his horrible countenance, and, from its hideous signs of the inward working of a devilish and tortured spirit, gathered the misery of the man, and the abandonment of God." Cain, being now the rejected of heaven, "went out from the presence of the Lord;" and we never find that he came into it again to his comfort. He forsook Adam's family and altar, and cast off all pretensions to the fear of God: he suffered a perpetual banishment from the Fountain of all good. He went and "dwelt on the east of Eden," somewhere distant from the place where Adam and his religious family resided. It was on the east of Eden that the cherubim were with the flaming sword; and it might be that he fixed his dwelling here as if to confront those "terrors of the Lord." The land he dwelt in was "the land of Nod," a word which means shaking or trembling, and which was given to the place in consequence of Cain's dwelling there, his own spirit being continually restless. When Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, he bade adieu to rest; for "the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked." In this land of Nod "Cain became father of a wicked brood, to which mankind owes the most pernicious inventions. He himself led the way, by building a city, probably with the design of protecting himself from violence, or even from retaliation of rapine: but thus he was the first to deprive man of the natural and only wholesome food to many of his instincts and feelings, and to concentrate the means both of his bodily and moral corruption. His fifth descendant, Lamech, was, like himself, a murderer; and had four sons, men who were promoters of bloodshed. One of these is mentioned as having first kept cattle, probably as food for man: for this God had given no warrant; but the assumption was worthy of the son of one murderer, and the descendant of another. Another was Tubal Cain, who was the first forger of brass and iron, and, therefore, of deadly weapons of offence. The flood overwhelmed the whole of this wicked brood. The lesson of their example is left, but their blood has ceased to corrupt the generations of man. "The mark set on Cain still remains; and as the book of life has travelled, and is travelling, from land to land, he is exhibited to the shrinking eyes of mankind as fearfully and publicly as when he wandered upon the face of the earth. And well will the reader of that book do to remember, that whenever the serenity of his countenance is marred by an unwarrantable fit of anger, by the rising of a rebellious spirit, by the scowl of a sulky and discontented mind, by a frenzy of jealousy, by a gnawing of envy, by a rankling of malice and uncharitableness, he bears a piece of the mark of Cain upon him. "It is useless to puzzle yourself any longer over what is utterly illegible—the letters are worn past all hope of deciphering a single sentence. Come away." And thus ends the last effort of poor humanity to perpetuate its cherished sorrows, or to display its pompous boastings, in the sight of posterity. That old, grey, mossy stone, with its half shadow of a cherub's face peeping out from the broken outline of a pair of wings; its green and yellow patches of corroded surface, where the long inscription once appeared; and its slanting position, bending forward while it sinks sideways into the soil,- that is the sole surviving memento of-what? It is a memento, for it says "Remember;" but who or what is to be remembered by it, all the wit of all earth's wise ones cannot discover. Nay, though, right under the cherub's chin, we may trace the course of the "Hic jacet," by knowing where it should stand, still, no more is communicated than the bare existence of such a tablet in that place must make known. It is a grave-its inmate has long tenanted the silent dwelling; and here our information ceases. Is it, then, idle and vain so to mark a spot, endeared, perhaps, to some fond breast far beyond all that the residue of the globe contains? No; it is comely and befitting our nature so to do; though I look on the practice not as a mere natural impulse, but as one among the multitude of unregarded evidences afforded of the doctrine of the resurrection, as having been revealed to man from the earliest period. We find the art, not only of sepulture, but of preserving the human body itself after death, carried to a pitch of perfection at which modern science can only gaze and wonder, when unrolling from its delicate wrappers the corpse of two or three thousand years' unchanged existence. It seems to bespeak a thorough conviction that the spirit would reanimate its earthy tenement; but with a total ignorance or mistrust of the Power that could gather up the scattered dust, and say, "Lost in earth, in air, or main, Kindred atoms meet again!" Probably not to one in a thousand who puts a headstone at the grave of a departed friend does it occur that there is the remotest connexion between his act and the recognition of a great and glorious truth; yet I cannot sever them. That the custom prevails, with extravagant additions, such as the periodical digging up and caressing of the dry bones, among some people lost in the lowest depths of barbarism, and destitute even of a ray of spiritual understanding, does not militate against the supposition. It is in such cir cumstances that we find the rites of propitiatory sacrifice observed with jealous care, and practised with unsparing cruelty. Yet who questions the divine origin of the sacrificial rite, or fails to recognise in it a testimony to the truth of holy writ, proving that the sons of Noah, of whom the whole earth was overspread, transmitted, each to his descendants, an obligatory knowledge of the act which they with their fathers first performed upon issuing from the ark, by offering on an altar the victims miraculously preserved for that purpose? I know it is a question with some, whether the doctrine of the resurrection of the body was held in the patriarchal Church; but so clear to my apprehension is the language of Scripture on this point, that I never could contrive to perplex myself with a doubt. I believe it to have been as well understood by the earliest of the Old Testament saints as the nature and end of sacrifices. I love to think so. And on an old illegible grave-stone I can find a lesson written, beyond the mere tale of how the fashion of this world passeth away. The feeling to which I refer the origin of monu> ments erected on the spot where the dead moulder, is distinct from that which would record their names in historical tablets. In the former there would be something as humiliating as in the latter there is honourable distinction, were it not connected with a higher destiny. The old custom of burning the dead is far less harrowing to the mind than, on deliberate reflection, is the fearful process of gradual decomposition, and ultimate mingling with a cold damp soil. The ancients enclosed in an urn the calcined mass obtained from their funeral pyres, and stored it up; but to put a mark upon the spot where corruption and the worm are fulfilling their slow, noisome task on the body of a beloved object, does really seem like a triumph of faith over sight, of hope over experience, worthy of those who have been taught concerning them that sleep in Jesus, that their scattered dust shall rise again. Then, how sublime becomes the language of a gravestone! 66 Stop," says the crumbling monument of by-gone generations, -"stop, passenger, and mark me. Here lies a brother of your race; I shew you precisely where he was laid under the sod. Dig now, even to the centre, in quest of the frame so fearfully and wondeffully made. Search, sift every handful of earth as you cast it forth, you shall not find a vestige of my charge. All is resolved into the parent element, beyond the power of your keenest investigation to separate or to discern the one from the other. Yet, read me again. Here lies that mortal; and hence he shall again come forth, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump. What you toss around you is the corruptible that must put on incorruption; the mortal that must put on immortality. Go, learn from my defaced surface a lesson of faith,—' Blessed are they which believe, yet see not.'" Summon me not, therefore, from gazing on this crumbling head-stone. I may rove far, and look upon many an object, before I encounter a monitor at once so humble, so venerable, so faithful, and so just. |