salvation, not by lamentation and weeping and circling round the Ka'ba, as is written in the traditions of the Muslims.

And there is no doubt that from this first promise Adam understood that through that promised Saviour God would save all men from sin and from His own wrath,¹ and would bestow salvation on those who believed on Him. Nay more, it seems probable that God explained this matter still more clearly, for they so earnestly expected that saviour that, when Eve's first-born son was born, she apparently thought that he was the promised Saviour. So it is written that Eve 'conceived² and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man with (the help of) the LORD.' According to the original Hebrew, these words may also be rendered, 'I have gotten a man, even the LORD,' that is to say, a man who is the LORD, the promised Saviour. Secondly, Cain and Abel, Adam's sons, offered a sacrifice to God.³ Some think that God had commanded Adam to offer sacrifice and had explained to him its object and meaning. It is said that 'The⁴ Lord God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them,' and this may indicate the divine appointment of sacrifice, for we do not find

any definite divine sanction for eating flesh until after the flood in Noah's time. Previous to that, as we learn from Gen. i. 29, God had given men for food green herbs and the fruit of trees. But after the flood He sanctioned the use of flesh also, as it is written: 'Every¹ moving thing that liveth shall be food for you; as the green herb have I given you all. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.' The meaning may, of course, be that previously men used to eat flesh along with the blood, and that the drinking of the blood was now distinctly forbidden by God because of some wicked custom connected with it. So little is told us of the history of mankind before the flood that we cannot say positively that God had not previously sanctioned the eating of the flesh of animals. But, however that may be, it seems probable that the meaning of Gen. iii. 21 is that God taught Adam and Eve to offer animals as a sacrifice and to use their skins as clothing. Even if we suppose that they themselves invented the rite of sacrifice, it must have been for the reason that they felt their need of thus acknowledging their sinfulness and that they deserved death. And, as this conviction was produced in their minds by the influence of God's Holy Spirit, who is the source of all true knowledge, it was thus part of the teaching that God was giving them. Hence it is probable that God showed them that,