Page:The rock of wisdom.djvu/63

 appears that Cain slew his brother Abel, because that God had respect unto his offering, and there the Lord put a curse upon him, and he went away from the face of the Lord; his guilty conscience made him fear his own brothers and nephews, of whom, by this time, there might be a good number upon the earth (which now had endured nearly one hundred and thirty years, as may be gathered from Gen. c. 5. 3 v. compared with 4 c. 25 v.) though in the compendious accounts given in scripture, only Cain and Abel are mentioned. The more common opinion of the interpreters of holy writ, supposes this work to have been a trembling of the body, or a horror and consternation in his covenant name; it is supposed that his wife was the daughter of Adam, and Cain's own sister, God dispensing with such marriages in the beginning of the world as are now observed, as mankind could not otherwise be propagated. He built a city in process of time, when his race was multiplied so as to be numerous enough to people if, for in the many hundred years he lived, his race might be multiplied even to millions. It is the tradition of the Hebrews, that Lamech, in hunting, slew Cain, mistaking him for a wild beast, and that having discovered what he had done, he beat so unmercifully the youth by whom he was led into the mistake, that he died of the blows, not that Adam and Seth had not called upon God before the birth of Enos, but that Enos used more solemnity in the worship and invocation of God. The descendants of Seth and Enos are here called sons of God, from their religion, and whereas, the ungodly race of Cain, who, by their carnal affections, lay grovelling upon the earth, are called the children of men; the consequence of the former marrying with the latter, ought to be a warning to christians to be very circumspect in their marriages and not to suffer themselves to be determined in their choice by their carnal passions, to the prejudice of virtue or religion; the meaning is, that man's days, which before the flood were usually years, should now be reduced to a hundred and twenty years, of rather that God would allow men this term of a hundred and twenty years for their repentance and conversion, before he would send the deluge. It is likely the generality of men before the