gladden him; but he preferred the fruit of his vineyard. Can the most
sacred or impressive memories secure a man against sin? Noah had the
memory of a race drowned for sin and of a year in solitude with God. Can
the dignity and weight of responsibility steady a man? This man knew
that to him God had declared His purpose and that he only could carry it
forward to fulfilment. In that heavy helpless figure, fallen insensible
in his tent, is as significant a warning as in the Flood.

Noah's sin brings before us two facts about sin. First, that the
smaller temptations are often the most effectual. The man who is
invulnerable on the field of battle amidst declared and strong enemies
falls an easy prey to the assassin in his own home. When all the world
was against him, Noah was able to face single-handed both scorn and
violence, but in the midst of his vineyard, among his own people who
understood him and needed no preaching or proof of his virtue, he
relaxed.

He was no longer in circumstances so difficult as to force him to watch
and pray, as to drive him to God's side. The temptations Noah had before
known were mainly from without; he now learnt that those from within are
more serious. Many of us find it comparatively easy to carry clean hands
before the public, or to demean ourselves with tolerable seemliness in
circumstances where the temptation may be very strong but is also very
patent; but how careless are we often in our domestic life, and how
little strain do we put upon ourselves in the company of those whom we
can trust. What petulance and irritability, what angry and slanderous
words, what sensuality and indolence could our own homes witness to!
Noah is not the only man who has walked uprightly and kept his garment
unspotted from the world so long as the eye of man was on him, but who
has lain uncovered on his own tent-floor.

Secondly, we see here how a man may fall into new forms of sin, and are
reminded especially of one of the most distressing facts to be observed
in the world, viz., that men in their prime and even in their old age
are sometimes overtaken in sins of sensuality from which hitherto they
have kept themselves pure. We are very ready to think we know the full
extent of wickedness to which we may go; that by certain sins _we_
shall never be much tempted. And in some of our predictions we may be
correct; our temperament or our circumstances may absolutely preclude
some sins from mastering us. Yet who has made but a slight alteration in
his circumstances, added a little to his business, made some new family
arrangements, or changed his residence, without being astonished to find
how many new sources of evil seem to have been opened within him? While
therefore you rejoice over sins defeated, beware of thinking your work
is nearly done. Especially let those of us who have for years been
fighting mainly against one sin beware of thinking that if only _that_
were defeated we should be free from sin. As a man who has long suffered
from one bodily disease congratulates himself that at least he knows
what he may expect in the way of pain, and will not suffer as some other
man he has heard of does suffer; whereas though one disease may kill
others, yet some diseases only prepare the body for the assault of worse
ailments than themselves, and the constitution at last breaks up under a
combination of ills that make the sufferer a pity to his friends and a
perplexity to his physicians. And so is it in the spirit; you cannot say
that because you are so consumed by one infirmity, others can find no
room in you. In short, there is nothing that can secure us against the
unspeakable calamity of falling into new sins, except the direction
given by our Lord, "Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation."
There _is need_ of watching, else this precept had never been uttered;
too many things absolutely needful for us to do have to be enjoined upon
us to leave any room for the injunction of precepts that are
unnecessary, and he who is not watching has no security that he shall
not sin so as to be a scandal to his friends and a shame to himself.

Noah's sin brought to light the character of his three sons--the coarse
irreverence of Ham, the dignified delicacy and honour of Shem and
Japheth. The bearing of men towards the sins of others is always a
touchstone of character. The full exposure of sin where good is expected
to come of the exposure and when it is done with sorrow and with shame
is one thing, and the exposure of sin to create a laugh and merely to
amuse is another. They are the true descendants of Ham, whether their
faces be black or white, and whether they go with no clothes or with
clothes that are the product of much thought and anxiety, who find
pleasure in the mere contemplation of deeds of shame, in real life, on
the boards of the theatre, in daily journals, or in works of fiction.
Extremes meet, and the savage grossness of Ham is found in many who
count themselves the last and finest product of culture. It is found
also in the harder and narrower set of modern investigators, who glory
in exposing the scientific weakness of our forefathers, and make a jest
of the mistakes of men to whom they owe much of their freedom, and whose
shoe latchet they are not worthy to tie, so far as the deeper moral
qualities go.

But neither is religious society free from this same sin. The faults and
mistakes and sins of others are talked over, possibly with some show of
regret, but with, as we know, very little real shame and sadness, for
these feelings prompt us, not to talk them over in companies where no
good can be done in the way of remedy, but to cover them as these
sorrowing sons of Noah, with averted eye and humbled head. Charity is
the prime grace enjoined upon us and charity _covers_ a multitude of
sins. And whatever excuses for exposing others we may make, however we
may say it is only a love of truth and fair play that makes us drag to
light the infirmities of a man whom others are praising, we may be very
sure that if all _evil_ motives were absent this kind of evil speaking
would cease among us. But there is a malignity in sin that leaves its
bitter root in us all, and causes us to be glad when those whom we have
been regarding as our superiors are reduced to our poor level. And there
is a cowardliness in sin which cannot bear to be alone, and eagerly
hails every symptom of others being in the same condemnation.

Before exposing another, think first whether your own conduct could bear
a similar treatment, whether you have never done the thing you desire to
conceal, said the thing you would blush to hear repeated, or thought the
thought you could not bear another to read. And if you be a Christian,
does it not become you to remember what you yourself have learnt of the
slipperiness of this world's ways, of your liability to fall, of your
sudden exposure to sin from some physical disorder, or some slight
mistake which greatly extenuates your sin, but which you could not plead
before another? And do you know nothing of the difficulty of conquering
one sin that is rooted in your constitution, and the strife that goes on
in a man's own soul and in secret though he show little immediate fruit
of it in his life before men? Surely it becomes us to give a man credit
for much good resolution and much sore self-denial and endeavour, even
when he fails and sins still, because such we know to be our own case,
and if we disbelieve in others until they can walk with perfect
rectitude, if we condemn them for one or two flaws and blemishes, we
shall be tempted to show the same want of charity towards ourselves, and
fall at length into that miserable and hopeless condition that believes
in no regenerating spirit nor in any holiness attainable by us.

VII.

_THE CALL OF ABRAHAM._

GENESIS xi. 27-xii. 5.

With Abraham there opens a new chapter in the history of the race; a
chapter of the profoundest significance. The consequences of Abraham's
movements and beliefs have been limitless and enduring. All succeeding
time has been influenced by him. And yet there is in his life a
remarkable simplicity, and an entire absence of such events as impress
contemporaries. Among all the forgotten millions of his own time he
stands alone a recognisable and memorable figure. But around his figure
there gathers no throng of armed followers; with his name, no vast
territorial dominion, no new legislation, not even any work of
literature or art is associated. The significance of his life was not
military, nor legislative, nor literary, but religious. To him must be
carried back the belief in one God. We find him born and brought up
among idolaters; and although it is certain there were others besides
himself who here and there upon earth had dimly arrived at the same
belief as he, yet it is certainly from him the Monotheistic belief has
been diffused. Since his day the world has never been without its
explicit advocacy. It is his belief in the true God, in a God who
manifested His existence and His nature by responding to this belief,
it is this belief and the place he gave it as the regulating principle
of all his movements and thoughts, that have given him his everlasting
influence.

With Abraham there is also introduced the first step in a new method
adopted by God in the training of men. The dispersion of men and the
divergence of their languages are now seen to have been the necessary
preliminary to this new step in the education of the world--the fencing
round of one people till they should learn to know God and understand
and exemplify His government. It is true, God reveals Himself to all men
and governs all; but by selecting one race with special adaptations, and
by giving to it a special training, God might more securely and more
rapidly reveal Himself to all. Each nation has certain characteristics,
a national character which grows by seclusion from the influences which
are forming other races. There is a certain mental and moral
individuality stamped upon every separate people. Nothing is more
certainly retained; nothing more certainly handed down from generation
to generation. It would therefore be a good practical means of
conserving and deepening the knowledge of God, if it were made the
national interest of a people to preserve it, and if it were closely
identified with the national characteristics. This was the method
adopted by God. He meant to combine allegiance to Himself with national
advantages, and spiritual with national character, and separation in
belief with a distinctly outlined and defensible territory.

This method, in common with all Divine methods, was in strict keeping
with the natural evolution of history. The migration of Abraham occurred
in the epoch of migrations. But although for centuries before Abraham
new nations had been forming, none of them had belief in God as its
formative principle. Wave upon wave of warriors, shepherds, colonists
have left the prolific plains of Mesopotamia. Swarm after swarm has left
that busy hive, pushing one another further and further west and east,
but all have been urged by natural impulses, by hunger, commerce, love
of adventure and conquest. By natural likings and dislikings, by policy,
and by dint of force the multitudinous tribes of men were finding their
places in the world, the weaker being driven to the hills, and being
schooled there by hard living till their descendants came down and
conquered their conquerors. All this went on without regard to any very
high motives. As it was with the Goths who invaded Italy for her wealth,
as it is now with those who people America and Africa because there is
land or room enough, so it was then. But at last God selects one man and
says, "_I_ will make of thee a great nation." The origin of this nation
is not facile love of change nor lust of territory, but belief in God.
Without this belief this people had not been. No other account can be
given of its origin. Abraham is himself already the member of a tribe,
well-off and likely to be well-off; he has no large family to provide
for, but he is separated from his kindred and country, and led out to be
himself a new beginning, and this because, as he himself throughout his
life said, he heard God's call and responded to it.

The city which claims the distinction of being Abraham's birthplace, or
at least of giving its name to the district where he was born, is now
represented by a few mounds of ruins rising out of the flat marshy
ground on the western bank of the Euphrates, not far above the point
where it joins its waters to those of the Tigris and glides on to the
Persian gulf. In the time of Abraham, Ur was the capital city which gave
its name to one of the most populous and fertile regions of the earth.
The whole land of Accad which ran up from the sea-coast to Upper
Mesopotamia (or Shinar) seems to have been known as Ur-ma, the land of
Ur. This land was of no great extent, being little if at all larger than
Scotland, but it was the richest of Asia. The high civilisation which
this land enjoyed even in the time of Abraham has been disclosed in the
abundant and multifarious Babylonian remains which have recently been
brought to light.

What induced Terah to abandon so prosperous a land can only be
conjectured. It is possible that the idolatrous customs of the
inhabitants may have had something to do with his movements. For while
the ancient Babylonian records reveal a civilisation surprisingly
advanced, and a social order in some respects admirable, they also make
disclosures regarding the worship of the gods which must shock even
those who are familiar with the immoralities frequently fostered by
heathen religions. The city of Ur was not only the capital, it was the
holy city of the Chaldeans. In its northern quarter rose high above the
surrounding buildings the successive stages of the temple of the
moon-god, culminating in a platform on which the priests could both
accurately observe the motions of the stars and hold their night-watches
in honour of their god. In the courts of this temple might be heard
breaking the silence of midnight, one of those magnificent hymns, still
preserved, in which idolatry is seen in its most attractive dress, and
in which the Lord of Ur is invoked in terms not unworthy of the living
God. But in these same temple-courts Abraham may have seen the
firstborn led to the altar, the fruit of the body sacrificed to atone
for the sin of the soul; and here too he must have seen other sights
even more shocking and repulsive. Here he was no doubt taught that
strangely mixed religion which clung for generations to some members of
his family. Certainly he was taught in common with the whole community
to rest on the seventh day; as he was trained to look to the stars with
reverence and to the moon as something more than the light which was set
to rule the night.

Possibly then Terah may have been induced to move northwards by a desire
to shake himself free from customs he disapproved. The Hebrews
themselves seem always to have considered that his migration had a
religious motive. "This people," says one of their old writings, "is
descended from the Chaldeans, and they sojourned heretofore in
Mesopotamia because they would not follow the gods of their fathers
which were in the land of Chaldea. For they left the way of their
ancestors and worshipped the God of heaven, the God whom they knew; so
they cast them out from the face of their gods, and they fled into
Mesopotamia and sojourned there many days. Then their God commanded them
to depart from the place where they sojourned and to go into the land of
Canaan." But if this is a true account of the origin of the movement
northwards, it must have been Abraham rather than his father who was the
moving spirit of it; for it is certainly Abraham and not Terah who
stands as the significant figure inaugurating the new era.

If doubt rests on the moving cause of the migration from Ur, none rests
on that which prompted Abraham to leave Charran and journey towards
Canaan. He did so in obedience to what he believed to be a Divine
command, and in faith on what he understood to be a Divine promise. How
he became aware that a Divine command thus lay upon him we do not know.
Nothing could persuade him that he was not commanded. Day by day he
heard in his soul what he recognised as a Divine voice, saying: "Get
thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's
house, unto a land that I will show thee!" This was God's first
revelation of Himself to Abraham. Up to this time Abraham to all
appearance had no knowledge of any God but the deities worshipped by his
fathers in Chaldea. Now, he finds within himself impulses which he
cannot resist and which he is conscious he ought not to resist. He
believes it to be his duty to adopt a course which may look foolish and
which he can justify only by saying that his conscience bids him. He
recognises, apparently for the first time, that through his conscience
there speaks to him a God Who is supreme. In dependence on this God he
gathered his possessions together and departed.

So far, one may be tempted to say, no very unusual faith was required.
Many a poor girl has followed a weakly brother or a dissipated father to
Australia or the wild west of America; many a lad has gone to the deadly
west coast of Africa with no such prospects as Abraham. For Abraham had
the double prospect which makes migration desirable. Assure the colonist
that he will find land and have strong sons to till and hold and leave
it to, and you give him all the motive he requires. These were the
promises made to Abraham--a land and a seed. Neither was there at this
period much difficulty in believing that both promises would be
fulfilled. The land he no doubt expected to find in some unoccupied
territory. And as regards the children, he had not yet faced the
condition that only through Sarah was this part of the promise to be
fulfilled.

But the peculiarity in Abraham's abandonment of present certainties for
the sake of a future and unseen good is, that it was prompted not by
family affection or greed or an adventurous disposition, but by faith in
a God Whom no one but himself recognised. It was the first step in a
life-long adherence to an Invisible, Spiritual Supreme. It was that
first step which committed him to life-long dependence upon and
intercourse with One Who had authority to regulate his movements and
power to bless him. From this time forth all that he sought in life was
the fulfilment of God's promise. He staked his future upon God's
existence and faithfulness. Had Abraham abandoned Charran at the command
of a widely ruling monarch who promised him ample compensation, no
record would have been made of so ordinary a transaction. But this was
an entirely new thing and well worth recording, that a man should leave
country and kindred and seek an unknown land under the impression that
thus he was obeying the command of the unseen God. While others
worshipped sun, moon, and stars, and recognised the Divine in their
brilliance and power, in their exaltation above earth and control of
earth and its life, Abraham saw that there was something greater than
the order of nature and more worthy of worship, even the still small
voice that spoke within his own conscience of right and wrong in human
conduct, and that told him how his own life must be ordered. While all
around him were bowing down to the heavenly host and sacrificing to them
the highest things in human nature, he heard a voice falling from these
shining ministers of God's will, which said to him, "See thou do it not,
for we are thy fellow-servants; worship thou God!" This was the triumph
of the spiritual over the material; the acknowledgment that in God there
is something greater than can be found in nature; that man finds his
true affinity not in the things that are seen but in the unseen Spirit
that is over all. It is this that gives to the figure of Abraham its
simple grandeur and its permanent significance.

Under the simple statement "The Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of
thy country," there are probably hidden years of questioning and
meditation. God's revelation of Himself to Abram in all probability did
not take the determinate form of articulate command without having
passed through many preliminary stages of surmise and doubt and mental
conflict. But once assured that God is calling him, Abraham responds
quickly and resolutely. The revelation has come to a mind in which it
will not be lost. As one of the few theologians who have paid attention
to the method of revelation has said: "A Divine revelation does not
dispense with a certain character and certain qualities of mind in the
person who is the instrument of it. A man who throws off the chains of
authority and association must be a man of extraordinary independence
and strength of mind, although he does so in obedience to a Divine
revelation; because no miracle, no sign or wonder which accompanies a
revelation can by its simple stroke force human nature from the innate
hold of custom and the adhesion to and fear of established opinion; can
enable it to confront the frowns of men, and take up truth opposed to
general prejudice, except there is in the man himself, who is the
recipient of the revelation, a certain strength of mind and
independence which concurs with the Divine intention."

That Abraham's faith triumphed over exceptional difficulties and enabled
him to do what no other motive would have been strong enough to
accomplish, there is therefore no call to assert. During his after-life
his faith was severely tried, but the mere abandonment of his country in
the hope of gaining a better was the ordinary motive of his day. It was
the _ground_ of this hope, the belief in God, which made Abraham's
conduct original and fruitful. That sufficient inducement was presented
to him is only to say that God is reasonable. There is always sufficient
inducement to obey God; because life is reasonable. No man was ever
commanded or required to do anything which it was not for his advantage
to do. Sin is a mistake. But so weak are we, so liable to be moved by
the things present to us and by the desire for immediate gratification,
that it never ceases to be wonderful and admirable when a sense of duty
enables a man to forego present advantage and to believe that present
loss is the needful preliminary of eternal gain.

Abraham's faith is chosen by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews as
an apt illustration of his definition of Faith, that it is "the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." One
property of faith is that it gives to things future and which are as yet
only hoped for all the reality of actual present existence. Future
things may be said to have no existence for those who do not believe in
them. They are not taken into account. Men do not shape their conduct
with any reference to them. But when a man believes in certain events
that are to be, this faith of his lends to these future things the
reality, the "substance" which things actually existing in the present
have. They have the same weight with him, the same influence upon his
conduct.

Without some power to realize the future and to take account of what is
to be as well as of what already is, we could not carry on the common
affairs of life. And success in life very greatly depends on foresight,
or the power to see clearly what is to be and give it due weight. The
man who has no foresight makes his plans, but being unable to apprehend
the future his plans are disconcerted. Indeed it is one of the most
valuable gifts a man can have, to be able to say with tolerable accuracy
what is to happen and what is not; to be able to sift rumours, common
talk, popular impressions, probabilities, chances, and to be able to
feel sure what the future will really be; to be able to weigh the
character and commercial prospects of the men he deals with, so as to
see what must be the issue of their operations and whom he may trust.
Many of our most serious mistakes in life arise from our inability to
imagine the consequences of our actions and to forefeel how these
consequences will affect us.

Now faith largely supplies the want of this imaginative foresight. It
lends substance to things future. It believes the account given of the
future by a trustworthy authority. In many ordinary matters all men are
dependent on the testimony of others for their knowledge of the result
of certain operations. The astronomer, the physiologist, the navigator,
each has his department within which his predictions are accepted as
authoritative. But for what is beyond the ken of science no faith in our
fellow-men avails. Feeling that if there is a life beyond the grave, it
must have important bearings on the present, we have yet no data by
which to calculate what will then be, or only data so difficult to use
that our calculations are but guesswork. But faith accepts the testimony
of God as unhesitatingly as that of man and gives reality to the future
He describes and promises. It believes that the life God calls us to is
a better life, and it enters upon it. It believes that there is a world
to come in which all things are new and all things eternal; and, so
believing, it cannot but feel less anxious to cling to this world's
goods. That which embitters all loss and deepens sorrow is the feeling
that this world is all; but faith makes eternity as real as time and
gives substantial existence to that new and limitless future in which we
shall have time to forget the sorrows and live past the losses of this
present world.

The radical elements of greatness are identical from age to age, and the
primal duties which no good man can evade do not vary as the world grows
older. What we admire in Abraham we feel to be incumbent on ourselves.
Indeed the uniform call of Christ to all His followers is even in form
almost identical with that which stirred Abraham, and made him the
father of the faithful. "Follow Me," says our Lord, "and every one that
forsaketh houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or
wife, or children, or lands, for My name's sake, shall receive an
hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life." And there is something
perennially edifying in the spectacle of a man who believes that God has
a place and a use for him in the world, and who puts himself at God's
disposal; who enters upon life refusing to be bound by the circumstances
of his upbringing, by the expectations of his friends, by prevailing
customs, by prospect of gain and advancement among men; and resolved to
listen to the highest voice of all, to discover what God has for him to
do upon earth and where he is likely to find most of God; who virtually
and with deepest sincerity says, Let God choose my destination: I have
good land here, but if God wishes me elsewhere, elsewhere I go: who, in
one word, believes in the call of God to himself, who admits it into the
springs of his conduct, and recognises that for him also the highest
life his conscience can suggest is the only life he can live, no matter
how cumbrous and troublesome and expensive be the changes involved in
entering it. Let the spectacle take hold of your imagination--the
spectacle of a man believing that there is something more akin to
himself and higher than the material life and the great laws that govern
it, and going calmly and hopefully forward into the unknown, because he
knows that God is with him, that in God is our true life, that man
liveth not by bread only, but by every word that cometh out of the mouth
of God.

Even thus then may we bring our faith to a true and reliable test. All
men who have a confident expectation of future good make sacrifices or
run risks to obtain it. Mercantile life proceeds on the understanding
that such ventures are reasonable and will always be made. Men might if
they liked spend their money on present pleasure, but they rarely do so.
They prefer to put it into concerns or transactions from which they
expect to reap large returns. They have faith and as a necessary
consequence they make ventures. So did these Hebrews--they ran a great
risk, they gave up the sole means of livelihood they had any experience
of and entered what they knew to be a bare desert, because they believed
in the land that lay beyond and in God's promise. What then has your
faith done? What have you ventured that you would not have ventured but
for God's promise? Suppose Christ's promise failed, in what would you be
the losers? Of course you would lose what you call your hope of
heaven--but what would you find you had lost in this world? When a
merchant's ships are wrecked or when his investment turns out bad, he
loses not only the gain he hoped for, but the means he risked. Suppose
then Christ were declared bankrupt, unable to fulfil your expectations,
would you really find that you had ventured so much upon His promise
that you are deeply involved in His bankruptcy, and are much worse off
in this world and now than you would otherwise have been? Or may I not
use the words of one of the most cautious and charitable of men, and
say, "I really fear, when we come to examine, it will be found that
there is nothing we resolve, nothing we do, nothing we do not do,
nothing we avoid, nothing we choose, nothing we give up, nothing we
pursue, which we should not resolve, and do, and not do, and avoid, and
choose, and give up, and pursue, if Christ had not died and heaven were
not promised us." If this be the case--if you would be neither much
better nor much worse though Christianity were a fable--if you have in
nothing become poorer in this world that your reward in heaven may be
greater, if you have made no investments and run no risks, then really
the natural inference is that your faith in the future inheritance is
small. Barnabas sold his Cyprus property because he believed heaven was
his, and his bit of land suddenly became a small consideration; useful
only in so far as he could with the mammon of unrighteousness make
himself a mansion in heaven. Paul gave up his prospects of advancement
in the nation, of which he would of course as certainly have become the
leader and first man as he took that position in the Church, and plainly
tells us that having made so large a venture on Christ's word, he would
if this word failed be a great loser, of all men most miserable because
he had risked his all _in this life_ on it. People sometimes take
offence at Paul's plain way of speaking of the sacrifices he had made,
and of Peter's plain way of saying "we have left all and followed Thee,
what shall we have therefore?" but when people have made sacrifices they
know it and can specify them, and a faith that makes no sacrifices is no
good either in this world's affairs or in religion. Self-consciousness
may not be a very good thing: but self-deception is a worse.

Here as elsewhere a clear hope sprang from faith. Recognising God,
Abraham knew that there was for men a great future. He looked forward to
a time when all men should believe as he did, and in him all families of
the earth be blessed. No doubt in these early days when all men were on
the move and striving to make a name and a place for themselves, an
onward look might be common. But the far-reaching extent, the certainty,
and the definiteness of Abraham's view of the future were unexampled.
There far back in the hazy dawn he stood while the morning mists hid the
horizon from every other eye, and he alone discerns what is to be. One
clear voice and one only rings out in unfaltering tones and from amidst
the babel of voices that utter either amazing follies or misdirected
yearnings, gives the one true forecast and direction--the one living
word which has separated itself from and survived all the
prognostications of Chaldean sooth-sayers and priests of Ur, because it
has never ceased to give life to men. It has created for itself a
channel and you can trace it through the centuries by the living green
of its banks and the life it gives as it goes. For this hope of Abraham
has been fulfilled; the creed and its accompanying blessing which that
day lived in the heart of one man only has brought blessing to all the
families of the earth.

VIII.

_ABRAM IN EGYPT._

GENESIS xii. 6-20.

Abram still journeying southward and not as yet knowing where his
shifting camp was finally to be pitched, came at last to what may be
called the heart of Palestine, the rich district of Shechem. Here stood
the oak of Moreh, a well-known landmark and favourite meeting-place. In
after years every meadow in this plain was owned and occupied, every
vineyard on the slopes of Ebal fenced off, every square yard specified
in some title-deed. But as yet the country seems not to have been
densely populated. There was room for a caravan like Abram's to move
freely through the country, liberty for a far-stretching encampment such
as his to occupy the lovely vale that lies between Ebal and Gerizim. As
he rested here and enjoyed the abundant pasture, or as he viewed the
land from one of the neighbouring hills, the Lord appeared to him and
made him aware that this was the land designed for him. Here accordingly
under the spreading oak round whose boughs had often clung the smoke of
idolatrous sacrifice, Abram erects an altar to the living God in devout
acceptance of the gift, taking possession as it were of the land jointly
for God and for himself. Little harm will come of worldly possessions so
taken and so held.

As Abram traversed the land, wondering what were the limits of his
inheritance, it may have seemed far too large for his household. Soon he
experiences a difficulty of quite the opposite kind; he is unable to
find in it sustenance for his followers. Any notion that God's
friendship would raise him above the touch of such troubles as were
incident to the times, places, and circumstances in which his life was
to be spent, is quickly dispelled. The children of God are not exempt
from any of the common calamities; they are only expected and aided to
be calmer and wiser in their endurance and use of them. That we suffer
the same hardships as all other men is no proof that we are not
eternally associated with God, and ought never to persuade us our faith
has been in vain.

Abram, as he looked at the bare, brown, cracked pastures and at the dry
watercourses filled only with stones, thought of the ever-fresh plains
of Mesopotamia, the lovely gardens of Damascus, the rich pasturage of
the northern borders of Canaan; but he knew enough of his own heart to
make him very careful lest these remembrances should make him turn back.
No doubt he had come to the promised land expecting it to be the real
Utopia, the Paradise which had haunted his thoughts as he lay among the
hills of Ur watching his flocks under the brilliant midnight sky. No
doubt he expected that here all would be easy and bright, peaceful and
luxurious. His first experience is of famine. He has to look on his herd
melting away, his favourite cattle losing their appearance, his servants
murmuring and obliged to scatter. In his dreams he must have night after
night seen the old country, the green breadth of the land that Euphrates
watered, the heavy headed corn bending before the warm airs of his
native land; but morning by morning he wakes to the same anxieties, to
the sad reality of parched and burnt-up pastures, shepherds hanging
about with gloomy looks, his own heart distressed and failing. He was
also a stranger here who could not look for the help an old resident
might have counted on. It was probably years since God had made any sign
to him. Was the promised land worth having after all? Might he not be
better off among his old friends in Charran? Should he not brave their
ridicule and return? He will not so much as make it possible to return.
He will not even for temporary relief go north towards his old country,
but will go to Egypt, where he cannot stay, and from which he must
return to Canaan.

Here, then, is a man who plainly believes that God's promise cannot
fail; that God will magnify His promise, and that it above all else is
worth waiting for. He believes that the man who seeks without flinching
and through all disappointment and bareness to do God's will, shall one
day have an abundantly satisfying reward, and that meanwhile association
with God in carrying forward His abiding purposes with men is more for a
man to live upon than the cattle upon a thousand hills. And thus famine
rendered to Abram no small service if it quickened within him the
consciousness that the call of God was not to ease and prosperity, to
land-owning and cattle-breeding, but to be God's agent on earth for the
fulfilment of remote but magnificent purposes. His life might seem to be
down among the commonplace vicissitudes, pasture might fail, and his
well-stocked camp melt away, but out of his mind there could not fade
the future God had revealed to him. If it had been his ambition to give
his name to a tribe and be known as a wide-ruling chief, that ambition
is now eclipsed by his desire to be a step towards the fulfilment of
that real end for which the whole world is. The belief that God has
called him to do His work has lifted him above concern about personal
matters; life has taken a new meaning in his eyes by its connection with
the Eternal.

The extraordinary country to which Abram betook himself, and which was
destined to exercise so profound an influence on his descendants, had
even at this early date attained a high degree of civilisation. The
origin of this civilisation is shrouded in obscurity, as the source of
the great river to which the country owes its prosperity for many
centuries kept the secret of its birth. As yet scholars are unable to
tell us with certainty what Pharaoh was on the throne when Abram went
down into Egypt. The monuments have preserved the effigies of two
distinct types of rulers; the one simple, kindly, sensible, stately,
handsome, fearless, as of men long accustomed to the throne. These are
the faces of the native Egyptian rulers. The other type of face is heavy
and massive, proud and strong but full of care, with neither the
handsome features nor the look of kindliness and culture which belong to
the other. These are the faces of the famous Shepherd kings who held
Egypt in subjection, probably at the very time when Abram was in the
land.

For our purposes it matters little whether Abram's visit occurred while
the country was under native or under foreign rule, for long before the
Shepherd kings entered Egypt it enjoyed a complete and stable
civilisation. Whatever dynasty Abram found on the throne, he certainly
found among the people a more refined social life than he had seen in
his native city, a much purer religion, and a much more highly developed
moral code. He must have kept himself entirely aloof from Egyptian
society if he failed to discover that they believed in a judgment after
death, and that this judgment proceeded upon a severe moral code. Before
admission into the Egyptian heaven the deceased must swear that "he has
not stolen nor slain any one intentionally; that he has not allowed his
devotions to be seen; that he has not been guilty of hypocrisy or lying;
that he has not calumniated any one nor fallen into drunkenness or
adultery; that he has not turned away his ear from the words of truth;
that he has been no idle talker; that he has not slighted the king or
his father." To a man in Abram's state of mind the Egyptian creed and
customs must have conveyed many valuable suggestions.

But virtuous as in many respects the Egyptians were, Abram's fears as he
approached their country were by no means groundless. The event proved
that whatever Sarah's age and appearance at this time were, his fears
were something more than the fruit of a husband's partiality. Possibly
he may have heard the ugly story which has recently been deciphered from
an old papyrus, and which tells how one of the Pharaohs, acting on the
advice of his princes, sent armed men to fetch a beautiful woman and
make away with her husband. But knowing the risk he ran, why did he go?
He contemplated the possibility of Sarah's being taken from him; but, if
this should happen, what became of the promised seed? We cannot suppose
that, driven by famine from the promised land, he had lost all hope
regarding the fulfilment of the other part of the promise. Probably his
idea was that some of the great men might take a fancy to Sarah, and
that he would so temporise with them and ask for her such large gifts as
would hold them off for a while until he could provide for his people
and get clear out of the land. It had not occurred to him that she might
be taken to the palace. Whatever his idea of the probable course of
events was, his proposal to guide them by disguising his true
relationship to Sarah was unjustifiable. And his feelings during these
weeks in Egypt must have been far from enviable as he learned that of
all virtues the Egyptians set greatest store by truth, and that lying
was the vice they held in greatest abhorrence.

Here then was the whole promise and purpose of God in a most precarious
position; the land abandoned, the mother of the promised seed in a harem
through whose guards no force on earth could penetrate. Abram could do
nothing but go helplessly about, thinking what a fool he had been, and
wishing himself well back among the parched hills of Bethel. Suddenly
there is a panic in the royal household; and Pharaoh is made aware that
he was on the brink of what he himself considered a great sin. Besides
effecting its immediate purpose, this visitation might have taught
Pharaoh that a man cannot safely sin within limits prescribed by
himself. He had not intended such evil as he found himself just saved
from committing. But had he lived with perfect purity, this liability to
fall into transgression, shocking to himself, could not have existed.
Many sins of most painful consequence we commit, not of deliberate
purpose, but because our previous life has been careless and lacking in
moral tone. We are mistaken if we suppose that we can sin within a
certain safe circle and never go beyond it.

By this intervention on God's part Abram was saved from the consequences
of his own scheme, but he was not saved from the indignant rebuke of the
Egyptian monarch. This rebuke indeed did not prevent him from a
repetition of the same conduct in another country, conduct which was met
with similar indignation: "What have I offended thee, that thou hast
brought on me and on my kingdom this great sin? Thou hast done deeds
unto me that ought not to be done. What sawest thou that thou hast done
this thing?" This rebuke did not seem to sink deeply into the conscience
of Abram's descendants, for the Jewish history is full of instances in
which leading men do not shrink from man[oe]uvre, deceit and lying. Yet
it is impossible to suppose that Abram's conception of God was not
vastly enlarged by this incident, and this especially in two
particulars.

(1) Abram must have received a new impression regarding God's truth. It
would seem that as yet he had no very clear idea of God's holiness. He
had the idea of God which Mohammedans entertain, and past which they
seem unable to get. He conceived of God as the Supreme Ruler; he had a
firm belief in the unity of God and probably a hatred of idolatry and a
profound contempt for idolaters. He believed that this Supreme God could
always and easily accomplish His will, and that the voice that inwardly
guided him was the voice of God. His own character had not yet been
deepened and dignified by prolonged intercourse with God and by close
observation of His actual ways; and so as yet he knows little of what
constitutes the true glory of God.

For learning that truth is an essential attribute of God he could not
have gone to a better school than Egypt. His own reliance on God's
promise might have been expected to produce in him a high esteem for
truth and a clear recognition of its essential place in the Divine
character. Apparently it had only partially had this effect. The
heathen, therefore, must teach him. Had not Abram seen the look of
indignation and injury on the face of Pharaoh, he might have left the
land feeling that his scheme had succeeded admirably. But as he went at
the head of his vastly increased household, the envy of many who saw his
long train of camels and cattle, he would have given up all could he
have blotted from his mind's eye the reproachful face of Pharaoh and
nipped out this entire episode from his life. He was humbled both by his
falseness and his foolishness. He had told a lie, and told it when truth
would have served him better. For the very precaution he took in passing
off Sarai as his sister was precisely what encouraged Pharaoh to take
her, and produced the whole misadventure. It was the heathen monarch who
taught the father of the faithful his first lesson in God's holiness.

What he so painfully learned we must all learn, that God does not need
lying for the attainment of His ends, and that double-dealing is always
short-sighted and the proper precursor of shame. Frequently men are
tempted like Abram to seek a God-protected and God-prospered life by
conduct that is not thoroughly straightforward. Some of us who statedly
ask God to bless our endeavours, and who have no doubt that God approves
the ends we seek to accomplish, do yet adopt such means of attaining our
ends as not even men with any high sense of honour would countenance. To
save ourselves from trouble, inconvenience, or danger, we are tempted to
evasions and shifts which are not free from guilt. The more one sees of
life, the higher value does he set on truth. Let lying be called by
whatever flattering title men please--let it pass for diplomacy,
smartness, self-defence, policy, or civility--it remains the device of
the coward, the absolute bar to free and healthy intercourse, a vice
which diffuses itself through the whole character and makes growth
impossible. Trade and commerce are always hampered and retarded, and
often overwhelmed in disaster, by the determined and deliberate
doubleness of those who engage in them; charity is minimised and
withheld from its proper objects by the suspiciousness engendered in us
by the almost universal falseness of men; and the habit of making things
seem to others what they are not, reacts upon the man himself and makes
it difficult for him to feel the abiding effective reality of anything
he has to do with or even of his own soul. If then we are to know the
living and true God we must ourselves be true, transparent, and living
in the light as He is the Light. If we are to reach His ends we must
adopt His means and abjure all crafty contrivances of our own. If we are
to be His heirs and partners in the work of the world, we must first be
His children, and show that we have attained our majority by manifesting
an indubitable resemblance to His own clear truth.

(2) But whether Abram fully learned this lesson or not, there can be
little doubt that at this time he did receive fresh and abiding
impressions of God's faithfulness and sufficiency. In Abram's first
response to God's call he exhibited a remarkable independence and
strength of character. His abandonment of home and kindred on account of
a religious faith which he alone possessed, was the act of a man who
relied much more on himself than on others and who had the courage of
his convictions. This qualification for playing a great part in human
affairs he undoubtedly had. But he had also the defects of his
qualities. A weaker man would have shrunk from going into Egypt and
would have preferred to see his flocks dwindle rather than take so
venturesome a step. No such hesitations could trammel Abram's
movements. He felt himself equal to all occasions. That part of his
character which was reproduced in his grandson Jacob, a readiness to
rise to every emergency that called for management and diplomacy, an
aptitude for dealing with men and using them for his purposes--this came
to the front now! To all the timorous suggestions of his household he
had one reply: Leave it all to me; I will bring you through. So he
entered Egypt confident that single-handed he could cope with their
Pharaohs, priests, magicians, guards, judges, warriors; and find his way
through the finely-meshed net that held and examined every person and
action in the land.

He left Egypt in a much more healthy state of mind, practically
convinced of his own inability to work his way to the happiness God had
promised him, and equally convinced of God's faithfulness and power to
bring him through all the embarrassments and disasters into which his
own folly and sin might bring him. His own confidence and management had
placed God's promise in a position of extreme hazard; and without the
intervention of God Abram saw that he could neither recover the mother
of the promised seed nor return to the land of promise. Abram is put to
shame even in the eyes of his household slaves; and with what burning
shame must he have stood before Sarai and Pharaoh, and received back his
wife from him whose wickedness he had feared, but who so far from
meaning to sin as Abram suspected, was indignant that Abram should have
made it even possible. He returned to Canaan humbled and very little
disposed to feel confident in his own powers of managing in emergencies;
but quite assured that God might at all times be relied on. He was
convinced that God was not depending upon him, but he upon God. He saw
that God did not trust to his cleverness and craft, no, nor even to his
willingness to do and endure God's will, but that He was trusting in
Himself, and that by His faithfulness to His own promise, by His
watchfulness and providence, He would bring Abram through all the
entanglements caused by his own poor ideas of the best way to work out
God's ends and attain to His blessing. He saw, in a word, that the
future of the world lay not with Abram but with God.

This certainly was a great and needful step in the knowledge of God.
Thus early and thus unmistakably was man taught in how profound and
comprehensive a sense God is his Saviour. Commonly it takes a man a long
time to learn that it is God who is saving him, but one day he learns
it. He learns that it is not his own faith but God's faithfulness that
saves him. He perceives that he needs God throughout, from first to
last; not only to make him offers, but to enable him to accept them; not
only to incline him to accept them to-day, but to maintain within him at
all times this same inclination. He learns that God not only makes him a
promise and leaves him to find his own way to what is promised; but that
He is with him always, disentangling him day by day from the results of
his own folly and securing for him not only possible but actual
blessedness.

Few discoveries are so welcome and gladdening to the soul. Few give us
the same sense of God's nearness and sovereignty; few make us feel so
deeply the dignity and importance of our own salvation and career. This
is God's affair; a matter in which are involved not merely our personal
interests, but God's responsibility and purposes. God calls us to be
His, and He does not send us a-warring on our own charges, but
throughout furnishes us with _everything_ we need. When we go down to
Egypt, when we quite diverge from the path that leads to the promised
land and worldly straits tempt us to turn our back upon God's altar and
seek relief by our own arrangements and devices, when we forget for a
while how God has identified our interests with His own and tacitly
abjure the vows we have silently registered before Him, even then He
follows us and watches over us and lays His hand upon us and bids us
back. And this only is our hope. Not in any determination of our own to
cleave to Him and to live in faith on His promise can we trust. If we
have this determination, let us cherish it, for this is God's present
means of leading us onwards. But should this determination fail, the
shame with which you recognise your want of steadfastness may prove a
stronger bond to hold you to Him than the bold confidence with which
to-day you view the future. The waywardness, the foolishness, the
obstinate depravity that cause you to despair, God will conquer. With
untiring patience, with all-foreseeing love, He stands by you and will
bring you through. His gifts and calling are without repentance.

IX.

_LOT'S SEPARATION FROM ABRAM._

GENESIS xiii.

Abram left Egypt thinking meanly of himself, highly of God. This humble
frame of mind is disclosed in the route he chooses; he went straight
back "unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning, unto the
altar which he had made there at the first." With a childlike simplicity
he seems to own that his visit to Egypt had been a mistake. He had gone
there supposing that he was thrown upon his own resources, and that in
order to keep himself and his dependants alive he must have recourse to
craft and dishonesty. By retracing his steps and returning to the altar
at Bethel, he seems to acknowledge that he should have remained there
through the famine in dependence on God.

Whoever has attempted a similar practical repentance, visible to his own
household and affecting their place of abode or daily occupations, will
know how to estimate the candour and courage of Abram. To own that some
distinctly marked portion of our life, upon which we entered with great
confidence in our own wisdom and capacity, has come to nothing and has
betrayed us into reprehensible conduct, is mortifying indeed. To admit
that we have erred and to repair our error by returning to our old way
and practice, is what few of us have the courage to do. If we have
entered on some branch of business or gone into some attractive
speculation, or if we have altered our demeanour towards some friend,
and if we are finding that we are thereby tempted to doubleness, to
equivocation, to injustice, our only hope lies in a candid and
straightforward repentance, in a manly and open return to the state of
things that existed in happier days and which we should never have
abandoned. Sometimes we are aware that a blight began to fall on our
spiritual life from a particular date, and we can easily and distinctly
trace an unhealthy habit of spirit to a well-marked passage in our
outward career; but we shrink from the sacrifice and shame involved in a
thoroughgoing restoration of the old state of things. We are always so
ready to fancy we have done enough, if we get one heartfelt word of
confession uttered; so ready, if we merely turn our faces towards God,
to think our restoration complete. Let us make a point of getting
through mere beginnings of repentance, mere intention to recover God's
favour and a sound condition of life, and let us return and return till
we bow at God's very altar again, and know that His hand is laid upon us
in blessing as at the first.

Out of Egypt Abram brought vastly increased wealth. Each time he
encamped, quite a town of black tents quickly rose round the spot where
his fixed spear gave the signal for halting. And along with him there
journeyed his nephew, apparently of almost equal, or at least
considerable wealth; not dependent on Abram, nor even a partner with
him, for "Lot also had flocks and herds and tents." So rapidly was their
substance increasing that no sooner did they become stationary than
they found that the land was not able to furnish them with sufficient
pasture. The Canaanite and the Perizzite would not allow them unlimited
pasture in the neighbourhood of Bethel; and as the inevitable result of
this the rival shepherds, eager to secure the best pasture for their own
flocks and the best wells for their own cattle and camels, came to high
words and probably to blows about their respective rights.

To both Abram and Lot it must have occurred that this competition
between relatives was unseemly, and that some arrangement must be come
to. And when at last some unusually blunt quarrel took place in presence
of the chiefs, Abram divulges to Lot the scheme which had suggested
itself to him. This state of things, he says, must come to an end; it is
unseemly, unwise, and unrighteous. And as they walk on out of the circle
of tents to discuss the matter without interruption, they come to a
rising ground where the wide prospect brings them naturally to a pause.
Abram looking north and south and seeing with the trained eye of a large
flock-master that there was abundant pasture for both, turns to Lot with
a final proposal: "Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself,
I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to
the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the
left."

Thus early did wealth produce quarrelling among relatives. The men who
had shared one another's fortunes while comparatively poor, no sooner
become wealthy than they have to separate. Abram prevented quarrel by
separation. "Let us," he says, "come to an understanding. And rather
than be separate in heart, let us be separate in habitation." It is
always a sorrowful time in family history when it comes to this, that
those who have had a common purse and have not been careful to know what
exactly is theirs and what belongs to the other members of the family,
have at last to make a division and to be as precise and documentary as
if dealing with strangers. It is always painful to be compelled to own
that law can be more trusted than love, and that legal forms are a surer
barrier against quarrelling than brotherly kindness. It is a confession
we are sometimes compelled to make, but never without a mixture of
regret and shame.

As yet the character of Lot has not been exhibited, and we can only
calculate from the relation he bears to Abram what his answer to the
proposal will probably be. We know that Abram has been the making of his
nephew, and that the land belongs to Abram; and we should expect that in
common decency Lot would set aside the generous offer of his uncle and
demand that he only should determine the matter. "It is not for me to
make choice in a land which is wholly yours. My future does not carry in
it the import of yours. It is a small matter what kind of subsistence I
secure or where I find it. Choose for yourself, and allot to me what is
right." We see here what a safeguard of happiness in life right feeling
is. To be in right and pleasant relations with the persons around us
will save us from error and sin even when conscience and judgment give
no certain decision. The heart which feels gratitude is beyond the need
of being schooled and compelled to do justly. To the man who is
affectionately disposed it is superfluous to insist upon the rights of
other persons. The instinct which tells a man what is due to others and
makes him sensitive to their wrongs will preserve him from many an
ignominious action which would degrade his whole life. But such
instinct was awanting in Lot. His character though in some respects
admirable had none of the generosity of Abram's in it. He had allowed
himself on countless previous occasions to take advantage of Abram's
unselfishness. Generosity is not always infectious; often it encourages
selfishness in child, relative, or neighbour. And so Lot instead of
rivalling, traded on his uncle's magnanimity; and chose him all the
plains of Jordan because in his eye it was the richest part of the land.

This choice of Sodom as a dwelling-place was the great mistake of Lot's
life. He is the type of that very large class of men who have but one
rule for determining them at the turning points of life. He was swayed
solely by the consideration of worldly advantage. He has nothing deep,
nothing high in him. He recognises no duty to Abram, no gratitude, no
modesty; he has no perception of spiritual relations, no sense that God
should have something to say in the partition of the land. Lot may be
acquitted of a good deal which at first sight one is prompted to lay to
his charge, but he cannot be acquitted of showing an eagerness to better
himself, regardless of all considerations but the promise of wealth
afforded by the fertility of the Jordan valley. He saw a quick though
dangerous road to wealth. There seemed a certainty of success in his
earthly calling, a risk only of moral disaster. He shut his eyes to the
risk that he might grasp the wealth; and so doing, ruined both himself
and his family.

The situation is one which is ceaselessly repeated. To men in business
or in the cultivation of literature or art, or in one of the
professions, there are presented opportunities of attaining a better
position by cultivating the friendship or identifying oneself with the
practice of men whose society is not in itself desirable. Society is
made up of little circles, each of which has its own monopoly of some
social or commercial or political advantage, and its own characteristic
tone and enjoyments and customs. And if a man will not join one of these
circles and accommodate himself to the mode of carrying on business and
to the style of living it has identified with itself, he must forego the
advantages which entrance to that circle would secure for him. As
clearly as Lot saw that the well-watered plain stretching away under the
sunshine was the right place to exercise his vocation as a flock-master,
so do we see that associated with such and such persons and recognised
as one of them, we shall be able more effectively than in any other
position to use whatever natural gifts we have, and win the recognition
and the profit these gifts seem to warrant. There is but one drawback.
"The men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly."
There is a tone you do not like; you hesitate to identify yourself with
men who live solely and with cynical frankness only for gain; whose
every sentence betrays the contemptible narrowness of soul to which
worldliness condemns men; who live for money and who glory in their
shame.

The very nature of the world in which we live makes such temptation
universal. And to yield is common and fatal. We persuade ourselves we
need not enter into close relations with the persons we propose to have
business connections with. Lot would have been horrified, that day he
made his choice, had it been told him his daughters would marry men of
Sodom. But the swimmer who ventures into the outer circle of the
whirlpool finds that his own resolve not to go further presents a very
weak resistance to the water's inevitable suction. We fancy perhaps
that to refuse the companionship of any class of men is pharisaic; that
we have no business to condemn the attitude towards the Church, or the
morality, or the style of living adopted by any class of men among us.
This is the mere cant of liberalism. We do not condemn persons who
suffer from smallpox, but a smallpox hospital would be about the last
place we should choose for a residence. Or possibly we imagine we shall
be able to carry some better influences into the society we enter. A
vain imagination; the motive for choosing the society has already sapped
our power for good.

Many of the errors of worldly men only reveal their most disastrous
consequences in the second generation. Like some virulent diseases they
have a period of incubation. Lot's family grew up in a very different
atmosphere from that which had nourished his own youth in Abram's tents.
An adult and robust Englishman can withstand the climate of India; but
his children who are born in it cannot. And the position in society
which has been gained in middle life by the carefully and hardily
trained child of a God-fearing household, may not very visibly damage
his own character, but may yet be absolutely fatal to the morality of
his children. Lot may have persuaded himself he chose the dangerous
prosperity of Sodom mainly for the sake of his children; but in point of
fact he had better have seen them die of starvation in the most barren
and parched desolation. And the parent who disregards conscience and
chooses wealth or position, fancying that thus he benefits his children,
will find to his life-long sorrow that he has entangled them in
unimagined temptations.

But the man who makes Lot's choice not only does a great injury to his
children, but cuts himself off from all that is best in life. We are
safe to say that after leaving Abram's tents Lot never again enjoyed
unconstrainedly happy days. The men born and brought up in Sodom were
possibly happy after their kind and in their fashion; but Lot was not.
His soul was daily vexed. Many a time while hearing the talk of the men
his daughters had married, must Lot have gone out with a sore heart, and
looked to the distant hills that hid the tents of Abram, and longed for
an hour of the company he used to enjoy. And the society to which you
are tempted to join yourself may not be unhappy, but you can take no
surer means of beclouding, embittering, and ruining your whole life than
by joining it. You cannot forget the thoughts you once had, the
friendships you once delighted in, the hopes that shed brightness
through all your life. You cannot blot out the ideal that once you
cherished as the most animating element of your life. Every day there
will be that rising in your mind which is in the sharpest contrast to
the thoughts of those with whom you are associated. You will despise
them for their shallow, worldly ideas and ways; but you will despise
yourself still more, being conscious that what they are through
ignorance and upbringing, you are in virtue of your own foolish and mean
choice. There is that in you which rebels against the superficial and
external measure by which they judge things, and yet you have
deliberately chosen these as your associates, and can only think with
heart-broken regret of the high thoughts that once visited you and the
hopes you have now no means of fulfilling. Your life is taken out of
your own hands; you find yourself in bondage to the circumstances you
have chosen; and you are learning in bitterness, disappointment, and
shame, that indeed "a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the
things which he possesseth." To determine your life solely by the
prospect of worldly success is to risk the loss of the best things in
life. To sacrifice friendship or conscience to success in your calling
is to sacrifice what is best to what is lowest, and to blind yourself to
the highest human happiness. For happily the essential elements of the
highest happiness are as open to the poor as to the rich, to the
unsuccessful as to the successful--love of wife and children, congenial
and educating friendships, the knowledge of what the best men have done
and the wisest men have said; the pleasure and impulse, the sentiments
and beliefs which result from our knowledge of the heroic deeds done
from year to year among men; the enlivening influence of examples that
tell on all men alike, young and old, rich and poor; the insight and
strength of character that are won in the hard wrestle with life; the
growing consciousness that God is in human life, that He is ours and
that we are His--these things and all that makes human life of value are
universal as air and sunshine, but must be missed by those who make the
world their object.

Though in point of fact Lot cut himself off by his choice from direct
participation in the special inheritance to which Abram was called by
God, it might perhaps be too much to say that his choice of the valley
of Jordan was an explicit renunciation of the special blessedness of
those who find their joy in responding to God's call and doing His work
in the world. It might also be extravagant to say that his choice of the
richest land was prompted by the feeling that he was not included in the
promise to Abram, and might as well make the most of his present
opportunities. But it is certain that Abram's generosity to Lot arose
out of his sense that in God he himself had abundant possession. In
Egypt he had learned that in order to secure all that is worth having a
man need never resort to duplicity, trickery, bold lying. He now learns
that in order to enter on his own God-provided lot, he need shut no
other man out of his. He is taught that to acknowledge amply the rights
of other men is the surest road to the enjoyment of his own rights. He
is taught that there is room in God's plan for every man to follow his
most generous impulses and the highest views of life that visit him.

It was Abram's simple belief that God's promise was meant and was
substantial, that made him indifferent as to what Lot might choose. His
faith was judged in this scene, and was proved to be sound. This man
whose very calling it was to own this land, could freely allow Lot to
choose the best of it. Why? Because he has learned that it is not by any
plan of his own he is to come into possession; that God Who promised is
to give him the land in His own way, and that his part is to act
uprightly, mercifully, like God. Wherever there is faith, the same
results will appear. He who believes that God is pledged to provide for
him cannot be greedy, anxious, covetous; can only be liberal, even
magnanimous. Any one can thus test his own faith. If he does not find
that what God promises weighs substantially when put in the scales with
gold; if he does not find that the accomplishment of God's purpose with
him in the world is to him the most valuable thing, and actually compels
him to think lightly of worldly position and ordinary success; if he
does not find that in point of fact the gains which content a man of
the world shrivel and lose interest, he may feel tolerably certain he
has no faith and is not counting as certain what God has promised.

It is commonly observed that wealth pursues the men who part with it
most freely. Abram had this experience. No sooner had he allowed Lot to
choose his portion than God gave him assurance that the whole would be
his. It is "the meek" who "inherit the earth." Not only have they, in
their very losses and while suffering wrong at the hands of their
fellows, a purer joy than those who wrong them; but they know themselves
heirs of God with the certainty of enjoying all His possessions that can
avail for their advantage. Declining to devote themselves as living
sacrifices to business they hold their soul at leisure for what brings
truest happiness, for friendship, for knowledge, for charity. Even in
this life they may be said to inherit the earth, for all its richest
fruits are theirs--the ground may belong to other men, but the beauty of
the landscape is theirs without burden--and ever and anon they hear such
words as were now uttered to Abram. They alone are inclined or able to
receive renewed assurances that God is mindful of His promise and will
abundantly bless them. It is they who are in no haste to be rich, and
are content to abide in the retired hill-country where they can freely
assemble round God's altar, it is they who seek first the kingdom of God
and make sure of that, whatever else they put in hazard, to whom God's
encouragements come. You wonder at the certainty with which others speak
of hearing God's voice and that so seldom you have the joy of knowing
that God is directing and encouraging you. Why should you wonder, if you
very well know that your attention is directed mainly to the world,
that your heart trembles and thrills with all the fluctuations of your
earthly hopes, that you wait for news and listen to every hint that can
affect your position in life? Can you wonder that an ear trained to be
so sensitive to the near earthly sounds, should quite have lost the
range of heavenly voices?

Of the assurance here given him Abram was probably much in need when Lot
had withdrawn with his flocks and servants. When the warmth of feeling
cooled and allowed the somewhat unpleasant facts of the case to press
upon his mind; and when he heard his shepherds murmuring that after all
the strife they had maintained for their master's rights, he should have
weakly yielded these to Lot; and when he reflected, as now he inevitably
would reflect, how selfish and ungrateful Lot had shown himself to be,
he must have been tempted to think he had possibly made a mistake in
dealing so generously with such a man. This reflection on himself might
naturally grow into a reflection upon God, Who might have been expected
so to order matters as to give the best country to the best man. All
such reflections are precluded by the renewed grant he now receives of
the whole land.

It is always as difficult to govern our heart wisely after as before
making a sacrifice. It is as difficult to keep the will decided as to
make the original decision; and it is more difficult to think
affectionately of those for whom the sacrifice has been made, when the
change in their condition and our own is actually accomplished. There is
a natural reaction after a generous action which is not always
sufficiently resisted. And when we see that those who refuse to make any
sacrifices are more prosperous and less ruffled in spirit than ourselves
we are tempted to take matters into our own hand, and, without waiting
upon God, to use the world's quick ways. At such times we find how
difficult it is to hold an advanced position, and how much unbelief
mingles with the sincerest faith, and what vile dregs of selfishness
sully the clearest generosity; we find our need of God and of those
encouragements and assistances He can impart to the soul. Happy are we
if we receive them and are enabled thereby to be constant in the good we
have begun; for all sacrifice is good begun. And as Abram saw, when the
cities of the plain were destroyed, how kindly God had guided him; so
when our history is complete, we shall have no inclination to grumble at
any passage of our life which we entered by generosity and faith in God,
but shall see how tenderly God has held us back from much that our soul
has been ardently desiring, and which we thought would be the making of
us.

X.

_ABRAM'S RESCUE OF LOT._

GENESIS xiv.

This chapter evidently incorporates a contemporary account of the events
recorded. So antique a document was it even when it found its place in
this book, that the editor had to modernize some of its expressions that
it might be intelligible. The places mentioned were no longer known by
the names here preserved--Bela, the vale of Siddim, En-mishpat, the
valley of Shaveh, all these names were unknown even to the persons who
dwelt in the places once so designated. It can scarcely have been Abram
who wrote down the narrative, for he himself is spoken of as Abram the
Hebrew, the man born beyond the Euphrates, which is a way of speaking of
himself no one would naturally adopt. From the clear outline given of
the route followed by the expedition of Chedorlaomer, it might be
supposed that some old staff-secretary had reported on the campaign.
However that may be, the discoveries of the last two or three years have
shed light on the outlandish names that have stood for four thousand
years in this document, and on the relations subsisting between Elam and
Palestine.

On the bricks now preserved in our own British Museum the very names we
read in this chapter can be traced, in the slightly altered form which
is always given to a name when pronounced by different races.
Chedorlaomer is the Hebrew transliteration of Kudur Lagamar; Lagamar was
the name of one of the Chaldean deities, and the whole name means
Lagamar's son, evidently a name of dignity adopted by the king of Elam.
Elam comprehended the broad and rich plains to the east of the lower
course of the Tigris, together with the mountain range (8,000 to 10,000
feet high) that bounds them. Elam was always able to maintain its own
against Assyria and Babylonia, and at this time it evidently exercised
some kind of supremacy not only over these neighbouring powers, but as
far west as the valley of the Jordan. The importance of keeping open the
valley of the Jordan is obvious to every one who has interest enough in
the subject to look at a map. That valley was the main route for trading
caravans and for military expeditions between the Euphrates and Egypt.
Whoever held that valley might prove a most formidable annoyance and
indeed an absolute interruption to commercial or political relations
between Egypt and Elam, or the Eastern powers. Sometimes it might serve
the purpose of East and West to have a neutral power between them, as
became afterwards clear in the history of Israel, but oftener it was the
ambition of either Egypt or of the East to hold Canaan in subjection. A
rebellion therefore of these chiefs occupying the vale of Siddim was
sufficiently important to bring the king of Elam from his distant
capital, attaching to his army as he came, his tributaries Amraphel king
of Shinar or northern Chaldea, Arioch king of a district on the east of
the Euphrates, and finally Tidal, or rather Tur-gal _i.e._ the great
chief, who ruled over the nations or tribes to the north of Babylonia.

Susa, the capital of Elam, lies almost on the same parallel as the vale
of Siddim, but between them lie many hundred miles of impracticable
desert. Chedorlaomer and his army followed therefore much the same route
as Terah in his emigration, first going north-west up the Euphrates and
then crossing it probably at Carchemish, or above it, and coming
southward towards Canaan. But the country to the east of the Jordan and
the Dead Sea was occupied by warlike and marauding tribes who would have
liked nothing better than to swoop down on a rich booty-laden Eastern
army. With the sagacity of an old soldier therefore, Chedorlaomer makes
it his first business to sweep this rough ground, and so cripple the
tribes in his passage southwards, that when he swept round the lower end
of the Dead Sea and up the Jordan valley he should have nothing to fear
at least on his right flank. The tribe that first felt his sword was
that of the Rephaim, or giants. Their stronghold was Ashteroth Karnaim,
or Ashteroth of the two horns, a town dedicated to the goddess Astarte
whose symbol was the crescent or two-horned moon. The Zuzims and the
Emims, "a people great and many and tall," as we read in Deuteronomy,
next fell before the invading host. The Horites, _i.e._ cave-dwellers or
troglodytes, would scarcely hold Chedorlaomer long, though from their
hilly fastnesses they might do him some damage. Passing through their
mountains he came upon the great road between the Dead Sea and the
Elanitic gulf--but he crossed this road and still held westward till he
reached the edge of what is roughly known as the Desert of Sinai. Here,
says the narrative (ver. 7), they returned, that is, this was their
furthest point south and west, and here they turned and made for the
vale of Siddim, smiting the Amalekites and the Amorites on their route.

This is the only part of the army's route that is at all obscure. The
last place they are spoken of as touching before reaching the vale of
Siddim is Hazezon-Tamar, or as it was afterwards and is still called
Engedi. Now Engedi lies on the western shore of the Dead Sea about half
way up from south to north. It lies on a very steep, indeed artificially
made, pass and is a place of much greater importance on that account
than its size would make it. The road between Moab and Palestine runs by
the western margin of the Dead Sea up to this point, but beyond this
point the shore is impracticable, and the only road is through the
Engedi pass on to the higher ground above. If the army chose this route
then they were compelled to force this pass; if on the other hand they
preferred during their whole march from Kadesh to keep away west of the
Dead Sea on the higher ground, then they would only detail a company to
pounce upon Engedi, as the main army passed behind and above. In either
case the main body must have been if not actually within sight of, yet
only a few miles from, the encampment of Abram.

At length as they dropped down through the practicable passes into the
vale of Siddim their grand object became apparent, and the kings of the
five allied towns, probably warned by the hill-tribes weeks before, drew
out to meet them. But it is not easy to check an army in full career,
and the wells of bitumen, which those who knew the ground might have
turned to good purpose against the foreigners, actually hindered the
home troops and became a trap to them. The rout was complete. No second
stand or rally was attempted. The towns were sacked, the fields swept,
and so swift were the movements of the invaders that although Abram was
barely twenty miles off, and no doubt started for the rescue of Lot the
hour he got the news, he did not overtake the army, laden as it was with
spoil and retarded by prisoners and wounded, until they had reached the
sources of Jordan.

But well-conceived and brilliantly executed as this campaign had been,
the experienced warrior had failed to take account of the most
formidable opponent he would have to reckon with. Those that escaped
from the slaughter at Sodom took to the hills, and either knowing they
would find shelter with Abram or more probably blindly running on, found
themselves at nightfall within sight of the encampment at Hebron. There
is no delay on Abram's part; he hastily calls out his men, each
snatching his bow, his sword, and his spear, and slinging over his
shoulders a few days' provision. The neighbouring Amorite chiefs Aner,
Mamre and Eshcol join them, probably with a troop each, and before many
hours are lost they are down the passes and in hot pursuit. Not however
till they had traversed a hundred and twenty miles or more do they
overtake the Eastern army. But at Dan, at the very springs of the
Jordan, they find them, and making a night attack throw them into utter
confusion and pursue them as far as Hobah, a village near Damascus, that
retains to this day the same name.

One is naturally curious to see how Abram will conduct himself in
circumstances so unaccustomed. From leading a quiet pastoral life he
suddenly becomes the most important man in the country, a man who can
make himself felt from the Nile to the Tigris. From a herd he becomes a
hero. But, notoriously, power tries a man, and, as one has often seen
persons make very glaring mistakes in such altered circumstances and
alter their characters and beliefs to suit and take advantage of the new
material and opportunities presented to them, we are interested in
seeing how a man whose one rule of action has hitherto been faith in a
promise given him by God, will pass through such a trial. Can a
spiritual quality like faith be of much service in rough campaigning and
when the man of faith is mixed up with persons of doubtful character and
unscrupulous conduct, and brought into contact with considerable
political powers? Can we trace to Abram's faith any part of his action
at this time? No sooner is the question put than we see that his faith
in God's promise was precisely that which gave him balance and dignity,
courage and generosity in dealing with the three prominent persons in
the narrative. He could afford to be forgiving and generous to his grand
competitor Lot, precisely because he felt sure God would deal generously
with himself. He could afford to acknowledge Melchizedek and any other
authority that might appear, as his superior, and he would not take
advantage, even when at the head of his men eager for more fighting, of
the peaceful king who came out to propitiate him, because he knew that
God would give him his land without wronging other people. And he
scorned the wages of the king of Sodom, holding himself to be no
mercenary captain, nor indebted to any one but God. In a word, you see
faith producing all that is of importance in his conduct at this time.

Lot is the person who of all others might have been expected to be
forward in his expressions of gratitude to Abram--not a word of his is
recorded. Ashamed he cannot but have been, for if Abram said not a word
of reproach, there would be plenty of Lot's old friends among Abram's
men who could not lose so good an opportunity of twitting him about the
good choice he had made. And considering how humiliating it would have
been for him to go back with Abram and abandon the district of his
adoption, we can scarcely wonder that he should have gone quietly back
to Sodom, well as he must by this time have known the nature of the
risks he ran there. For, after all, this warning was not very loud. The
same thing, or a similar thing, might have happened had he remained with
Abram. The warning was unobtrusive as the warnings in life mostly are;
audible to the ear that has been accustomed to listen to the still small
voice of conscience, inaudible to the ear that is trained to hear quite
other voices. God does not set angels and flaming swords in every man's
path. The little whisper that no one hears but ourselves only and that
says quite quietly that we are continuing in a wrong course, is as
certain an indication that we are in danger, as if God were to proclaim
our case from heaven with thunder or the voice of an archangel. And when
a man has persistently refused to listen to conscience it ceases to
speak, and he loses the power to discern between good and evil and is
left wholly without a guide. He may be running straight to destruction
and he does not know it. You cannot live under two principles of action,
regard to worldly interest and regard to conscience. You can train
yourself to great acuteness in perceiving and following out what is for
your worldly advantage, or you can train yourself to great acuteness of
conscience; but you must make your choice, for in proportion as you gain
sensitiveness in the one direction you lose it in the other. If your eye
is _single_ your whole body is full of light; but if the light that is
in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

Melchizedek is generally recognised as the most mysterious and
unaccountable of historical personages; appearing here in the King's
Vale no one knows whence, and disappearing no one knows whither, but
coming with his hands full of substantial gifts for the wearied
household of Abram, and the captive women that were with him. Of each of
the patriarchs we can tell the paternity; the date of his birth, and the
date of his death; but this man stands with none to claim him, he forms
no part of any series of links by which the oldest and the present times
are connected. Though possessed of the knowledge of the Most High God,
his name is not found in any of those genealogies which show us how that
knowledge passed from father to son. Of all the other great men whose
history is recorded a careful genealogy is given; but here the writer
breaks his rule, and breaks it where, had there not been substantial
reason, he would most certainly have adhered to it. For here is the
greatest man of the time, a man before whom Abram the father of the
faithful, the honoured of all nations, bowed and paid tithes; and yet he
appears and passes away likest to a vision of the night. Perhaps even in
his own time there was none that could point to the chamber where first
he was cradled, nor show the tent round which first he played in his
boyhood, nor hoard up a single relic of the early years of the man that
had risen to be the first man upon earth in those days. So that the
Apostle speaks of him as a very type of all that is mysterious and
abrupt in appearance and disappearance, "without father, without mother,
without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life," and
as he significantly adds, "made like unto the Son of God." For as
Melchizedek stands thus on the page of history, so our Lord in
reality--as the one has no recorded pedigree, and holds an office
beginning and ending in his own person, so our Lord, though born of a
woman, stands separate from sinners and quite out of the ordinary line
of generations, and exercises an office which he received hereditarily
from none, and which he could commit to no successor. As the one stands
apparently disconnected from all before and after him, so the Other in
point of fact did thus suddenly emerge from eternity, a problem to all
who saw Him; owning the authority of earthly parents, yet claiming an
antiquity greater than Abram's; appearing suddenly to the captivity led
captive, with His hands full of gifts, and His lips dropping words of
blessing.

Melchizedek is the one personage on earth whom Abram recognises as his
spiritual superior. Abram accepts his blessing and pays him tithes;
apparently as priest of the Most High God; so that in paying to him,
Abram is giving the tenth of his spoils to God. This is not any mere
courtesy of private persons. It was done in presence of various parties
of jealously watchful retainers. Men of rank and office and position
_consider_ how they should act to one another and who should take
precedence. And Abram did deliberately and with a perfect perception of
what he was doing, whatever he now did. Manifestly therefore God's
revelation of Himself was not as yet confined to the one line running
from Abram to Christ. Here was a man of whom we really do not know
whether he was a Canaanite, a son of Ham or a son of Shem; yet Abram
recognises him as having knowledge of the true God, and even bows to him
as his spiritual superior in office if not in experience. This shows us
how little jealousy Abram had of others being favoured by God, how
little he thought _his_ connection with God would be less secure if
other men enjoyed a similar connection, and how heartily he welcomed
those who with different rites and different prospects yet worshipped
the living God. It shows us also how apt we are to limit God's ways of
working; and how little we understand of the connections He has with
those who are not situated as we ourselves are. Here while all our
attention is concentrated on Abram as carrying the whole spiritual hope
of the world, there emerges from an obscure Canaanite valley a man
nearer to God than Abram is. From how many unthought-of places such men
may at any time come out upon us, we really can never tell.

Again Melchizedek is evidently a title, not a name--the word means King
of Righteousness, or Righteous King. It may have been a title adopted by
a line of kings, or it may have been peculiar to this one man. But these
old Canaanites, if Canaanites they were, had got hold of a great
principle when they gave this title to the king of their city of Salem
or Peace. They perceived that it was the righteousness, the justice, of
their king that could best uphold their peaceful city. They saw that the
right king for them was a man not grinding his neighbours by war and
taxes, not overriding the rights of others and seeking always
enlargement of his own dominion; nor a merely merciful man, inclined to
treat sin lightly and leaning always to laxity; but the man they would
choose to give them peace was the righteous man who might sometimes seem
overscrupulous, sometimes over-stern, who would sometimes be called
romantic and sometimes fanatical, but through all whose dealings it
would be obvious that justice to all parties was the aim in view. Some
of them might not be good enough to love a ruler who made no more of
their special interest than he did of others, but all would possibly
have wit enough to see that only by justice could they have peace. It is
the reflex of God's government in which righteousness is the foundation
of peace, a righteousness unflinching and invariable, promulgating holy
laws and exacting punishment from all who break them. It is this that
gives us hope of eternal peace, that we know God has not left out of
account facts that must yet be reckoned with, nor merely lulled the
unquiet forebodings of conscience, but has let every righteous law and
principle find full scope, has done righteously in offering us pardon so
that nothing can ever turn up to deprive us of our peace. And it is
quite in vain that any individual holds before his mind the prospect of
peace, _i.e._ of permanent satisfaction, so long as he is not seeking it
by righteousness. In so far as he is keeping his conscience from
interfering, in so far is he making it impossible to himself to enter
into the condition for the sake of which he is keeping conscience from
regulating his conduct.

Lastly, Abram's refusal of the king of Sodom's offers is significant.
Naturally enough, and probably in accordance with well-established
usage, the king proposes that Abram should receive the rescued goods and
the spoil of the invading army. But Abram knew men, and knew that
although now Sodom was eager to show that he felt himself indebted to
Abram, the time would come when he would point to this occasion as
laying the foundation of Abram's fortune. When a man rises in the world
every one will tell you of the share he had in raising him, and will
convey the impression that but for assistance rendered by the speaker he
would not have been what he now is. Abram knows that he is destined to
rise, and knows also by Whose help he is to rise. He intends to receive
all from God; and therefore not a thread from Sodom. He puts his refusal
in the form adopted by the man whose mind is made up beyond revisal. He
has "vowed" it. He had anticipated such offers and had considered their
bearing on his relations to God and man; and taking advantage of the
unembarrassed season in which the offer was as yet only a possibility,
he had resolved that when it was actually made he would refuse it, no
matter what advantages it seemed to offer. So should we in our better
seasons and when we know we are viewing things healthily,
conscientiously, and righteously, determine what our conduct is to be,
and if possible so commit ourselves to it that when the right frame is
passed we cannot draw back from the right conduct. Abram had done so,
and however tempting the spoils of the Eastern kings were, they did not
move him. His vow had been made to the Possessor of heaven and earth, in
Whose hand were riches beyond the gifts of Sodom.

Here again it is the man of faith that appears. He shows a noble
jealousy of God's prerogative to bless him. He will not give men
occasion to say that any earthly monarch has enriched him. It shall be
made plain that it is on God he is depending. In all men of faith there
will be something of this spirit. They cannot fail so to frame their
life as to let it come clearly out that for happiness, for success, for
comfort, for joy, they are in the main depending on God. That this
cannot be done in the complex life of modern society, no one will
venture to say in presence of this incident. Could we more easily have
shown our reliance upon God in the hurry of a sudden foray, in the
turmoil and intense action of a midnight attack and hand to hand
conflict, in the excitement and elation of a triumphal progress, the
kings of the country vying with one another to do us honour and the
rescued captives lauding our valour and generosity? No one fails to see
what it was that balanced Abram in this intoxicating march. No one asks
what enabled him, while leading his armed followers flushed with success
through a land weakened by recent dismay and disaster, to restrain them
and himself from claiming the whole land as his. No one asks what gave
him moral perception to see that the opportunity given him of winning
the land by the sword was a temptation not a guiding providence. To
every reader it is obvious that his dependence on God was his safeguard
and his light. God would bring him by fair and honourable means to his
own. There was no need of violence, no need of receiving help from
doubtful allies. This is true nobility; and this, faith always produces.
But it must be a faith like Abram's; not a quick and superficial growth,
but a deeply-rooted principle. For against all temptations this only is
our sure defence, that already our hearts are so filled with God's
promise that other offers find no craving in us, no empty dissatisfied
spot on which they can settle. To such faith God responds by the
elevating and strengthening assurance, "I am thy shield, and thy
exceeding great reward."

XI.

_COVENANT WITH ABRAM._

GENESIS xv.

Of the nine Divine manifestations made during Abram's life this is the
fifth. At Ur, at Kharran, at the oak of Moreh, at the encampment between
Bethel and Ai, and now at Mamre, he received guidance and encouragement
from God. Different terms are used regarding these manifestations.
Sometimes it is said "The Lord appeared unto him;" here for the first
time in the course of God's revelation occurs that expression which
afterwards became normal, "The word of the Lord came unto Abram."
Throughout the subsequent history this word of the Lord continues to
come, often at long intervals, but always meeting the occasion and needs
of His people and joining itself on to what had already been declared,
until at last the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, giving thus to
all men assurance of the nearness and profound sympathy of their God. To
repeat this revelation is impossible. A repetition of it would be a
denial of its reality. For a second life on earth is allowed to no man;
and were our Lord to live a second human life it were proof He was no
true man, but an anomalous, unaccountable, uninstructive, appearance or
simulacrum of a man.

But though these revelations of God are finished, though complete
knowledge of God is given in Christ, God comes to the individual still
through the Spirit Whose office it is to take of the things of Christ
and show them to us. And in doing so the law is observed which we see
illustrated here. God comes to a man with further encouragement and
light for a new step when he has conscientiously used the light he
already has. The temper that "seeks for a sign" and expects that some
astounding Providence should be sent to make us religious is by no means
obsolete. Many seem to expect that before they act on the knowledge they
have, they will receive more. They put off giving themselves to the
service of God under some kind of impression that some striking event or
much more distinct knowledge is required to give them a decided turn to
a religious life. In so doing they invert God's order. It is when we
have conscientiously followed such light as we have, and faithfully done
all that we know to be right, that God gives us further light. It was
immediately on the back of faithful action that Abram received new help
to his faith.

The time was seasonable for other reasons. Never did Abram feel more in
need of such assurance. He had been successful in his midnight attack
and had scattered the force from beyond Euphrates, but he knew the
temper of these Eastern monarchs well enough to be aware that there was
nothing they hailed with greater pleasure than a pretext for extending
their conquests and adding to their territory. To Abram it must have
appeared certain that the next campaigning season would see his country
invaded and his little encampment swept away by the Eastern host. Most
appropriate, therefore, are the words: "Fear not, Abram: I am thy
shield."

But another train of thoughts occupied Abram's mind perhaps even more
unceasingly at this time. After busy engagement comes dulness; after
triumph, flatness and sadness. I have pursued kings, got myself a great
name, led captivity captive. Men are speaking of me in Sodom, and
finding that in me they have a useful and important ally. But what is
all this to my purpose? Am I any nearer my inheritance? I have got all
that men might think I needed; they may be unable to understand why now,
of all times, I should seem heartless; but, O Lord, Thou knowest how
empty these things seem to me, and what wilt Thou give me? Abram could
not understand why he was kept so long waiting. The child given when he
was a hundred years old might equally have been given twenty-five years
before, when he first came to the land of Canaan. All Abram's servants
had their children, there was no lack of young men born in his
encampment. He could not leave his tent without hearing the shouts of
other men's children, and having them cling to his garments--but "to me
Thou hast given no seed; and lo! one born in mine house, a slave, is
mine heir."

Thus it often is that while a man is receiving much of what is generally
valued in the world, the one thing he himself most prizes is beyond his
reach. He has his hope irremovably fixed on something which he feels
would complete his life and make him a thoroughly happy man; there is
one thing which, above all else, would be a right and helpful blessing
to him. He speaks of it to God. For years it has framed a petition for
itself when no other desire could make itself heard. Back and back to
this his heart comes, unable to find rest in anything so long as this is
withheld. He cannot help feeling that it is God who is keeping it from
him. He is tempted to say, "What is the use of all else to me, why give
me things Thou knowest I care little for, and reserve the one thing on
which my happiness depends?" As Abram might have said; "Why make me a
great name in the land, when there is no one to keep it alive in men's
memories; why increase my possessions when there is none to inherit but
a stranger?"

Is there then any resulting benefit to character in this so common
experience of delayed expectations? In Abram's case there certainly was.
It was in these years he was drawn close enough to God to hear Him say,
"_I_ am thy exceeding great reward." He learned in the multitude of his
debatings about God's promise and the delay of its fulfilment, that God
was more than all His gifts. He had started as a mere hopeful colonist
and founder of a family; these twenty-five years of disappointment made
him the friend of God and the Father of the Faithful. Slowly do we also
pass from delight in God's gifts to delight in Himself, and often by a
similar experience. From what have you received truest and deepest
pleasure in life? Is it not from your friendships? Not from what your
friends have given you or done for you; rather from what you have done
for them; but chiefly from your affectionate intercourse. You, being
persons, must find your truest joy in persons, in personal love,
personal goodness and wisdom. But friendship has its crown in the
friendship of God. The man who knows God as his friend and is more
certain of God's goodness and wisdom and steadfastness than he can be of
the worth of the man he has loved and trusted and delighted in from his
boyhood, the man who is always accompanied by a latent sense of God's
observation and love, is truly living in the peace of God that passeth
understanding. This raises him above the touch of worldly losses and
restores him in all distresses, even to the surprise of observers; his
language is, "There may be many that will say, Who will show us any
good? Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us. _Thou_
hast put gladness in my heart more than in the time that their corn and
their wine increased."

But evidently there was still another feeling in Abram's heart at this
particular point in his career. He could not bear to think he was to
miss that very thing which God had promised him. The keen yearning for
an heir which God's promise had stirred in him was not lost sight of in
the great saying, "_I_ am thy exceeding great reward." When he was
journeying back to his encampment not a shoestring richer than he left,
and while he heard his men, disappointed of booty, murmuring that he
should be so scrupulous, he cannot but have felt some soreness that he
should be set before his little world as a man who had the enjoyment
neither of this world's rewards nor of God. And here must have come the
strong temptation that comes to every man: Might it not be as well to
take what he could get, to enjoy what was put fairly within his reach,
instead of waiting for what seemed so uncertain as God's gift? It is
painful to be exposed to the observation of others or to our own
observation, as persons who, on the one hand, refuse to seek happiness
in the world's way, and yet are not finding it in God. You have possibly
with some magnanimity rejected a tempting offer because there were
conditions attached to which conscience could not reconcile itself; but
you find that you are in consequence suffering greater privations than
you expected and that no providential intervention seems to be made to
reward your conscientiousness. Or you suddenly become aware that though
you have for years refused to be mirthful or influential or successful
or comfortable in the world's way and on the world's terms, you are yet
getting no substitute for what you refuse. You will not join the world's
mirth, but then you are morose and have no joy of any kind. You will not
use means you disapprove of for influencing men, but neither have you
the influence of a strong Christian character. In fact by giving up the
world you seem to have contracted and weakened instead of enlarging and
deepening your life.

In such a condition we can but imitate Abram and cast ourselves more
resolutely on God. If you find it most weary and painful to deny
yourself in these special ways which have fallen to be your experience,
you can but utter your complaint to God, assured that in Him you will
find consideration. He knows why He has called you, why He has given you
strength to abandon worldly hopes; He appreciates your adherence to Him
and He will renew your faith and hope. If day by day you are saying,
"Lead Thou me on," if you say, "What wilt Thou give me?" not in
complaint but in lively expectation, encouragement enough will be yours.

The means by which Abram's faith was renewed were appropriate. He has
been seeing in the tumult and violence and disappointment of the world
much to suggest the thought that God's promise could never work itself
out in the face of the rude realities around him. So God leads him out
and points him to the stars, each one called by his name, and thus
reminds the Chaldæan who had so often gazed at and studied them in
their silent steady courses, that his God has designs of infinite sweep
and comprehension; that throughout all space His worlds obey His will
and all harmoniously play their part in the execution of His vast
design; that we and all our affairs are in a strong hand, but moving in
orbits so immense that small portions of them do not show us their
direction and may seem to be out of course. Abram is led out alone with
the mighty God, and to every saved soul there comes such a crisis when
before God's majesty we stand awed and humbled, all complaints hushed,
and indeed our personal interests disappear or become so merged in God's
purposes that we think only of Him; our mistakes and wrong-doing are
seen now not so much as bringing misery upon ourselves as interrupting
and perverting His purposes, and His word comes home to our hearts as
stable and satisfying.

It was in this condition that Abram believed God, and He counted it to
him for righteousness. Probably if we read this without Paul's
commentary on it in the fourth of Romans, we should suppose it meant no
more than that Abram's faith, exercised as it was in trying
circumstances, met with God's cordial approval. The faith or belief here
spoken of was a resolute renewal of the feeling which had brought him
out of Chaldæa. He put himself fairly and finally into God's hand to be
blessed in God's way and in God's time, and this act of resignation,
this resolve that he would not force his own way in the world but would
wait upon God, was looked upon by God as deserving the name of
righteousness, just as much as honesty and integrity in his conduct with
Lot or with his servants. Paul begs us to notice that an act of faith
accepting God's favour is a very different thing from a work done for
the sake of winning God's favour. God's favour is always a matter of
grace, it is favour conferred on the undeserving; it is never a matter
of debt, it is never favour conferred because it has been won. To put
this beyond doubt he appeals to this righteousness of Abram's. How, he
asks, did Abram achieve righteousness? Not by observing ordinances and
commandments; for there were none to observe; but by trusting God, by
believing that already without any working or winning of his, God loved
him and designed blessedness for him, in short by referring his prospect
of happiness and usefulness wholly to God and not at all to himself.
This is the essential quality of the godly; and having this, Abram had
that root which produced all actual righteousness and likeness to God.

It is sufficiently obvious in such a life as Abram's why faith is the
one thing needful. Faith is required because it is only when a man
believes God's promise and rests in His love that he can co-operate with
God in severing himself from iniquitous prospects and in so living for
spiritual ends as to enter the life and the blessedness God calls him
to. The boy who does not believe his father, when he comes to him in the
midst of his play and tells him he has something for him which will
please him still better, suffers the penalty of unbelief by losing what
his father would have given him. All missing of true enjoyment and
blessedness results from unbelief in God's promise. Men do not walk in
God's ways because they do not believe in God's ends. They do not
believe that spiritual ends are as substantial and desirable as those
that are physical.

Abram's faith is easily recognised, because not only had he not wrought
for the blessing God promised him, but it was impossible for him even
to see how it could be achieved. That which God promised was apparently
quite beyond the reach of human power. It serves then as an admirable
illustration of the essence of faith; and Paul uses it as such. It is
not because faith is the root of all actual righteousness that Paul
describes it as "imputed for righteousness." It is because faith at once
gives a man possession of what no amount of working could ever achieve.
God now offers in Christ righteousness, that is to say, justification,
the forgiveness of sins and acceptance with God with all the fruits of
this acceptance, the indwelling Divine Spirit and life everlasting. He
offers this freely as he offered to Abram what Abram could never have
won for himself. And all that we are asked to do is to accept it. This
is all we are asked to do in order to our becoming the forgiven and
accepted children of God. After becoming so, there of course remains an
infinite amount of service to be rendered, of work to be done, of
self-discipline to be undergone. But in answer to the awakened sinner's
enquiry, "What must I do to be saved," Paul replies, "You are to _do_
nothing; nothing you can do can win God's favour, because that favour is
already yours; nothing you can do can achieve the rectification of your
present condition, but Christ has achieved it. Believe that God is with
you and that Christ can deliver you and commit yourself cordially to the
life you are called to, hopeful that what is promised will be
fulfilled."

Abram's faith cordial as it was, yet was not independent of some
sensible sign to maintain it. The sign given was twofold: the smoking
furnace and a prediction of the sojourn of Abram's posterity in Egypt.
The symbols were similar to those by which on other occasions the
presence of God was represented. Fire, cleansing, consuming, and
unapproachable, seemed to be the natural emblem of God's holiness. In
the present instance it was especially suitable, because the
manifestation was made after sundown and when no other could have been
seen. The cutting up of the carcases and passing between the pieces was
one of the customary forms of contract. It was one of the many devices
men have fallen upon to make sure of one another's word. That God should
condescend to adopt these modes of pledging Himself to men is
significant testimony to His love; a love so resolved on accomplishing
the good of men that it resents no slowness of faith and accommodates
itself to unworthy suspicions. It makes itself as obvious and pledges
itself with as strong guarantees to men as if it were the love of a
mortal whose feelings might change and who had not clearly foreseen all
consequences and issues.

The prediction of the long sojourn of Abram's posterity in Egypt was not
only helpful to those who had to endure the Egyptian bondage, but also
to Abram himself. He no doubt felt the temptation, from which at no time
the Church has been free, to consider himself the favourite of heaven
before whose interests all other interests must bow. He is here taught
that other men's rights must be respected as well as his, and that not
one hour before absolute justice requires it, shall the land of the
Amorites be given to his posterity. And that man is considerably past
the rudimentary knowledge of God who understands that every act of God
springs from justice and not from caprice, and that no creature upon
earth is sooner or later unjustly dealt with, by the Supreme Ruler. In
the life of Abram it becomes visible, how, by living with God and
watching for every expression of His will, a man's knowledge of the
Divine nature enlarges; and it is also interesting to observe that
shortly after this he grounds all his pleading for Sodom on the truth he
had learned here: "Shall not the Judge of _all the earth_ do right?"

The announcement that a long interval must elapse before the promise was
fulfilled must no doubt have been a shock to Abram; and yet it was
sobering and educative. It is a great step we take when we come clearly
to understand that God has a great deal to do with us before we can
fully inherit the promise. For God's promise, so far from making
everything in the future easy and bright, is that which above all else
discloses how stern a reality life is; how severe and thorough that
discipline must be which makes us capable of achieving God's purposes
with us. A horror of great darkness may well fall upon the man who
enters into covenant with God, who binds himself to that Being whom no
pain nor sacrifice can turn aside from the pursuance of aims once
approved. When we look forward and consider the losses, the privations,
the self-denials, the delays, the pains, the keen and real discipline,
the lowliness of the life to which fellowship with God leads men,
darkness and gloom and smoke darken our prospect and discourage us; but
the smoke is that which arises from a purifying fire that purges away
all that prevents us from living spiritually, a darkness very different
from that which settles over the life which amidst much present
brightness carries in it the consciousness that its course is downwards,
that the blows it suffers are deadening, that its sun is steadily
nearing its setting and that everlasting night awaits it.

But over all other feelings this solemn transacting with God must have
produced in Abram a humble ecstasy of confidence. The wonderful mercy
and kindness of God in thus binding Himself to a weak and sinful man
cannot but have given him new thoughts of God and new thoughts of
himself. With fresh elevation of mind and superiority to ordinary
difficulties and temptations would he return to his tent that night. In
how different a perspective would all things stand to him now that the
Infinite God had come so near to him. Things which yesterday fretted or
terrified him seemed now remote: matters which had occupied his thought
he did not now notice or remember. He was now the Friend of God, taken
up into a new world of thoughts and hopes; hiding in his heart the
treasure of God's covenant, brooding over the infinite significance and
hopefulness of his position as God's ally.

For indeed this was a most extraordinary and a most encouraging event.
The Infinite God drew near to Abram and made a contract with him. God as
it were said to him, I wish you to count upon Me, to make sure of Me: I
therefore pledge Myself by these accustomed forms to be your Friend.

But it was not as an isolated person, nor for his own private interests
alone that Abram was thus dealt with by God. It was as a medium of
universal blessing that he was taken into covenant with God. The
kindness of God which he experienced was merely an intimation of the
kindness all men would experience. The laying aside of unapproachable
dignity and entrance into covenant with a man was the proclamation of
His readiness to be helpful to all and to bring Himself within reach of
all. That you may have a God at hand He thus brought Himself down to men
and human ways, that your life may not be vain and useless, dark and
misguided, and that you may find that you have a part in a well-ordered
universe in which a holy God cares for all and makes His strength and
wisdom available for all. Do not allow these intimations of His mercy to
go for nothing but use them as intended for your guidance and
encouragement.

XII.

_BIRTH OF ISHMAEL._

GENESIS xvi.

In this unpretending chapter we have laid bare to us the origin of one
of the most striking facts in the history of religion: namely, that from
the one person of Abram have sprung Christianity and that religion which
has been and still is its most formidable rival and enemy,
Mohammedanism. To Ishmael, the son of Abram, the Arab tribes are proud
to trace their pedigree. Through him they claim Abram as their father,
and affirm that they are his truest representatives, the sons of his
first-born. In Mohammed, the Arabian, they see the fulfilment of the
blessing of Abram, and they have succeeded in persuading a large part of
the world to believe along with them. Little did Sarah think when she
persuaded Abram to take Hagar that she was originating a rivalry which
has run with keenest animosity through all ages and which oceans of
blood have not quenched. The domestic rivalry and petty womanish spites
and resentments so candidly depicted in this chapter, have actually
thrown on the world from that day to this one of its darkest and least
hopeful shadows. The blood of our own countrymen, it may be of our own
kindred, will yet flow in this unappeasable quarrel. So great a matter
does a little fire kindle. So lasting and disastrous are the issues of
even slight divergences from pure simplicity.

It is instructive to observe how long this matter of obtaining an heir
for Abram occupies the stage of sacred history and in how many aspects
it is shown. The stage is rapidly cleared of whatever else might
naturally have invited attention, and interest is concentrated on the
heir that is to be. The risks run by the appointed mother, the doubts of
the father, the surrender now of the mother's rights,--all this is
trivial if it concerned only one household, important only when you view
it as significant for the race. It was thus men were taught thoughtfully
to brood upon the future and to believe that, though Divine, blessing
and salvation would spring from earth: man was to co-operate with God,
to recognise himself as capable of uniting with God in the highest of
all purposes. At the same time, this long and continually deferred
expectation of Abram was the simple means adopted by God to convince men
once for all that the promised seed is not of nature but of grace, that
it is God who sends all effectual and determining blessing, and that we
must learn to adapt ourselves to His ways and wait upon Him.

The first man, then, whose religious experience and growth are recorded
for us at any length, has this one thing to learn, to trust God's word
and wait for it. In this everything is included. But gradually it
appears to us all that this is the great difficulty, to wait; to let God
take His own time to bless us. It is hard to believe in God's perfect
love and care when we are receiving no present comfort or peace; hard to
believe we shall indeed be sanctified when we seem to be abandoned to
sinful habit; hard to pass all through life with some pain, or some
crushing trouble, or some harassing anxiety, or some unsatisfied
craving. It is easy to start with faith, most trying to endure patiently
to the end. It is thus God educates His children. Compelled to wait for
some crowning gift, we cannot but study God's ways. It is thus we are
forced to look below the surface of life to its hidden meanings and to
construe God's dealings with ourselves apart from the experience of
other men. It is thus we are taught actually to loosen our hold of
things temporal and to lay hold on what is spiritual and real. He who
leaves himself in God's hand will one day declare that the pains and
sorrows he suffered were trifling in comparison with what he has won
from them.

But Sarah could not wait. She seems to have fixed ten years as the
period during which she would wait; but at the expiry of this term she
considered herself justified in helping forward God's tardy providence
by steps of her own. One cannot severely blame her. When our hearts are
set upon some definite blessing, things seem to move too slowly and we
can scarcely refrain from urging them on without too scrupulously
enquiring into the character of our methods. We are willing to wait for
a certain time, but beyond that we must take the matter into our own
hand. This incident shows, what all life shows, that whatever be the
boon you seek, you do yourself an injury if you cease to seek it in the
best possible form and manner, and decline upon some lower thing which
you can secure by some easy stratagem of your own.

The device suggested by Sarah was so common that the wonder is that it
had not long before been tried. Jealousy or instinctive reluctance may
have prevented her from putting it in force. She might no doubt have
understood that God, always working out His purposes in consistency
with all that is most honourable and pure in human conduct, requires of
no one to swerve a hair's breadth from the highest ideal of what a human
life should be, and that just in proportion as we seek the best gifts
and the most upright and pure path to them does God find it easy to
bless us. But in her case it was difficult to continue in this belief;
and at length she resolved to adopt the easy and obvious means of
obtaining an heir. It was unbelieving and foolish, but not more so than
our adoption of practices common in our day and in our business which we
know are not the best, but which we nevertheless make use of to obtain
our ends because the most righteous means possible do not seem workable
in our circumstances. Are you not conscious that you have sometimes used
a means of effecting your purpose, which you would shrink from using
habitually, but which you do not scruple to use to tide you over a
difficulty, an extraordinary device for an extraordinary emergency, a
Hagar brought in for a season to serve a purpose, not a Sarah accepted
from God and cherished as an eternal helpmeet. It is against this we are
here warned. From a Hagar can at the best spring only an Ishmael, while
in order to obtain the blessing God intends we must betake ourselves to
God's barren-looking means.

The evil consequences of Sarah's scheme were apparent first of all in
the tool she made use of. Agur the son of Jakeh says: "For three things
the earth is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear. For a
servant when he reigneth, and a fool when he is filled with meat; for an
odious woman when she is married, and an handmaid that is heir to her
mistress." Naturally this half-heathen girl, when she found that her
son would probably inherit all Abram's possessions, forgot herself, and
looked down on her present, nominal mistress. A flood of new fancies
possessed her vacant mind and her whole demeanour becomes insulting to
Sarah. The slave-girl could not be expected to sympathize with the
purpose which Abram and Sarah had in view when they made use of her.
They had calculated on finding only the unquestioning, mechanical
obedience of the slave, even while raising her practically to the
dignity of a wife. They had fancied that even to the deepest feelings of
her woman's heart, even in maternal hopes, she would be plastic in their
hands, their mere passive instrument. But they have entirely
miscalculated. The slave has feelings as quick and tender as their own,
a life and a destiny as tenaciously clung to as their God-appointed
destiny. Instead of simplifying their life they have merely added to it
another source of complexity and annoyance. It is the common fate of all
who use others to satisfy their own desires and purposes. The
instruments they use are never so soulless and passive as it is wished.
If persons cannot serve you without deteriorating in their own
character, you have no right to ask them to serve you. To use human
beings as if they were soulless machines is to neglect radical laws and
to inflict the most serious injury on our fellow-men. Mistresses who do
not treat their servants with consideration, recognising that they are
as truly women as themselves, with all a woman's hopes and feelings, and
with a life of their own to live, are committing a grievous wrong, and
evil will come of it.

In such an emergency as now arose in Abram's household, character shows
itself clearly. Sarah's vexation at the success of her own scheme, her
recrimination and appeal for strange justice, her unjustifiable
treatment of Hagar, Abram's Bedouin disregard of the jealousies of the
women's tent, his Gallio-like repudiation of judgment in such quarrels,
his regretful vexation and shame that through such follies, mistakes,
and wranglings, God had to find a channel for His promise to flow--all
this discloses the painful ferment into which Abram's household was
thrown. Sarah's attempt to rid herself with a high hand of the
consequences of her scheme was signally unsuccessful. In the same
inconsiderate spirit in which she had put Hagar in her place, she now
forces her to flee, and fancies that she has now rid herself and her
household of all the disagreeable consequences of her experiment. She is
grievously mistaken. The slave comes back upon her hands, and comes back
with the promise of a son who should be a continual trouble to all about
him. All through Ishmael's boyhood Abram and Sarah had painfully to reap
the fruits of what they had sown. We only make matters worse when we
endeavour by injustice and harshness to crush out the consequences of
wrong-doing. The difficulties into which sin has brought us can only be
effectually overcome by sincere contrition and humiliation. It is not
all in a moment nor by one happy stroke you can rectify the sin or
mistake of a moment. If by your wise devices you have begotten young
Ishmaels, if something is every day grieving you and saying to you,
"This comes of your careless inconsiderate conduct in the past," then
see that in your vexation there is real penitence and not a mere
indignant resentment against circumstances or against other people, and
see that you are not actually continuing the fault which first gave
birth to your present sorrow and entanglement.

When Hagar fled from her mistress she naturally took the way to her old
country. Instinctively her feet carried her to the land of her birth.
And as she crossed the desert country where Palestine, Egypt and Arabia
meet, she halted by a fountain, spent with her flight and awed by the
solitude and stillness of the desert. Her proud spirit is broken and
tamed, the fond memories of her adopted home and all its customs and
ways and familiar faces and occupations, overtake her when she pauses