the vast procession of races and empires. He stands at the head of the traditions, usages, and annals of a host of various nations. Jew, Christian, and Mahometan alike look back to him. Fables without number have been connected with his history, and all the wonders of magic and astrology have been ascribed to him. Scepticism, too, has been quite as extravagant as superstition, and has in its various hypotheses exhibited the patriarch as a pagan demigod, an allegorical personage, the genius of a star, the chief of a school of Magi. But above all these extravagances the father of the faithful rises in his filial submission and simple dignity, and claims our respect and love as the friend of God and man. The power of his character was mainly in his faith. In this respect is he not the precursor of the line of heroes who have been strong in God? Think of his faith, not as a weak credulity, but as the reliance of what was deepest in his soul upon what is true and holy in God, and we understand something of its power. Say what he believed and how he believed, and we recognize at once the strength of his nature and the ground of his trust. In what he believed we have the truth of truths, the unity and universality of God, a truth which Moses and Christ only more fully developed. To understand how deeply he believed, we must remember that all true faith contains within itself the germs of an infinite progress, and the implicit trust of Abraham needed only development to make it the explicit faith in Christ. Remember how wavering are the opinions of men, and how ready, even with our clearer light, to bow to idols of their own device, and we cannot inadequately appreciate the heroism of the man who

came boldly out from his kindred, renounced their many superstitions, and in the infancy of nations founded in his own family the empire of faith.

That he was a perfect character, it would be folly to say, quite as unjustified by Scripture as by reason. It is needless sophistry to try to free him from the charge of equivocating, and we leave it to the men who have never colored the truth to favor their own purposes to cast the first stone at the chief who in a rude age sought to protect his family from royal violence by a stratagem. He was a man of tender affections, and if sometimes too ready to acquiesce in harsh measures to make peace in his home, his own dispositions were uniformly kind in all his relations with his kindred and neighbors. He was faithful in his alliances and honorable in his dealings, - brave in danger, and proving by his generous surrender of proffered booty that the protection of friends, not the wealth of foes, had led him to take arms. The Scriptures of both Testaments celebrate his worth. Moses and Christ speak of the God of Abraham, the one in consummation of the Law, the other in proof of the Gospel of immortality. Words cannot say more than Christ's did when he spoke of Abraham's joy in seeing his day, of the meeting of all the faithful with him in the kingdom of God, and in his own use of the familiar phrase that gave the patriarch's name to the place of rest for departed souls.

But we must ask distinctly, What is this man to us now, or what has been his mission to our race? We must certainly acknowledge a providential plan in human history, and nothing can be more absurd than to see a divine purpose in the structure of a plant or

a human body, and to own no guiding purpose in that great drama in which man and nature combine. History is but the record of Providence, and the providential plan is most clearly manifested in the men who are called to the most exalted work. What is so exalted as religion, or that which decides man's relations Iwith his Maker? How can we dismiss from our thought the personage who gathered up the precious truths that had been handed down from the very beginning, and saved from the rising confusion, the chief idea and the chief solace of our race, the unity of God and the promise of redemption? This sacred trust, so likely to be lost, and so sure to be confounded. with superstition if left to casual guardianship, thus became the mission of a single family, who made it the property of a nation and then of the whole race. The choice of the place as well as of the man was providential, the place a central region situated at almost equal distances from three continents, upon the borders of Upper Asia, the very source of human society, and upon the coast of the great sea whose banks have been the theatre of ancient civilization. There the patriarch kept his precious charge, whilst the great movements were in progress that were to illustrate by their conflicting extremes the tendencies against which he protested. They that started from the great central home, and peopled Eastern Asia, plunged into a dreary pantheism that sunk God in nature. They who went westward, and peopled Europe, fell into a gross polytheism that exalted men and nature into gods.

The civilization of the world is now in the hands of the children of Abraham. The Hebrew race claims

to preserve at once his faith and nationality; the Mahometan claims through Ishmael to be the heir of the patriarchal covenant; the Christian, with greater reason, professing a faith so spiritual and so comprehensive, declares that in Christ only is the great promise to be fulfilled that proclaimed blessing to all the nations of the earth.

That

The life of our race, like the life of the individual, has its internal and external history, and the destiny of men is divided between the things that are seen and the things that are not seen. Since Abraham's day the empire of faith and the empire of sight have been most wonderfully developed, and in every great movement the two have combined their influence, the progress of religion being singularly coincident with the advance of civilization. tendency towards the lands of the setting sun, which drove the patriarch to the shores of the Mediterranean, has never lost its power; it survived in Paul when he sought Rome, and in Augustine as he faced towards Britain; it was not lost when Columbus planted the Cross on the soil of a new world, or when the Mayflower dropped anchor in the harbor of Plymouth. It is moving still the earnest hearts of the world to look westward with hope, and calling myriads to build homes and altars upon the far Pacific shores. Shall we call all this movement merely material, and believe that surely in these latter days the world of matter has disenthroned the empire of faith, and men now are to look to the physical arts and sciences for all the salvation they desire, and leave spiritual concerns to dreamers and dotards?

It is not so,

it cannot be so.

They are dreamers

who think of the universe of atoms without God, they are dotards who pamper the dust as if the eternal spirit had never breathed into it a living soul. Welcome all science, but none the less keep the ancient faith. Let science be its minister, and not its foe, and both will be gainers by the union. We are desolate, whatever our triumphs, if our boasted knowledge but reveals our orphanage, and sends us, without God in the world, to a grave without hope. Praised be the heavenly mercy, that the best science has ever been the handmaid of faith, and the best arts have always sought the sanction of Him who taught the art of holy living. The Newtons, Keplers, Herschels, have looked upon the stars of heaven in a knowledge far surpassing Abraham's, yet have made no discovery that can allow them to dismiss his childlike trust in God as the beginning of wisdom and the rock of strength.

Select if we will the man gifted beyond all others in the science of nature, sit at the feet of Humboldt, the venerable sage who has gathered the results of all physical research into a work so vast in its conception and beautiful in its plan as well to deserve to be named "Kosmos," - and who will not say that all the learning of the philosopher would be but vanity apart from the filial faith which led the patriarch to read the page of nature by a light not of this world? Nay, does not the "Kosmos" itself derive its highest charm from the gleams of a divine faith that interprets nature as a part of the book of God, not as a play of unmeaning atoms or a chain of self-existent laws?

The patriarch looked to the heavens with the natu