phism as much as we please, but depend upon it we shall drive men to be anthropomorphic and idolatrous too by our vagueness and unreality. For those who are men with actual flesh and blood, and not speculators or philosophers, must have an actual object to believe in, or they must give up belief altogether. They can be Theists or Atheists, but they cannot float in a cloudland between the two; confessing God and making him nothing, under pretence of making Him everything. The more sincerely and faithfully we deal with our own minds, the more I believe we shall discover that the highest knowledge of all does not come at once; and never comes in mere phrases and abstractions. If man is capable of knowing God, it must be because there is that in him, that in every part of his being, which responds to something in God;—all his acts and ways, all his exercises of observation, insight, foresight, rule, must be derived from some source, and that source must be the Creator. I may repeat this maxim to weariness, but I wish you to feel that it is the maxim of Scripture, and that it would be false to itself if the maxim was not carried into every, even the minutest, detail. We need not be afraid of any opprobrious phrases. If the Scripture revelation leads to idolatry-if it does not offer an effectual deliverance from idolatry—such a deliverance as no philosophers have been able, after six thousand years, to devise, cast it aside. But do not be frightened by the word anthropomorphism, for there may be the deepest reason in the nature of things, in the

laws of the universe, why God should only be known in and through a Man.

The whole judgment upon the cities of the plain is, in one sense, the condemnation of the sin which men commit when they become worshippers of themselves; in another, the assertion of the truth which lies beneath that enormity. Man seeing only himself sinks to the point where society becomes impossible, where every man becomes the corrupter and destroyer of every other. Man seeing himself in God, feeling his own relation to God, grows into the perception of a fellowship and sympathy between himself and every being of his own race, into a perception of the loving care and government which he is to exercise over all creatures of lower races; grows into this perception, because the divine character, the mind which upholds all things, and keeps all things at one, the mind, in the likeness of which humanity is created, dawns more and more clearly upon him. And thus the man is prepared for the last and culminating point in the divine education, that in which he learns the meaning and ground of self-sacrifice-how it is possible, how it is implied in our very existence as servants of God, as members of a kind, how it may become the most frightful of all contradictions.

IV. The history of this stage of Abraham's discipline, we have heard in the lesson this afternoon. As in all the other steps of it, the life of the family is inseparably involved with the life of the individual; the most awful experience in the personal being of the patriarch, relates to the child of promise

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the child of laughter and joy. The facts are told in the same style as all that have gone before. 'After these things it came to pass that the Lord did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham : and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee to the land of Moriah; and offer him for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. A very easy explanation, critics assure us, is to be found for this narration. It was a process in the mind of the patriarch. The thought occurred to him, It would be acceptable to God that I should slay my son;' accordingly he determined to do

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so.

Of course we are indebted to any one who reminds us that this process took place in the mind of Abraham; but if we had not received that instruction, we should have been at some loss to know where else it could have taken place. It was precisely because such deep and tremendous thoughts were presented to the mind and spirit of Abraham that he referred them to God. He knew that an invisible Being had held converse with his spirit. He knew that this was the Being to whom he owed obedience. He knew that he was a righteous Being. But how could he know if that command came from this righteous Being? Might it not come from some darker source? He was certain of this, that the impulse to self-sacrifice the feeling that he owed all to God, and was bound to devote all to God-was not from any dark source. That was assuredly from above.

He could no more doubt it than he could doubt his own existence. What then had he to do? The Judge of the whole earth would do right, and would not suffer him to do wrong. He would cast himself upon him; he would make himself ready to do the thing which would be most agonising to him; he would not try, by any act of his, to save the child which God had given him. If the promises to his race were dependent upon him, the Author of those promises could take care of him; if not, he could put the cause into his hands. To argue upon what Abraham did or did not do, should or should not have done, without considering him as a subject of Divine education, is simply to argue about another Abraham, not the one of which the book of Genesis speaks. If we take the whole story just as it stands, we shall believe that God did tempt Abraham, as He had been all his life tempting him, in order to call into life that which would else have been dead; in order to teach him truths which he would else have been ignorant of. Of all truths, the most precious for himself and for his race, was to know that the first-born of the body was not to be slain for the sin of the soul, or as any token of devotion to God. And yet if that negative truth could not be brought into union with the positive one, that a man is to sacrifice his child, himself, everything that he has, to God, then would there be a perpetual contradiction in the hearts of the best, the wisest, and the most simple; such a contradiction as sometimes would lead to the death of an Iphigenia; sometimes to the re

jection of sacrifice altogether, as a mere barbarous impiety. Frightful as the first result is, I believe it is the less terrible alternative. For there is in deed and truth no middle path. The life of the individual, the life of society, must come at last to make self-indulgence, self-seeking, self-will, its foundation, or else Sacrifice. The one was that upon which Sodom stood, and by which it fell; and that which must, by a fire from heaven, such as appealed to the sense and conscience of the elder world, or by the withering up of powers, energies, hopes, involve all cities and nations, which yield to it, in a like ruin. The other was the basis which God laid for the commonwealth, of which Abraham was the beginner for that wider commonwealth which was to comprehend all the families of the earth.

And surely in doing so, He did not intend a departure from his own primary law. He did not intend that a man should be called upon to make a sacrifice; without feeling that in that act, he was in the truest sense, the image of his Maker. Abraham, returning from the slaughter of the kings, found there was a priest in Salem who could bless him in God's name; who was higher than him, though he was to be father of many nations. Abraham, returning from the offering of the lamb which was caught in the thicket, felt that there must be a higher sacrifice than that which he had intended to offer. To ascertain how it was possible that the Lord of all could make a sacrifice, the greatest, most transcendent of all, was the deepest problem with which the souls of righteous men could be exercised. But