the Flood, so it was after the Flood. We look in vain for any sign of moral betterment on account of that experience, its impression being soon forgotten or erased. The second trial of the man of dust proved as discreditable and disappointing as the first. In the midst of this spiritual stagnation, about ten generations after Noah, we read that Abram heard the voice of the Lord, saying:

"Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee:

And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:

And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."

Abram obeyed without questioning. He had apparently reached out for and had found a higher mental and spiritual plane of consciousness than others of his people, else he would not have heard and understood the divine message. In the words of the writer of the book of Hebrews, he went out to look "for a city," that is, a consciousness of life, "whose builder and maker is God." His maturing conception of the real nature of God pointed to the wisdom of seeking another home and country where he might find the freedom to express his better sense of Deity. His recognition of the necessity for this complete separation impressed him as the divine call," and he went out, not knowing whither he went."

What it really meant was, that the glimmering dawn of Israel was beginning to break. "The Spirit of God" was moving "upon the face of the waters," the heterogeneous human mass, and was preparing the formation of a nation whose recognition of the one infinite and only God was to be its distinguishing feature. It was necessary, in the very nature of things, that a racial distinction would sometime arise between those who had some definite knowledge of God, and the residue of mankind. Ever since the enmity between good and evil had been uncovered to human consciousness, it was logically

inevitable that the mental qualities nearest to the right conception of God, as they became more defined and coherent, would sooner or later find their family and national expression.

It was no doubt the unconscious stirring of these things that impelled Abram to leave the idolatry of his father's house, and that took form in his thought as a covenant or assurance from God. He beheld himself. not in the sense of personality, but as the representative of the true idea of God-becoming the founder, not only of a great nation, but of a great spiritual movement that, in the fulness of time, would cover the earth with its blessing, and gather all mankind into its fold. This great destiny, which was unfolded to Abram as the legacy of his race, cannot be rightly viewed as an arbitrary predestination by a personal Deity, but as the obligation naturally resting upon the most spiritually enlightened people. It was Abram's preeminent fitness that alone selected him for this work, as it has been with every great leader and reformer.

About twenty-five years later, when Abram was ninety-nine years old and there seemed little prospect of its fulfilment, the heavenly covenant was reaffirmed to him, with the assurance that the son who was to carry on his line would be born of Sarai. But the carnal mind argued that this could not be, because his wife had passed the time of motherhood allotted by so-called physical law. The enmity of the serpent arrayed the plea of matter against the continuation of her seed, but, although human faith staggered at the material argument, it was proved to be without power or authority. The law of Spirit prevailed, and in the process, the natures of Abram and Sarai were so deeply touched by a higher sense of life than matter, that they were henceforth to be known by new names.

It was obviously in accord with the necessity for spiritual progress that the faith of Abraham and his wife should triumph over the so-called laws of the flesh, for only as they overcame evil could their experience bless

all the families of the earth." Abraham had long since left his father's house, with its worship of materiality, and was here struggling with the ungodly claim that man is a creature of the dust, dependent for his life upon material conditions, instead of upon God. Were these material conditions to overrule the divine promise and prevent its fulfilment? It could not be. Abraham's

higher thought of God, which had inspired him to seek "a better country," and which had not failed him during the intervening years, emerged triumphant. The son of promise was born.

And thus at the close of the first long lap of the human journey, it was demonstrated that a diviner law than physical sense governs the creation of man, and this experience lifted human thought to a distinctly higher plane of preparation for its final freedom from evil, the goal towards which all right human endeavor is directed.

A

CHAPTER IV

THE RISE OF ISRAEL

But thou, Israel, art My servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham My friend. ISA. 41:8. And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.

And I will establish My covenant between Me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. GEN. 17:6, 7.

Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable. — HEB. II: 12.

BRAHAM is our father," argued the Jews with Jesus in their attempted self-justification, but the Master pointed out with incisive directness that to be Abraham's descendants meant something more than racial affinity. "If ye were Abraham's children," he said, "ye would do the works of Abraham." And so while we follow with interest the course of Israel in the flesh among the races of the earth, we must not forget that the promises primarily belong to the Israel of Spirit.

Abraham is a notably outstanding figure in the history of human development, not because of personal prestige, but because of his spiritual accomplishments. He had the remarkable distinction of being called "the friend of God." While his contemporaries were absorbed with the worship of idols, he was making the close acquaintance of the invisible Principle or cause of being which mortals name Deity, not through the medium of any physical sense, but through mental obedience to his highest understanding of good. Abraham's fidelity to the demands of God, so far as he apprehended them, brought him eventually to the point where he must choose between the human and the divine idea of fatherhood. Did he as a mortal glory over Isaac as his own son?—then he must surrender this human claim, this concept of man's

earthly origin, that Spirit might be to him the only Father, and His image and likeness the only Son.

Whether this may or may not have come to him, in the crude fashion of his times, as a call for the literal sacrifice of his son's life, is of minor importance. The record indicates that he was prepared to go to even that extremity if he felt that God required it, but that would have been the interpretation of the carnal mind, and its logical ultimate would have required Abraham to offer up his own life also. What progress was impelling him to learn was that Isaac, as the divinely provided means for continuing the chosen seed, belonged not to him but to God. It was a rebuke to the material sense of fatherhood which later found its perfect antitype in the spiritual conception of Jesus.

Reviewing this incident, it would seem that Abraham was here awakening to the recognition that man has no life other than God, and, consequently, that there was no life in Isaac's body which God required him to destroy. This naturally led him to see that what God did require him, as well as other mortals, to sacrifice was the sense of life as material, a sense of life which God neither creates nor destroys. The patriarch's enlarged perception of the spiritual nature of man which came to him in this experience, and his unreserved response to the demand to lay his earthly treasure upon the altar, made him the virtual starting-point of the line of the Messiah, and destined Israel to be the bearer of spiritual light to humanity.

The process of selection, referred to in the preceding chapter, is again seen in the declaration to Abraham, "In Isaac shall thy seed be called," or named. The sons of Abraham by his other wives were thus not classed with the "seed," which would indicate that, in its truer meaning, this word was intended to apply only to the offspring or outgrowth of his spiritual sense of being. In his epistle to the Galatians St. Paul makes this distinction clear when he distinguishes between the son of Hagar and the son of Sarah, as between one born after the