ABRAM: A BLESSING TO MANKIND.

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and his nation as a chosen family and nation; these are often spoken of as necessary for some high religious purpose, but as disturbing the course of human history. But if the early records are what they have appeared to be, this call of Abram is a step in the unfolding of that social order, which is the order intended for human beings, as such; that order which the individualizing tendencies of men were transgressing and revolutionizing. The polity which Abram was to begin was not to be less human, because it was national. The nationality of it was to be the protest against the universal empires,—which were so inhuman, because they were so ungodly.

But was not Abram, as the faithful man, the father of the faithful, heir of a special privilege which separated him from his unfaithful descendants, still more from the unfaithful majority of mankind? Just so far as this,—every unfaithful descendant of Abram, every unfaithful man, was setting up his own separate, selfish nature, was unwilling to stand upon that truth which belonged to the whole race. Every unfaithful man of the race of Abram, every unfaithful man anywhere, would be a God; he would not claim the right of knowing God and being like Him. Therefore all such were tempted to make gods of their own, and to forget the living God. Abram's faith consisted in not doing this; in acknowledging the Lord to be God; in recollecting Him; in living as if He were that guide and protector He declared Himself to be. The promise to him was, 'In thee and thy seed shall ALL the families of the earth be blessed.' He believed the promise. He counted it the highest blessing and glory which could be given him,not that he should be blessed, but that he should be the channel of blessings to multitudes unknown.

G

And therefore said our Lord, speaking to those who counted it their highest glory to be Abraham's children,— 'He saw my day and rejoiced.' The words were most startling to the Jews; for said they, Thou art not fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? The depth of meaning which lies in His answer we cannot yet appreciate. It must be considered in the light of a later revelation, which was made not to the father of the faithful, but to the lawgiver of the nation. But thus much we may see in it. He said, 'I am He in whom God made the covenant with 'the old fathers of the human family, when He bade them 'look up to the bow, which was the sign that He would no more drown the earth with a flood. I am He in whom 'He formed all men to be brothers, so that he who sheds 'the blood of another, sheds his own. ' of whom He will require the life of every man. I am He 'from whom came the life, the faith, the hope, the love of 'all who had strength to believe that God was their Creator and Preserver and Deliverer, not their enemy. 'I am He in whom God could look upon them, and in 'whom they could look upon God. And what I was, 'I am; I am still the eternal bond of Peace and fellowship, 'the seed in which all the families of the earth shall be ' blessed;—the destroyer of every Babel tyranny which has 'mocked the divine government, and spread curses among 'mankind.'

I am that brother

SERMON IV.

ABRAHAM AND ISAAC.

(Lincoln's Inn, First Sunday in Lent.-March 9, 1851.)

Lessons for the day, Genesis XIX. and XXII.

GENESIS XXII. 7, 8.

And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God • will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

THERE was a passage in the chapter from which I preached last Sunday, to which I did not then allude. The story of Abraham's call is scarcely concluded, before we are told that he went down into Egypt in consequence of a famine; that there he persuaded his wife to call herself his sister; that he was intreated well for her sake; that she was saved by God's providence from the effect of her husband's falsehood. Is it desirable to keep such a story as this in the background, or to find some mystical explanation of it which shall show that the untruth of a patriarch is not like the untruth of another man? I apprehend that any one who takes the first course, must hold his own judgment to be higher than that which guided the writer of the book; that any one who takes the second, must set up for himself a

most fluctuating standard of right and wrong. I find this narrative here, given with all simplicity; I suppose there is a reason why it should be given. I assume that it was meant to say what it does say. And the natural primâ facie view of the subject is that which accords best with. the preceding and subsequent narrative. The whole history, instead of suffering from the admission that the first father of the Jewish nation acted just in the way in which another Mesopotamian shepherd, going into a strange country, and seized with a sudden fear of what might befal him, was likely to have acted,—that he displayed cowardice, selfishness, readiness to put his wife in a terrible hazard for his own sake,—the history, I say, instead of being made more difficult and unintelligible by this statement, is brought out by it in its true and proper character. Any notion that we are going to read of a hero, or a race of heroes, is dispelled at the very outset. The dream that this man had in him, in his own nature, something different from other men, that he was not exposed to every ordinary temptation incident to human beings as such,-incident to the place, time, circumstances, in which it was appointed that he should live, —is taken away, not by surmises of ours, but by the express announcements of the sacred historian, intended for other purposes also it may be, but certainly for this one above all others,—that the Jewish people might not fall into any mistakes respecting their ancestor, or fancy him to be a person of another kind from themselves. And so we feel the force of the words, 'In thee, and thy seed, shall ALL the families of the earth be blessed. Here is a man, not picked out as a model of excellence; not invested with some rare qualities of heart and intellect; one apt to fear; apt to lie; certain to fear, certain to lie, if once he began to speculate

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according to his own sagacity on the best way of preserving himself. He is made aware of an invisible guide who is near him; of an invisible government which is over him; and which it concerned not him only, but all human beings in all generations, to be acquainted with. Herein lies his greatness, his strength. What he is apart from his Teacher we see in his journey to Egypt; a very poor, paltry earthworm indeed; one not to be despised by us, because we are earth-worms also; but assuredly worthy of no reverence for any qualities which were his by birth, or which became his merely in virtue of his call. What he was when he was walking in the light, when that transfigured him from an earth-worm into a man, his after story will help us to understand.

And thus, my brethren, the same principle which we recognised in the history of Adam in his first estate,—of Adam fallen, of every man before the flood, good or evil, of those who perished in the waters, and of those who were to inaugurate the new economy of the restored universe,— meets us again in this more advanced stage of the history. All these lived because they were members of a race formed in God's image. All might claim that image, confessing their dependence upon Him whom they could not see. All might sink into their own individual animal natures, which were under the curse of death. Of that degradation, and of its consequences, God himself, and all true men hearing and echoing his voice, bore testimony; the warning, by its very terms, declared who could raise them out of this death, how they might hold fast this life. In these respects there is no change. Abraham must stand or fall, sink or rise, as all who preceded him stood or fell, sank or rose. He must yield to the invisible Guide, or become the slave of visible.