Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III The Deterioration Of The Race. Cain and his adherents went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. The phrase presence of the Lord and its exact equivalents before the Lord and before the face of the Lord, are used in the Old Testament to indicate the place of worship or the shrine where the Lord revealed himself to the worshippers both by oracles and with visible manifestations of his presence. It was the rallying place and the centre of the religious life of the people. Cain left this place, partly as an apostate from the true faith, and partly as a fugitive and a voluntary exile. He left the oracle behind him and surrendered the high priviledge of having the Lord as his teacher and friend ready to guide him in all important matters. We might therefore expect the effects of sin to manifest themselves more rapidly among his descendants, and also to find the central forces of the antediluvian apostasy among them. In the fourth generation Lamech took two wives. So far as we know, this was the origin of polygamy and the consequent wreckage of the family. One woman was made for one man that there might be a godly seed. Mai. ii. 15. Polygamy in later times has been a murderous system. It was so then, for Lamech made defiant proclamation to his wives, Adah and Zillah, that he had slain a young man for wounding and injuring him, and declared his determination to beavenged seventy fold in such a case. It is generally supposed that it was an insane jealously over real or fancied wrongs in this double family relation. Polygamy and murder have been intimately associated all the way down the ages to Mormonism of our times. All this indicates a great apostasy and departure from the righteousness and true holiness in wh…
