which rest upon it, must go down. Certain notions about the faith of the
ancient saints must give way, and the views of saving faith presented in
the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews must take their
place.

Great numbers of religious teachers and writers attribute to Adam and
Eve, in their first state, an amount of knowledge, and a perfection of
righteousness, which the Scriptures nowhere ascribe to them, and which,
if they had possessed them, would have rendered it impossible, one
would think, that they should have yielded so readily to temptation.

They represent the first sin as having effects which are never
attributed to it in the Bible.

They give an unwarrantable meaning to the word death contained in the
first threatening.

They attribute to man's first sin inconveniences of the seasons, and of
the different climates of the globe, as well as a thousand things on the
earth's surface, and in the dispositions and habits of the lower
animals, which are not attributed _to_ that cause by the sacred writers.

They spend a vast amount of time and words in trying to prove that the
reason why Abel's sacrifice was more excellent than that of Cain, and
was accepted by God, was that Abel offered animals, and had an eye to
the sacrifice of Christ, while Cain offered only the fruits of the
ground, that did not typify or symbolize that sacrifice; a notion for
which there is no authority in Scripture. The story in Genesis seems to
intimate that the sacrifice of Cain was rejected because he was a
bad-living man, and that the sacrifice of Abel was accepted because he