him know that he was to go out of his father's house, or because he became the head of a peculiar nation, or because he is called the father of the faithful.' Would it not have been the greatest deviation from the idea of this narrative, as it has come out before us thus far, if God were not supposed to speak to men, to make known His will to them, to give them the power of fulfilling it? Would not the anomaly, the exception be, that he should not have intercourse with the creature whom He had made in His image? Would not the absence of such intercourse involve the loss of all that is precious to men? Would it not be the sealing and confirming of their own monstrous dream of independence, that in which lay all animal degradation, all destruction of brotherhood? The Scripture, you will find, assumes it to be the normal condition of man that he should receive communications from God. Whatever good comes forth from him it supposes to be the result of such communications. We hear of them made to the Egyptian Pharaoh, to the Philistine Abimelech. They are told of something which they are not to do; that teaching, it is not proved but taken for granted, must come from the Lord of the heart and reins. Of Abram we are told nothing, except that he was descended from Shem, till we hear that God said to him, 'Get thee out of thy father's house, and from thy kindred, into a land that I will tell thee of." Nothing is said of the time or manner of the communication. We do not want to hear anything of either. Moses expects us to believe that God knew the mind of the

Mesopotamian shepherd, as of all other men whom he had formed, and could make that mind aware of His presence. No heap of words could make the awfulness of the discovery greater; the simplest are the best. But it is not merely the revelation of an actual presence. Abram is taught that he is the

servant of Him who has declared Himself to him; he is to go where He bids him; he is to become a wanderer, to settle himself in another land; and there he is told that he shall found a family; and that God will make of him a great nation; and that his seed shall possess the land in which he is only to sojourn.

These words, great nation,' belong to the new period. We heard no such language in the time before the flood. The inhabitants of the earth were then probably gathered within very narrow limits; at least the Scripture gives us no hint which can make us think otherwise. It is by the sons of Noah that the earth is said to be overspread. I shall not allude to any of the ethnological speculations which have been raised upon the story of their families. Most of them are very crude; in nearly all of them there is a large element of vague tradition, which we have grafted upon the simple letter, till we can hardly separate the one from the other. But there are one or two passages in the narrative which contain, it seems to me, precious and profound ethnological facts, which we are apt to overlook or to misinterpret. The story of the curse pronounced on Canaan, by Noah, has exercised our ingenuity to discover what special na

tions were comprehended in it. Would it not have been better to consider the occasion and nature of the curse, before we investigated the geographical limits of it? And would not that inquiry have led to the truth, so important for understanding the infancy of societies, but equally important for understanding them in their greatest maturity, that wherever the reverence for fathers is lost there is a people predestined to slavery; servants of servants, sooner or later will they become. And whatever opinions we may hold respecting the Semitic or Japhetic stocks, we shall not hesitate to think that, in some way or other, the establishment and recognition of the paternal authority would be associated with the blessing, human and divine, which rested upon the tents of the first, and which the other was afterwards to inherit.

Another of these facts is, surely, that the sons of Noah, to whatever lands they might journey, were to be divided after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.' This dispersion, and these distinctions, are surely a part of the original divine order; the fulfilment of God's designs for the race which He had made after His own likeness. To overturn that order, to frustrate that design, the wandering tribes met on the plain of Shinar, and said, 'Go to, let us make bricks, and burn them throughly; and let us build a tower that may reach to heaven; and let us make ourselves a name, that we be not scattered abroad upon the earth.' In other words, let us build a

society, not upon faith in the unseen God and His covenant, but upon faith in brick walls. Let this be the bond of our union. Let us provide securities against the divine power, lest it should crush us. The plan, we are told, was confounded: they left off to build the tower. The earth was overspread, though they determined that it should not be. Distinct families and nations were established in spite of this attempt to reduce all into one indistinguishable mass. But we are told also that a Babel society was established by a mighty hunter in whom all have recognized the beginner of the great Asiatic tyrannies. Polities rose up, based upon a worship of natural powers, feared, not trusted; whose cruel purposes were to be averted by such means as human wit and strength could devise. The rulers of these kingdoms owned no Lord of man after whose image they and their subjects were formed; they bowed to the powers which they thought they discerned in the storm, or in the dark sky; powers to which they attributed their own qualities; with which they had no sympathy; whose dominion was shadowed forth in their own. Such is society according to man's conception and arrangement of it. Society, of which self-will is the king, and animals are the subjects. But this was not God's society; and therefore it was said to Abram: 'I will make of thee a great nation; and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."

I have hastily recapitulated the previous history, that you may see how here, as in every

case that has come before us, the divine order is maintained, not violated, by what we are wont, awkwardly and irreverently, to call the divine interventions and interferences. The calling out of the Mesopotamian shepherd, the setting apart of his family and his nation as the chosen family and nation; these are often spoken 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 great 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