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he replied: "I thrust him away, because he did not worship " Thee." God answered, "I have suffered him these hundred "years, though he dishonoured Me: and couldest not thou endure him for one night, when he gave thee no trouble?" Upon this, saith the story, Abraham fetched him back again, and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruction. Go thou and do ' likewise; and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of 'Abraham,'

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If we may rust the ingenious conjecture of a distinguished writer whom I have already quoted, a more certain and enThe name during memorial has been preserved of this side of of Elohim. Abraham's mission. The name by which the Deity is known throughout the Patriarchal or introductory age of the Jewish Church is Elohim,' translated in the English version 'God.' In this name has been discovered a trace of the conciliatory, comprehensive mission of the first Prophet of the true religion. 'Elohim' is a plural noun, though followed by a verb in the singular. When 'Eloah' (God) was first used in the plural, it could only have signified, like any other plural, ‘many 'Eloahs; and such a plural could only have been formed after the various names of God had become the names of independent deities; that is, during a polytheistic stage. The transition from this into the monotheistic stage could be effected only in two ways; either by denying altogether the existence of the Elohim and changing them into devils-as was done in Persia, or by taking a higher view, and looking upon them as so many names invented with the honest purpose of expressing the various aspects of the Deity, though in time diverted from their original intention. This was the view taken by Abraham. Whatever were the names of the Elohim worshipped by the numerous clans of his race, Abraham saw that all the Elohim were meant for God; and thus Elohim, comprehending by one name everything that ever was or ever could be called Divine, became the name by which the monotheistic age was rightly inaugurated: a plural conceived and construed as a singular.

'What follows has been added, in a condensed form, from the Essay of Professor

Max Müller on Semitic Monotheism, already cited. (See pp. 13, 14.)

From this point of view the Semitic name of the Deity, which at first sounds not only ungrammatical but irrational, becomes perfectly clear and intelligible. It is at once the proof that Monotheism rose on the ruins of a polytheistic faith, and that it absorbed and acknowledged the better tendencies of that faith. In the true spirit of the later Apostle of the Gentiles, Abraham, his first predecessor and model, declared the God, 'whom they ignorantly worshipped,' to be the 'God that made 'the world, and all things therein,' 'the Lord of heaven and 'earth,' 'in whom we live, and move, and have our being.'1

The Covenant.

Circumcision.

Yet, however comprehensive is this type of the Patriarch's character, there is an exclusiveness also. In one point of view, 'he is the Father of all them that believe, though 'they be not circumcised :' in another point of view, he is the father of the circumcision only. That venerable rite, indeed, which in the first beginnings of Christianity was regarded only as a mark of division and narrowness, was, in the primitive Eastern world, the sign of a proud civilisation.2 It was not only a Jewish, but an Arabian, a Phoenician, an Egyptian custom. As such it still lingers in the Coptic and Abyssinian Churches. How far any of these countries received it from Abraham, or Abraham it from them, is now almost as difficult to ascertain as it is to discern the original signification of a usage, once so honourable and so sacred, and now so entirely removed alike from honour and from sanctity. But the limitation, of which, in a religious sense, it was the symbol, is expressed in a passage of the Patriarch's life, which stands midway, as it were, between his wider and his narrower call. In the visions 3 of the night Abraham is called forth by the Divine voice, from the curtains of the tent, under the open sky. He is told to look towards heaven, the clear bright Eastern heaven, glittering with innumerable stars, those stars which all

The vision of the Sacrifice.

1 Acts xvii. 23-28.

2 See Ezekiel xxxii. 24-32, with Ewald's notes. Compare also Ewald's Alterthümer,

100.

3 Gen. xv. 1. By Jewish tradition this

scene is fixed either on a mountain three miles north of Banias (Schwarz, 302), or on the Gebel Batrak (the Patriarch's Mountain), near Hebron.

tradition, as we have seen, nas so naturally and so closely connected with the education and conversion of Abraham; the stars which have in all times taught unearthly wisdom and vastness of spiritual ideas to the mind of man. 'Look toward 'heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them. 'So shall thy seed be.' This was, if taken in its fullest sense, that wide, incalculable, interminable view of all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, each star differing from the other star in glory-of which we have already spoken. But the vision was not ended. He was bidden to prepare as if for the peculiar forms of sacrifice which, it is said,1 for centuries afterwards, in his own country, were used to sanction a treaty or covenant. The birds, and the fragments of the heifer and the goat, were parted, so as to leave a space for the contracting parties to pass between; and the day began to decline, and the birds of prey, of evil omen, hovered like a crowd over the carcases; and at last the sun went down, and the heavens, so bright and clear on the preceding night, were overcast; and 'a deep sleep fell upon Abraham; and lo! a horror of great 'darkness fell upon him.' And in that thick darkness a light, as of a blazing fire, enveloped with the smoke as of a furnace, passed through the open space, and the covenant, the first covenant, 'the Old Testament,' was concluded between God and man. Taking these figures as they are thus shadowed forth, and in combination with the words which followed, they truly express the peculiar 'conditions,' to use the modern phrase, under which the history of the Chosen People was to be unfolded, from its brighter and from its darker side. Darkness and light are mingled together, the bright heavens of yesterday overclouded by the horror of great darkness today; wheresoever the carcases of the victims lie, the ravenous eagles are gathered together, and with difficulty scared away by the watchful protector; the light, burning in the midst of the smoke as it sweeps through the narrow pathway, is the same image that we shall meet again and again throughout

1 See Von Bohlen's note on Gen. xv. 10. For the amplification of the scene, see

Koran, ii. 262, in Lane's Selections, 153.

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the history of the Older, and of the New covenant also: the bush burning but not consumed; the pillar at once of cloud and of fire; the children in the midst of the furnace, yet without hurt; the remnant preserved, though cut down to the root; exile and bondage, yet constant deliverance; a narrow home, yet a vast dominion; the perverse, wayward, degraded people, yet the countrymen and the progenitors, after the flesh, of One in whom was brought to the highest fulfilment their own union of suffering and of triumph, the thick darkness of the smoking furnace, the burning and the shining light.2 This is the mixed prospect of the History of the Jewish Church; this is the mixed prospect, in its widest sense, of all Ecclesiastical History.

1 Gen. xv. 18-21. The 'river of Egypt' (here only) is the Nile. It is inserted, evidently, as the extreme western limit of Jewish thought and dominion.

2 A fine passage, which unites the thought of the vision of Gen. xv. 12 with the mediatorial prayer and catholic spirit

of Abraham in Gen. xviii. 23, occurs in the legends (Beer's Leben Abrahams, 88), where, after the overthrow of Jerusalem, the figure of Abraham emerges from the ruins to plead for the repentance and restoration of his people.

The first entrance

into the

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It is an advantage of visiting a country once civilised but since fallen back into barbarism, that its present aspect more nearly reproduces to us the appearance which it wore to its earliest inhabitants, than had we seen it in the height Holy Land. of its splendour. Delphi and Mycenæ, in their modern desolation, are far more like what they were as they burst upon the eyes of the first Grecian settlers, than at the time when they were covered by a mass of temples and palaces. Palestine, in like manner, must exhibit at the present day a picture more nearly resembling the country as it was seen in the days of the Patriarchs than would have been seen by David, or even by Joshua. Doubtless many of the hills which are now bare were then covered with forest; and the torrent beds which are now dry throughout the year were, at least in the winter, foaming streams. But, as far as we can trust the scanty notices, the land must have been in one important respect much what it is It is everywhere intimated that its population was thinly scattered over its broken surface of hill and valley. Here and there a wandering shepherd, as now, must have been driving his sheep over the mountains. The smoke of some worship, now extinct for ages, may have been seen going up from the rough, upright stones, which, like those of Stonehenge or Abury in our own country, have survived every form of civilised buildings, and remain to this day standing on the sea-coast plain of Phoenicia. Groups of worshippers must have been gathered from time to time on some of the many mountain heights, or under some of the dark clumps of ilex: 'For the

now.

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