WHO WAS CAIN'S WIFE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 197, 9 November 1871, Page 7

WHO WAS CAIN'S WIFE.

Mr. "Ward Beecher, in a recent sermon, said — There is no record of Cain's courtship or wedding. However interesting to ;he parties themselves, it is of ho interest to us, except upon the supposition that any people had been created. If Adam and Eve were the sole progenitors of the race, Cain and Abel, it is inferred, must have married their own sisters — a connection which is shocking to the sensibilities of the whole human race, at a subsequent stage of developement. But many of the fathers of the Church denied that Adam and Eve and their children were the only people on the globe. They affirmed that the text in Genesis plainly implies that there were other inhabitants besides Adam's family. They allege that verse 14 of IV Genesis plainly implies that the world was already widely populated. For when God declared that Cain should be driven from his family and made a vagabond in the earth, Cain deprecated the sentence and replied that ' everyone that , findeth me shall slay me.' It was plainly not his family connexions that he feared, for he desired not to be driven from them. It was the people that he should meet when he was a wanderer in the earth. Who, then, were the people who Cain should fear to meet when he should have gone forth . in the earth ? It is also reasoned by scholars that the most natural method of soothing his fears would have been to tell him ' there are no other people on the earth except your father's children.' Instead of that the Lord is represented as falling in with Cain's impression respecting the population of the world, and that he set a mark on Cain, lest anyone finding him should slay him.— (Gen. iv 15). Still further it is J>aid that Cain, separating himself from his kindred, went to the land of Nod, east of Edom, 'he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son Enoch.' The fathers very pertinently asked where did the people come from that lived in the city ? That would be an extraordinary state of things that would have enabled Cain to fill up a city, however small, with his own children ! And it is inferred therefore, there were other people in theiand besides the immediate progeny of Adam. If Adam was the only progenitor Cain must have married his sister. If there were lines of people, other Adams, as it were, he might have married into another stock. We do not express any judgment in the matter. We give the corresponding opinions that have been held in the early days of the Church, but with the statement that almost all modern Christian writers have rejected them.