Conscience, Awakened—Terror of – Charles Spurgeon

SEEING that there had been no wars in Cain’s day, and that the human heart had not been brutalized as it now is, so as to speak of war as we now do in such gentle terms, surely if he had had any conscience at all, it must have been a horrible thought to him that he had killed his brother. “I have killed a man, I have shed his blood.” Surely it made him start in his sleep. How could he be quiet upon his lonely couch? That red-handed man! Guilt, a grim chamberlain, with fingers bloody red, would surely draw the curtains of his bed. Would not the spectacle all come up before his mind? The talk in the field, the sudden impulse, the blow, the blood, the look of his victim as he cried for pity as one cruel stroke succeeded another; and then the sight of the ghastly body and the streaming blood, and the crimson marks on the soddened earth. Oh, it must have been a remembrance clinging like a viper around the murderer wherever he might be! He might well build a city, as we are told he did, in order to quench these fiery remembrances. Then would the thought come upon him, “You slew him though he was your brother.” “Am I my brother’s keeper?” said he, but men can talk more braggingly than their heart talks in secret. The horror of brother-killing must have haunted Cain: “I slew my brother, I, the first that was born of woman slew the second born.” And then it would be suggested, “And wherefore did I slay him? What evil had he done me? What if he did offer a different sacrifice from mine, and what if God did accept him and not me, yet what hurt had he done me?” The innocence of his victim, if Cain had any conscience, must have increased his uneasiness, for he would recollect how inoffensively he had kept those sheep of his, and had been like one among them, so lamb-like, that shepherd man, himself a true sheep of God’s pasture. “Yet,” would Cain say, “I slew him because I hated God, the God before whose bar I am soon to stand, the God who set this mark on me.” Can you picture the man who had thus to be daily schooled and upbraided by a brother’s blood? It needs a poet’s mind to teach him. Think how you would feel if you had killed your own brother, how the guilt would hang over you like a black cloud, and drop horror into your very soul.