Chapter 4—Adam’s Life
Adam’s life was one of sorrow, humility, and continual repentance.
As he taught his children and grand-children the fear of the Lord, he
was often bitterly reproached for his sin which resulted in so much
misery upon his posterity. When he left the beautiful Eden, the thought
that he must die thrilled him with horror. He looked upon death as
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a dreadful calamity. He was first made acquainted with the dreadful
reality of death in the human family by his own son Cain slaying
his brother Abel. Filled with the bitterest remorse for his own trans-
gression, and deprived of his son Abel, and looking upon Cain as his
murderer, and knowing the curse God pronounced upon him, bowed
down Adam’s heart with grief. Most bitterly did he reproach himself
for his first great transgression. He entreated pardon from God through
the promised Sacrifice. Deeply had he felt the wrath of God for his
crime committed in Paradise. He witnessed the general corruption
which afterward finally provoked God to destroy the inhabitants of the
earth by a flood. The sentence of death pronounced upon him by his
Maker, which at first appeared so terrible to him, after he had lived
some hundreds of years, looked just and merciful in God, to bring to
an end a miserable life.
To his children, and to their children, to the ninth generation, he
delineated the perfections of his Eden home; and also his fall and its
dreadful results, and the load of grief brought upon him on account of
the rupture in his family, which ended in the death of Abel. He related
to them the sufferings God had brought him through, to teach him the
necessity of strictly adhering to his law. He declared to them that sin
would be punished in whatever form it existed. He entreated them to
obey God, who would deal mercifully with them if they should love,
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and fear him.
Angels held communication with Adam after his fall, and informed
him of the plan of salvation, and that the human race was not beyond
redemption. Although a fearful separation had taken place between
God and man, yet provision had been made through the offering of his
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