"I must confine myself to the patriarchs, not only because our discourse has been accidentally led to them, but because the knowledge of their history is absolutely necessary to understand what follows.

"Our father Abraham is at once, the last star in the night of primeval history, and the morning star which announces the approaching day. The history of the creation and the fall you have doubtless heard already in the Bruchium; for I am told that both your philosophers and our Hellenists employ themselves very diligently upon it; and I must lament, that, leaving the true path of knowledge, they should prize the interpretations of the heathens above the genuine word of Jehovah. But enough of these men.

"Notwithstanding the fall of our first parents, they had still a just knowledge of God and of his will, connected with his promise, that the seed of the woman should bruise the head of the serpent. But when Cain was compelled to flee from his father's house, unwilling to relate to his children the story of his own fratricide,

he represented himself as the origin of the human race, on which account his descendants, who had been brought up in his sins, called themselves the Sons of Men; in contradistinction to which, the children of the other sons of Adam, who were acquainted with the history of the creation, called themselves Sons of God. By the sins of these sons of men, and their mixture with the sons of God, iniquity became so prevalent upon the earth, that Jehovah sent a deluge, in which only Noah and his family were saved. In him and the descendents of his son Shem alone, was the true knowledge of God preserved, when the former iniquities again obtained the ascendency among other nations and they fell into idolatry. When the true religion began to give way before the false, even in Ur of the Chaldees, where Abram the son of Terah lived, Jehovah bade him leave his native country and his father's house, to go to a land which the Lord should show him. That land was Canaan. This Abram is our father Abraham, who, when he arrived at Bethel, erected a tabernacle there, and built an altar,

and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord appeared often unto him and proved his faith ten of these trials are recorded in scripture. The severest of them was that in which he was commanded to offer up his son Isaac, in whom the promise was to be fulfilled. But his steadfastness in all these trials made him worthy that on him all these promises should rest. God promised him, in the person of his descendents, the land of Canaan, which on this account we still call the Land of Promise. The Lord made him to come forth from his tent, and said, 'Look towards heaven, and see if thou canst count the stars thereof such shall thy seed be.'* On the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, and said, "To thy seed will I give this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river Euphrates.' But these promises, to make his posterity a mighty nation and to give them a fair country for their inheritance, had their motive in a yet higher promise. After he had endured, with

* Gen. xv. 5.

such noble firmness and resignation, the most grievous of all his trials, God said unto him, 'In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.'* This prophecy is the radiant point of Jewish history, never obscured through all the vicissitudes of our condition, nay, wonderful to relate, shining most brightly in the very circumstances which seemed most unauspicious for its fulfilment. The promise was renewed to his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob; its import involves the history of the whole human race. Abraham stood alone in his knowledge and his worship of the one true God; except indeed that he found at Salem, the present Jerusalem, a single priest of the Most High, the king Melchisedec. It was necessary therefore that the people of the promise should separate themselves from all other nations, even from the rest of Abraham's descendents. In Isaac they separated themselves from Ishmael and his children; in Jacob from Esau and his children, the Edomites: for thus

* Gen. xxii. 18.

only could they continue to be the people of the promise.

"How great and dignified does the patriarch appear, in whom were united all those qualities, to which his descendents could only be formed by the lapse of a thousand years the knowledge of the will of Jehovah from his own immediate communication; in his own house, and its precincts, a temple; unlimited faith and unreserved obedience !

“While I mention these three distinguishing characteristics of the patriarch, I cannot help dwelling more particularly on the second, of which I am reminded by the contrast of our life in Egypt; and because our present situation, living in tents and caravans in the desert, has some analogy with his. His whole dwelling, and the region in which for the time he had his abode, were consecrated as a temple by the manifestations of Jehovah. The manifold complexity of relations and collision of interests, which are so burdensome in the life of men in cities, were unknown to him, in the simple grandeur of his pastoral state. His days flowed