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mind; it was not a force in the civilization of his times. was a stranger to those mighty ideas- the one family of man; universal brotherhood; the welfare of that family definitely proposed to every mind, as an object to be accom plished; the divine power entering human history in redemption, and thus consecrating humanity; the universal obligation to consecrate life, in the spirit of self-sacrifice, to the service of God in the service of man these great ideas are not in the literature of Greece and Rome. Nor can you find the derived thoughts, so familiar to the modern. mind-the worth of man; the sacredness and universality of human rights; missions; reformations; human progress; the conversion of the world. Whatever of thought, or action, or institution, looks to the welfare of mankind as a whole, to the rights of man, as man (not as a subject or eitizen), to the elevation and renovation of humanity, is wanting.

But in the opening of Genesis, the human race is presented as one family, and a foundation is thus laid for all the grand and quickening ideas which flow from this conception. The power of this unity of man as one family, having a common relation to God, their maker, is enhanced by their common fall, and their common participation in the ruin of sin, the condemnation of God, and the hope of deliverance through a human seed. What a unity of tho human kind here, which makes even the wickedness of a man a reason of tenderness towards him from his fellowmen, who are also fellow-sinners, and comprehends even the enmities of men within its all-embracing community of interest. Why does this old book open with this grand conception to which heathen culture never attained?

For the full force of this argument, it is necessary to consider the circumstances under which the promise to Abraham was made. It was nineteen centuries before human cultivation began anywhere to look beyond the limits of national exclusiveness; it was when men were dispersing themselves through the world; when families

and clans held their little territories, or roamed nomadic over the unoccupied earth, the germs of nations that were to be; it was when history herself was not yet born,1 and even Egypt is dimly seen as a centre of national life and unity. Then was announced this promise of a blessing for all mankind. It was announced as a prophecy to be fulfilled in the future; as the life-principle of a nation, and the object to be realized in its history; as the key to the plan of God's providence in all the history of the world. This great idea of the human family, one in origin, one in a common fall, and by a common redemption, fills the Bible. It is the Bible. Prophecies and doctrines, commands and promises, ritual and types, providential acts and miraculous interventions, are all the mighty growth of this one seed-thought.

III. The promise recognizes the idea of a universal religion.

Any explanation, which admits that the call of Abraham was supernatural, requires this admission; for then the essential conception of the call must be, that God selects Abraham's posterity as the depository of the knowledge of himself, and the agency through which he is to bring redemption to the world. The same is apparent in the various inspired records of this covenant.

To the minds of modern Christians the idea of a universal religion has lost its strangeness. They understand that religion must be the same to an American, or a Chinese, or a Hawaiian. But it was not familiar to the ancient mind; it was even rejected as impossible. It was urged as an argument against Christianity, that it claimed to be a universal religion. Says Celsus: "He must be a fool who can believe that Greeks and barbarians, in Asia, Europe, and Lybia- all nations to the end of the earth-can unite in one and the same religion."

The history of the Israelites exemplifies the difficulty felt by the ancients in receiving this idea, which the Bible has

1 "History herself was born on that night when Moses led forth his countrymen from the land of Goshen."- Bunsen.

made so familiar to us. They were slow to believe that Jehovah was the one and only God. The idolatry into which they were continually falling, was not the renunciation of Jehovah, as a god, or as the god of their nation, but it was falling back to the common belief of the times, that he was only a god of that nation, and that other nations had gods as really divine as he. Hence the reiterated procla mation: "I am Jehovah; there is no God else. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me."

It was not till the

captivity that the lesson was thoroughly learned.

But this idea of a universal religion in the worship of one God, in the participation in a common redemption, is the ground of the possibility of a community of human interests, and of all efforts for man's spiritual salvation, or even for a universal and homogeneous social progress.

Polytheism is essentially divisive. Each nation has its peculiar gods, embittered against the gods of other nations with all the enmities of the nations themselves. The gods of the hills fight against the gods of the valleys. Thus there is no common ground of unity; no common and supreme God; no common and authoritative law of right and wrong; no common standard of appeal; no common idea of sin, or of salvation; no common faith, nor hope, nor spiritual experience. The cleavage which divides the nations, cuts down through the deepest foundations of common thought, feeling, and interest, and leaves them more hopelessly dissevered than ships driven asunder on the ocean; for it cleaves the ocean itself, and leaves no common element in which they separate.

This foundation of a universal religion and a common redemption must be laid in human thought before it is possible for men even to have the idea of a permanent community of interest among all nations. There may be temporary alliances, arising from a temporary coincidence of interest, to be changed to enmity when that temporary coincidence ceases; but there is no basis of common progress, character, interest, and hope, the same under all

outward changes. This foundation must be laid in human thought before it is possible even to have the idea of the conversion of the world, of missions, of philanthropy, of popular progress, of the education and improvement of mankind.

But this idea of a universal religion is implied in the promise to Abraham, and is declared with ever-increasing clearness in the Psalms and the Prophecies.

IV. This blessing to mankind through a common redemption and a universal religion is to be realized through the agency of a people chosen by God, and, by covenant, made his peculiar people.

Here is an apparent incongruity. The promise is of universal blessing; a universal religion; a redemption to bless mankind. But the promise is made to a single people; it includes within itself a call and a command to that people to separate themselves from all others, and a covenant of God with them which distinguishes them from all others as his own.

This incongruity becomes more conspicuous in the subsequent history. Moses established stringent and minute regulations to insure the separateness of the Israelites. They were forbidden to round the corners of their beards, and were required, by many similar rules extending to the minutiae of life, to make themselves unlike other people, and to prevent the contamination of associating with them. By bloody wars they took the land of Canaan, seeming to be the enemies, rather than the benefactors, of mankind. The spirit of exclusiveness grew into their national life, and became a Pharisaism.

On the other hand, all the literature of this people is vital with the promise of universal blessing-of a Redeemer and a religion for all mankind. In the thinking of all the leading minds of the nation this great idea grows broader and clearer as the actual separation of the people becomes more distinct. In the Psalms and the Prophecies it is uttered in language at once the most explicit and sublime: "The wilderness

and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose: for as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things which are sown in it to burst forth, so the Lord will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all nations. The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea."

But this seeming contradiction is itself a proof of the divine origin of the promise and its development in the Israelitish writings.

1. It shows that there is nothing in the life and institu tions of that people which can adequately account for it. The literature of a people is the utterance of its inmost heart and life; but the institutions of the Jews were de signed to separate them from other nations. They imbibed the spirit of their institutions, rather than the spirit of the universal promise; and exclusiveness penetrated and characterized the national life. How is it to be accounted for, that this promise appears at the beginning of their history, and breathes its broad, generous, hopeful spirit through all their literature? We have seen that the idea is wanting in heathen literature for two thousand years after the call of Abraham, and that it was difficult to be received, was even regarded as absurd, when definitely propounded by Christianity. Now we see that the outward institutions and history of the Jews themselves were in seeming antagonism to the idea, and could not originate it. How can its exist ence, under such circumstances, be accounted for, except as an inspiration from God.

Especially is this difficulty insuperable to those who accept the low views of the Israelitish character common to sceptics. For example, Goethe says the Israelites had never been good for much, as their own judges and proph ets were always accusing them; that they had few virtues, and more faults than any other people. The single merit of toughness is all that he allows them.1 But how, on any

1 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Book II. Chap. 11.