themselves the descendants of Abraham until a very late period, when they had at last established themselves in Palestine. They were strangers, hated and despised by their neighbours. They wished, say some, to relieve themselves by passing for descendants of that Abraham who was so much reverenced in a great part of Asia. The faith which we owe to the sacred books of the Jews removes all these difficulties.

Other critics, no less hardy, start other objections relative to Abraham's immediate communication with the Almighty, his battles, and his victories.

The Lord appeared to him after he went out of Egypt, and said,* "Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art, northward and southward, and eastward, and westward. For all the land which thou seest to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.

The Lord, by a second oath, afterwards promised him all "from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates."+

The critics ask, how could God promise the Jews this immense country which they have never possessed? and how could God give to them for ever that small part of Palestine out of which they have so long been driven?

Again, the Lord added to these promises, that Abraham's posterity should be as numerous as the dust of the earth-" so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered."‡

Our critics insist that there are not now on the face of the earth four hundred thousand Jews, though they have always regarded marriage as a sacred duty, and made population their greatest object.

To these difficulties it is replied, that the church, substituted for the synagogue, is the true race of Abraham, who are therefore very numerous.

It must be admitted that they do not possess Pales

* Genesis, chap. xiii, verses 14 and 15.

+ Ibid, chap. xv, verse 18.

lbid, chap. xiii, verse 16.

tine; but they may one day possess it, as they have already conquered it once, in the first crusade, in the time of Urban II. In a word, when we view the Old Testament with the eyes of faith, as a type of the New, all either is or will be accomplished, and our weak reason must bow in silence.

Fresh difficulties are raised respecting Abraham's victory near Sodom. It is said to be inconceivable that a stranger who drove his flocks to graze in the neighbourhood of Sodom, should, with three hundred and eighteen keepers of sheep and oxen, beat a king of Persia, a king of Pontus, the king of Babylon, and the king of nations, and pursue them to Damascus, which is more than a hundred miles from Sodom. Yet such a victory is not impossible, for we see other similar instances in those heroic times, when the arm of God was not shortened. Think of Gideon, who, with three hundred men, armed with three hundred pitchers and three hundred lamps, defeated a whole army! Think of Sampson, who slew a thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass!

Even profane history furnishes like examples. Three hundred Spartans stopped, for a moment, the whole army of Xerxes, at the pass of Thermopylæ. It is true that, with the exception of one man who fled, they were all slain, together with their king Leonidas, whom Xerxes had the baseness to gibbet, instead of raising to his memory the monument which it deserved. It is moreover true, that these three hundred Lacedæmonians, who guarded a steep passage which would scarcely admit two men abreast, were supported by an army of ten thousand Greeks, distributed in advantageous posts among the rocks of Pelion and Ossa, four thousand of whom, be it observed, were stationed behind this very passage of Thermopylæ.

These four thousand perished after a long combat. Having been placed in a situation more exposed than that of the three hundred Spartans, they may be said to have acquired more glory in defending it against the Persian army, which cut them all in pieces. Indeed, on the monument afterwards erected on the field

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of battle, mention was made of these four thousand victims; whereas, none are spoken of now but the three hundred.

A still more memorable though much less celebrated action, was that of fifty Swiss, who, in 1315, routed at Morgat the whole army of the archduke Leopold of Austria, consisting of twenty thousand men. They destroyed the cavalry, by throwing down stones from a high rock; and gave time to fourteen hundred Helvetians to come up and finish the defeat of the army. This achievement at Morgat is more brilliant than that of Thermopyla, inasmuch as it is a finer thing to conquer than to be conquered. The Greeks amounted to ten thousand, well armed; and it was impossible that, in a mountainous country, they could have to encounter more than a hundred thousand Persians at once; it is more than probable that there were not thirty thousand Persians engaged. But here fourteen hundred Swiss defeat an army of twenty thousand men. The diminished proportion of the less to the greater number, also increases the proportion of glory. But, how far has Abraham led us?

These digressions amuse him who makes and sometimes him who reads them. Besides, every one is delighted to see a great army beaten by a little one.

SECTION II.

Abraham is one of those names which were famous in Asia Minor and Arabia, as Thaut was among the Egyptians, the first Zoroaster in Persia, Hercules in Greece, Orpheus in Thrace, Odin among the northern nations, and so many others, known more by their fame than by any authentic history. I speak here of profane history only; as for that of the Jews, our masters and our enemies, whom we at once detest and believe, their history having evidently been written by the Holy Ghost, we feel towards it as we ought to feel. We have to do here only with the Arabs. They boast of having descended from Abraham through Ismaël, believing that this patriarch built Mecca and died there.

The fact is, that the race of Ismaël has been

infinitely more favoured by God than that of Jacob. Both races, it is true, have produced robbers; but the Arabian robbers have been prodigiously superior to the Jewish ones; the descendants of Jacob conquered only a very small country, which they have lost; whereas the descendants of Ismaël conquered part of Asia, of Europe, and of Africa, established an empire more extensive than that of the Romans, and drove the Jews from their caverns, which they called The Land of Promise.

Judging of things only by the examples to be found in our modern histories, it would be difficult to believe that Abraham had been the father of two nations so widely different. We are told that he was born in Chaldea, and that he was the son of a poor potter, who earned his bread by making little earthen idols. It is hardly likely that this son of a potter should have passed through impracticable desarts, and founded the city of Mecca, at the distance of four hundred leagues, under a tropical sun. If he was a conqueror, he doubtless cast his eyes on the fine country of Assyria. If he was no more than a poor man, he did not found kingdoms abroad.

The Book of Genesis relates that he was seventy-five years old when he went out of the land of Haran after the death of his father Terah the potter; but the same book also tells us, that Terah, having begotten Abraham at the age of seventy years, lived to that of two hundred and five; and afterwards, that Abraham went out of Haran; which seems to signify, that it was after the death of his father.

Either the author did not know how to dispose his narration, or it is clear from the Book of Genesis itself, that Abraham was one hundred and thirty-five years old when he quitted Mesopotamia. He went from a

country which is called idolatrous, to another idodatrous country named Sichem, in Palestine. Why did he quit the fruitful banks of the Euphrates, for a spot so remote, so barren, and so stony as Sichem ? It was not a place of trade, and was distant a hundred leagues from Chaldea, and desarts lay between. But

God chose that Abraham should go this journey; he chose to show him the land which his descendants were

to occupy several ages after him. It is with difficulty that the human understanding comprehends the reasons for such a journey.

Scarcely had he arrived in the little mountainous country of Sichem, when famine compelled him to quit it. He went into Egypt with his wife Sarah, to seek a subsistence. The distance from Sichem to Memphis is two hundred leagues. Is it natural that a man should go so far to ask for corn in a country, the language of which he did not understand? Truly these were strange journies, undertaken at the age of nearly a hundred and forty years!

He brought with him to Memphis his wife Sarah, who was extremely young, and almost an infant when compared with himself; for she was only sixty-five. As she was very handsome, he resolved to turn her beauty to account. "Say, I pray thee, that thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake." He should rather have said to her, "Say, I pray thee, that thou art my daughter." The king fell in love with the young Sarah, and gave the pretended brother abundance of sheep, oxen, he-asses, she-asses, camels, menservants and maid-servants; which proves that Egypt was then a powerful, and well-regulated, and consequently an ancient kingdom, and that those were magnificently rewarded who came and offered their sisters to the kings of Memphis. The youthful Sarah was ninety years old when God promised her that, in the course of a year, she should have a child by Abraham, who was then a hundred and sixty.

Abraham, who was fond of travelling, went into the horrible desart of Kadesh with his pregnant wife, ever young and ever pretty. A king of this desart was, of course, captivated by Sarah, as the king of Egypt had been. The father of the faithful told the same lie as in Egypt, making his wife pass for his sister; which brought him more sheep, oxen, men-servants, and maid-servants. It might be said that this Abraham became rich principally by the means of his wife. Com