There can be little question that this is a true description of Noah's

feeling. And the sense of desolation and constraint would rather

increase in Noah's mind than diminish. Month after month elapsed; he was

coming daily nearer the end of his food, and yet the waters were

unabated. He did not know how long he was to be kept in this dark,

disagreeable place. He was left to do his daily work without any

supernatural signs to help him against his natural anxieties. The

floating of the ark and all that went on in it had no mark of God's hand

upon it. He was indeed _safe_ while others had been destroyed. But of

what good was this safety to be? Was he ever to get out of this

prison-house? To what straits was he to be first reduced? So it is often

with ourselves. We are left to fulfil God's will without any sensible

tokens to set over against natural difficulties, painful and pinching

circumstances, ill health, low spirits, failure of favourite projects

and old hopes--so that at last we come to think that perhaps safety is

all we are to have in Christ, a mere exemption from suffering of one

kind purchased by the endurance of much suffering of another kind; that

we are to be thankful for pardon on any terms; and escaping with our

_life_, must be content though it be bare. Why, how often does a

Christian wonder whether, after all, he has chosen a life that he can

endure, whether the monotony and the restraints of the Christian life

are not inconsistent with true enjoyment?

This strife between the felt restriction of the Christian life and the

natural craving for abundant life, for entrance into all that the

world can show us, and experience of all forms of enjoyment--this

strife goes on unceasingly in the heart of many of us as it goes on

from age to age in the world. Which is the true view of life, which is

the view to guide _us_ in choosing and refusing the enjoyments and

pursuits that are presented to us? Are we to believe that the ideal

man for this life is he who has tasted all culture and delight, who

believes in nature, recognising no fall and seeking for no redemption,

and makes enjoyment his end; or he who sees that all enjoyment is

deceptive till man is set right morally, and who spends himself on

this, knowing that blood and misery must come before peace and rest,

and crowned as our King and Leader, not with a garland of roses, but

with the crown of Him Who is greatest of all, because servant of

all--to Whom the most sunken is not repulsive, and Who will not

abandon the most hopeless? This comes to be very much the question,

whether this life is final or preparatory?--whether, therefore, our

work in it should be to check lower propensities and develop and train

all that is best in character, so as to be fit for highest life and

enjoyment in a world to come--or should take ourselves as we find

ourselves, and delight in this present world? whether this is a placid

eternal state, in which things are very much as they should be, and in

which therefore we can live freely and enjoy freely; or whether it is

a disordered, initial condition in which our main task should be to do

a little towards putting things on a better rail and getting at least

the germ and small beginnings of future good planted in one another?

So that in the midst of all felt restriction, there is the highest

hope, that one day we shall go forth from the narrow precincts of our

ark, and step out into the free bright sunshine, in a world where

there is nothing to offend, and that the time of our deprivation will

seem to have been well spent indeed, if it has left within us a

capacity permanently to enjoy love, holiness, justice, and all that is

delighted in by God Himself.

The use made of this event in the New Testament is remarkable. It is

compared by Peter to baptism, and both are viewed as illustrations of

salvation by destruction. The eight souls, he says, who were in the ark,

"were saved by water." The water which destroyed the rest saved them.

When there seemed little hope of the godly line being able to withstand

the influence of the ungodly, the Flood came and left Noah's family in a

new world, with freedom to order all things according to their own

ideas. In this Peter sees some analogy to baptism. In baptism, the

penitent who believes in the efficacy of Christ's blood to purge away

sin, lets his defilement be washed away and rises new and clean to the

life Christ gives. In Christ the sinner finds shelter for himself and

destruction for his sins. It is God's wrath against sin that saves us by

destroying our sins; just as it was the Flood which devastated the

world, that at the same time, and thereby, saved Noah and his family.

In this event, too, we see the completeness of God's work. Often we feel

reluctant to surrender our sinful habits to so final a destruction as is

implied in being one with Christ. The expense at which holiness is to be

bought seems almost too great. So much that has given us pleasure must

be parted with; so many old ties sundered, a condition of holiness

presents an aspect of dreariness and hopelessness; like the world after

the flood, not a moving thing on the surface of the earth, everything

levelled, prostrate, and washed even with the ground; here the corpse of

a man, there the carcase of a beast; here mighty forest timber swept

prone like the rushes on the banks of a flooded stream, and there a city

without inhabitants, everything dank, dismal and repellent. But this is

only one aspect of the work; the beginning, necessary if the work is to

be thorough. If any part of the sinful life remain it will spring up to

mar what God means to introduce us to. Only that is to be preserved

which we can take with us into our ark. Only that is to pass on into our

life which we can retain while we are in true connection with Christ,

and which we think can help us to live as His friends, and to serve Him

zealously.

This event then gives us some measure by which we can know how much God

will do to maintain holiness upon earth. In this catastrophe every one

who strives after godliness may find encouragement, seeing in it the

Divine earnestness of God for good and against evil. There is only one

other event in history that so conspicuously shows that holiness among

men is the object for which God will sacrifice everything else. There is

no need now of any further demonstration of God's purpose in this world

and His zeal for carrying it out. And may it not be expected of us His

children, that we stand in presence of the cross until our cold and

frivolous hearts catch something of the earnestness, the "resisting unto

blood striving against sin," which is exhibited there? The Flood has not

been forgotten by almost any people under heaven, but its moral result

is _nil_. But he whose memory is haunted by a dying Redeemer, by the

thought of One Whose love found its most appropriate and practical

result in dying for him, _is_ prevented from much sin, and finds in that

love the spring of eternal hope, that which his soul in the deep privacy

of his most sacred thoughts can feed upon with joy, that which he builds

himself round and broods over as his inalienable possession.

VI.

_NOAH'S FALL._

GENESIS ix. 20-27.

Noah in the ark was in a position of present safety but of much anxiety.

No sign of any special protection on God's part was given. The waters

seem to stand at their highest level still; and probably the risk of the

ark's grounding on some impracticable peak, or precipitous hill-side,

would seem as great a danger as the water itself. Five months had

elapsed, and though the rain had ceased the sky was heavy and

threatening, and every day now was worth many measures of corn in the

coming harvest. A reflection of the anxiety within the ark is seen in

the expression, "And God remembered Noah." It was needful to say so, for

there was as yet no outward sign of this.

To such anxieties all are subject who have availed themselves of the

salvation God provides. At the first there is an easy faith in God's

aid; there are many signs of His presence; the subjects in whom

salvation operates have no disposition or temptation to doubt that God

is with them and is working for them. But this initial stage is

succeeded by a very different state of things. We seem to be left to

ourselves to cope with the world and all its difficulties and

temptations in our own strength. Much as we crave some sign that God

remembers us, no sign is given. We no longer receive the same urgent

impulses to holiness of life; we have no longer the same freshness in

devotion as if speaking to a God at hand. There is nothing which of

itself and without reasoning about it says to us, Here is God's hand

upon me.

In fact, the great part of our life has to be spent under these

conditions, and we need to hold some well-ascertained principle

regarding God's dealings, if our faith is to survive. And here in God's

treatment of Noah we see that God may as certainly be working for us

when not working directly upon us, as when His presence is palpable. His

absence from us is as needful as His presence. The clouds are as

requisite for our salvation as the sunny sky. When therefore we find

that salvation from sin is a much slower and more anxious matter than we

once expected it to be, we are not to suppose that God is not hearing

our prayers. When Noah day by day cried to God for relief, and yet night

after night found himself "cribb'd, cabin'd, and confined," with no sign

from God but such as faith could apprehend, depend upon it he had very

different feelings from those with which he first stepped into the ark.

And when we are left to one monotonous rut of duty and to an unchanging

and dry form of devotion, when we are called to learn to live by faith

not by sight, to learn that God's purposes with us are spiritual, and

that slow and difficult growth in self-command and holiness is the best

proof that He hears our prayers, we must strive to believe that this

also is a needful part of our salvation; and we must especially be on

our guard against supposing that as God has ceased to disclose Himself

to us, and so to make faith easy, we may cease to disclose ourselves to

Him.

For this is the natural and very frequent result of such an experience.

Discouraged by the obscurity of God's ways and the difficulty of

believing when the mind is not sustained by success or by new thoughts

or manifest tokens of God's presence, we naturally cease to look for any

clear signs of God's concernment about our state, and rest from all

anxious craving to know God's will about us. To this temptation the

majority of Christian people yield, and allow themselves to become

indifferent to spiritual truth and increasingly interested in the

non-mysterious facts of the present world, attending to present duties

in a mechanical way, seeing that their families have enough to eat and

that all in their little ark are provided for. But to this temptation

Noah did not yield. Though to all appearance abandoned by God, he did

what he could to ascertain what was beyond his immediate sight and

present experience. He sent out his raven and his dove. Not satisfied

with his first enquiry by the raven, which could flit from one piece of

floating garbage to another, he sent out the dove, and continued to do

so at intervals of seven days.

Noah sent out the raven first, probably because it had been the most

companionable bird and seemed the wisest, preferable to "the silly

dove;" but it never came back with God's message. And so has one often

found that an enquiry into God's will, the examination, for example, of

some portion of Scripture, undertaken with a prospect of success and

with good human helps, has failed, and has failed in this peculiar

ravenlike way; the enquiry has settled down on some worthless point, on

some rotting carcase, on some subject of passing interest or worldly

learning, and brings back no message of God to us. On the other hand,

the continued use, Sabbath after Sabbath, of God's appointed means, and

the patient waiting for some message of God to come to us through what

seems a most unlikely messenger, will often be rewarded. It may be but a

single leaf plucked off that we get, but enough to convince us that God

has been mindful of our need, and is preparing for us a habitable world.

Many a man is like the raven, feeding himself on the destruction of

others, satisfied with knowing how God has dealt with others. He thinks

he has done his part when he has found out who has been sinning and what

has been the result. But the dove will not settle on any such

resting-place, and is dissatisfied until for herself she can pluck off

some token that God's anger is turned away and that now there is peace

on earth. And if only you wait God's time and renew your endeavours to

find such tokens, some assurance will be given you, some green and

growing thing, some living part, however small, of the new creation

which will certify you of your hope.

On the first day of the first month, New Year's day, Noah removed the

covering of the ark, which seems to have stranded on the Armenian

tableland, and looked out upon the new world. He cannot but have felt

his responsibility, as a kind of second Adam. And many questionings must

have arisen in his mind regarding the relation of the new to the old.

Was there to be any connection with the old world at all, or was all to

begin afresh? Were the promises, the traditions, the events, the

genealogies of the old world of any significance now? The Flood

distinctly marked the going out of one order of things and the

establishment of another. Man's career and development, or what we call

history, had not before the Flood attained its goal. If this development

was not to be broken short off, and if God's purpose in creation was to

be fulfilled, then the world must still go on. Some worlds may perhaps

die young, as individuals die young. Others endure through hair-breadth

escapes and constant dangers, find their way like our planet through

showers of fire, and pass without collision the orbits of huge bodies,

carrying with them always, as our world does, the materials of their

destruction within themselves. But catastrophes do not cut short, but

evolve God's purposes. The Flood came that God's purpose might be

fulfilled. The course of nature was interrupted, the arrangements of

social and domestic life were overturned, all the works of men were

swept away that this purpose might be fulfilled. It was expedient that

one generation should die for all generations; and this generation

having been taken out of the way, fresh provision is made for the

co-operation of man with God. On man's part there is an emphatic

acknowledgment of God by sacrifice; on God's part there is a renewed

grant to man of the world and its fulness, a renewed assurance of His

favour.

This covenant with Noah was on the plane of nature. It is man's natural

life in the world which is the subject of it. The sacredness of life is

its great lesson. Men might well wonder whether God did not hold life

cheap. In the old world violence had prevailed. But while Lamech's sword

may have slain its thousands, God had in the Flood slain tens of

thousands. The covenant, therefore, directs that human life must be

reverenced. The primal blessing is renewed. Men are to multiply and

replenish the earth; and the slaughter of a man was to be reckoned a

capital crime; and the maintenance of life was guaranteed by a special

clause, securing the regularity of the seasons. If, then, you ask, Was

this just a beginning again where Adam began? Did God just wipe out man

as a boy wipes his slate clean, when he finds his calculation is turning

out wrong? Had all these generations learned nothing; had the world not

grown at all since its birth?--the answer is, it had grown, and in two

most important respects,--it had come to the knowledge of the uniformity

of nature, and the necessity of human law. This great departure from the

uniformity of nature brought into strong relief its normal uniformity,

and gave men their first lesson in the recognition of a God who governs

by fixed laws. And they learned also from the Flood that wickedness must

not be allowed to grow unchecked and attain dimensions which nothing

short of a flood can cope with.

Fit symbol of this covenant was the rainbow. Seeming to unite heaven and

earth, it pictured to those primitive people the friendliness existing

between God and man. Many nations have looked upon it as not merely one

of the most beautiful and striking objects in nature, but as the

messenger of heaven to men. And arching over the whole horizon, it

exhibits the all-embracing universality of the promise. They accepted it

as a sign that God has no pleasure in destruction, that He does not give

way to moods, that He does not always chide, that if weeping may endure

for a night joy is sure to follow. If any one is under a cloud, leading

a joyless, hopeless, heartless life, if any one has much apparent reason

to suppose that God has given him up to catastrophe, and lets things

run as they may, there is some satisfaction in reading this natural

emblem and recognising that without the cloud, nay, without the cloud

breaking into heavy sweeping rains, there cannot be the bow, and that no

cloud of God's sending is permanent, but will one day give place to

unclouded joy. Let the prayer of David be yours, "I know, O Lord, that

Thy judgments are right, and that Thou in faithfulness hast afflicted

me. Let, I pray Thee, Thy merciful kindness be for my comfort according

to Thy word unto Thy servant."

It may be felt that the matters about which God spoke to Noah were

barely religious, certainly not spiritual. But to take God as our God in

any one particular is to take Him as our God for all. If we can eat our

daily bread as given to us by our Father in heaven, then we are heirs of

the righteousness which is by faith. It is because we wait for some

wonderful and out-of-the-way proofs that God is keeping faith with us

that we so much lack a real and living faith. If you think of God only

in connection with some spiritual difficulty, or if you are waiting for

some critical spiritual experience about which you may deal with

God,--if you are not transacting with Him about your daily work, about

your temporal wants and difficulties, about your friendships and your

tastes, about that which makes up the bulk of your thought, feeling, and

action, then you have yet to learn what living with God means. You have

yet to learn that God the Infinite Creator of all is present in all your

life. We are not in advance of Noah, but behind him, if we cannot speak

to God about common things.

Besides, the relation of man to God was sufficiently determined by this

covenant. When any man in that age began to ask himself the question

which all men in all ages ask, How shall I win the favour of God? it

must, or it might, at once have struck him, Why, God has already

favoured me and has bound Himself to me by express and solemn pledges.

And radically this is all that any one needs to know. It is not a change

in God's attitude towards you that is required. What is required is that

you believe what is actually the case, that the Holy God loves you

already and is already seeking to bless you by making you like Himself.

Believe that, and let the faith of it sink more and more deeply into

your spirit, and you will find that you are saved from your sin.

What remains to be told of Noah is full of moral significance. Rare

indeed is a _wholly_ good man; and happy indeed is he who throughout his

youth, his manhood, and his age lets principle govern all his actions.

The righteous and rescued Noah lying drunk on his tent-floor is a

sorrowful spectacle. God had given him the earth, and this was the use

he made of the gift; melancholy presage of the fashion of his posterity.

He had God to help him to bear his responsibilities, to refresh and

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!