It may be a subject of inquiry, why this distinct and exclusive reference to the blood of Abel, when so many since his time have died by the hands of violence? Every murder speaks, as well as Abel's. The bloody deed committed to-day will publish itself. It is the hardest thing in the world to conceal it. The providence of God often seems to turn the very arts and expedients which were designed to hide it and hush its voice, into the means of its detection. The stone cries out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber answers it. Blood will speak through walls of masonry, through deepest midnight darkness, across seas and deserts uninhabited. But passing over the many dark calendars of crime which generations had filled up, the apostle singles out Abel alone, as he was the first one of our race who died, and that by the hand of violence. That murder woke the first cry of blood which the world ever heard. It was when the world was young. And as then there were no human courts established to sit in judgment upon crime and punish the guilty, the Almighty himself came forth from his solitude and made inquisition for blood, and pronounced sentence upon the fratricide. The testimony upon which God convicted Cain, was the testimony of blood. It cried unto heaven from the ground; and by the prompt and terrible interposition of the Almighty at that epoch, God impressed upon the race the sacredness of human life and the certain vengeance which would pursue the man who shed blood. The blood of Abel, though it spoke a language like to that of ten thousand murders since committed, still arrests attention; for it was the first cry of murder which had shocked the world. It stands at the head of the dark roll of guilt which is still filling up. It stained for the first time the bosom of our mother earth. It flung a ghastly mangled corpse into the first family of our race, and deepened the gloom which, at the fall, settled upon the earliest history of humanity, into shadows black as Tartarus. These considerations would be enough to prompt the apostle to single out the death of Abel from all that followed it. And in the text he contrasts its testimony with that of the blood of Christ. What was its utterance? What did the blood of Abel say? Come with me and stand over the revolting spectacle. Look on the clotted gore and ghastly features of the murdered man, and hear the testimony: