But there came a great change over all life. Beasts that before were harmless and full of play put forth claw and sting and tooth and tusk. Birds whet their beak for prey, clouds troop in the sky, sharp thorns shoot up through the soft grass, blastings are on the leaves. All the chords of that great harmony are snapped. Upon the brightest home this world ever saw our first parents turned their back and led forth on a path of sorrow the broken-hearted myriads of a ruined race. [Illustration: THE ACCEPTED OFFERING.] When Eve looked into the face of her first-born, she remembered the words of the Lord, in His judgment upon Satan, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shalt bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel,” and, misunderstanding the meaning of the promise, she called him Cain, meaning, “I have gotten a man from the Lord,” mistaking him for the Redeemer. But how bitter must have been her disappointment as she saw the child grow up, saw his characteristics manifest themselves in acts of hatefulness and revenge. However, but little is said of Cain and his younger brother Abel, until they bring their offerings to the Lord. We read that Abel was a “keeper of sheep,” and Cain was a “tiller of the ground.” While it is not stated, we must believe these brothers knew what was, and what was not, an acceptable offering to the Lord, that Cain could easily have exchanged his fruits of the soil for a lamb of Abel’s flock. Evidently Cain was lacking in that fine moral insight which would lead him to have respect as to the nature of the sacrifice necessary to atone for sin. There must be the shed blood of the victim, for, “without shedding of blood,” there is no remission. Either Cain did not regard himself a sinner, or, if he did, he thought one sacrifice as good as another, and so he brings “of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.” God could not accept this act of disobedience. Because his offering was rejected, and seeing Abel’s offering accepted, Cain rose up and slew his brother. He failed to shed the blood of a lamb for his sin, but was quick to shed the blood of his brother, and thereby add to his sin. But what a crushing blow was this to the hopes of the mother heart who had supposed that her first-born was the promised “seed.” How she must have broken down under her sorrow, as she saw the blood dripping from Cain’s fingers, and that, too, the blood of his own brother. And sadder still as she looked upon the face of death for the first time. However she might have understood the lying words of her tempter, “Ye shall not surely die,” she now sees in the lifeless body of her second child, the awful reality of death. And when the first grave was made, how she must have daily wept over the precious mound, not only over this her first experience in bitter bereavement, but also over the circumstances under which it was brought