instinct of his faith in God superseded the necessity of all such laborious calculations. To him, the Almighty God-the Lord who had provided and would still provide, the God who had listened to his intercessory prayer, and remembered him when He destroyed the cities of the plain and spared Lot for his sake, the Great Being with whom he had entered into covenant -was not a mere name, had not been petrified into a conventionalism, nor become a metaphysical abstraction. He was his God; a constant source of strength and energy; the God before whom he lived and who was with him in all that he did.

It was a faith almost evangelical in its nature. It stretched far beyond the horizon of this present world. It never looked back; it was always looking forward. His whole life declared plainly, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews testifies, that "he sought not the country from which he came out," to which he might have returned, but that "he desired a better country—that is, an heavenly"; "wherefore God was not ashamed to be called his God, for He prepared for him a city."

(3) Seeking God's blessing, not as his children were taught by Moses to seek it, in the fruit of his body, nor in the fruit of his cattle, nor in the fruit of his ground, but "in the joy and peace of believing"; in the precious gift of a "conscience void of offence towards God and towards men"; realising the higher life of the Spirit, and leaving it to others to quarrel about pasturelands and flocks and herds, do we find the evangelical temper of his faith. Not in any fancied anticipatory

revelation of the great mystery of godliness, afterwards to be wrought out by Him who, when He came to deliver man, "took not on Him the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham"; but in this higher and more natural sense, I conceive we are to understand that this great saint of God" rejoiced to see the day of Christ, and saw it, and was glad." He saw it, not at one particular place, nor at one particular time; not only on Mount Moriah, when “in a figure" he had received his only-begotten son from the dead, but all his life. through—wherever he pitched his tent, and built his altar, and waited patiently for the promise, and found himself strong from his trust in God.

For what is "Christ's day" but that measure of knowledge of the will of God which it is our privilege to enjoy, and those opportunities of access to Him which all have, though all may not use? Even to us who live in the middle of that day, the light can be called neither clear nor dark. The knowledge is partial and fragmentary; the view is " through a glass" and full of riddles (ev alviyμari): the hopes, but not the eyes, enter into that which is within the veil. And just so, with less precise knowledge perhaps, but perhaps also with even intenser insight, fared Abraham.

What does Christ do for those who consciously live in the light of this day? He lifts them up from earth to heaven; "sets their affections on things above"; helps them to understand what that meaneth-" Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God."

It must have been the same influence, the same divine light, which guided the steps of Abraham when

he left house, and substance, and friends, at what he believed to be the bidding of God, and went out a homeless wanderer, "not knowing whither he went": that let Lot have the best of the land, instead of going to a judge and saying, "Bid my brother divide the inheritance with me": that waited those five and twenty years "because he knew Him faithful that had promised": and, clearest instance of all, that taught him on Mount Moriah that sublime lesson of self-sacrifice which can cheerfully surrender everything to the even suspected will of God.

And so when the blessed Jesus would reprove the eye-service and hypocrisy of those "who honoured God with their lips, while their heart was far from Him," He can find no more effective contrast by which to set forth the hollowness of such service than the faithful Abraham "rejoicing to see His day." They might be Abraham's natural seed, these hypocritical worshippers, but they were not Abraham's spiritual children. They might call Abraham their father, but they did not the works of Abraham. They thought it impossible that they could ever lose their spiritual prerogatives; but they were told that God, if He pleased, could even of the stones of the highway "raise up children unto Abraham."

The Psalmist's account of the forfeiture by the Israelites of their spiritual privileges, and their gradual degeneration as a people, is "that their heart was not whole with God"; and so "they continued not steadfast in His covenant." Abraham was a marked contrast to his posterity in this respect. If ever there

was a man whose heart might be called whole with God, it was he more so certainly than David: more so perhaps even than Moses. It was the special characteristic quality of his faith its entirety, its roundness, its complete submission to the will of God.

dwell on its few specks and flaws, on its equivocation in the courts of Pharaoh and Abimelech, on its impatience evidenced by the marriage with Hagar: reckon its triumphs, its achievements. The Bible, with its rare truthfulnesss, portrays the whole man for us, in his strength and in his weakness, and, as ever, that "strength made perfect in weakness."

No character drawn in Holy Writ seems to be the property of all time more than he. There is nothing Jewish about him; nothing local; nothing essential that can be called the product of his age, the result of his peculiar circumstances. He is a grand, statuesque type of the grace of faith: faith in its essence rather than in its development: faith in the power, the providence, the sovereignty of God. Alas! how much

than we see it!

more truly did he see Christ's day How much nearer did he reach the measure of the stature of Christ's fulness than we can! How far beyond our poor attainments was he penetrated with that transcendent Christian grace which "believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, and finally, never fails."

In the inquisitive temper of a realistic age, an interest has been re-awakened in the Hebrew patriarch's grave. To have visited the mausoleum at Hebron is one of the achievements of Eastern travel. There, in their

sepulchres, though in outward form strangely different from that natural cave “in the end of Ephron's field where first their bones were laid-cave and field and trees having long since disappeared-there still lies the dust of Abraham, and Sarah, and Isaac, and Jacob, "the heirs with him of the same promise." It hardly needs a visit to the tomb to realise the lesson it conveys. << 'Of illustrious men," said the great Athenian statesman, every land is the sepulchre." The grave of Abraham is dear even to those who count not their descent from him. Standing in imagination, reverently before either the memory of his life or the sepulchre of his dust, our hearts are kindled with the single thought of the conquering might of true and living faith. "The victory," cries one who himself had proved its power, "the victory that overcometh the world is faith" (1 St. John v. 4).

Preached-St. Mary's, Oxford, March 18, 1870.

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