or the time caused a bitter conflict between natural
affection and Christian faith! "Take thy son,"--had it been a slave, the
command would not have been so stirring; but a son, an only son, the joy of
his heart, and the pride and hope of his age,--the son he so much
loved,--oh it was this that harrowed up such a revulsion in his soul, and,
for the moment doubtless, caused him to shrink from the very thought of
obedience. But the command was imperious,--it was from God; and though the
parent shrunk from the deed, yet the faith of the faithful servant gained a
signal triumph over all the protestations of natural affection, and
silenced all its rising murmurs; for "Abraham rose up early in the morning,
and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with, him, and Isaac his
son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto
the place of which God had told him." There he built an altar, laid the
wood in order, bound Isaac, and laid him upon the wood on the altar. But
when with uplifted sacrificial knife, he was about to slay his son, just at
the point where God had the true test of his faith, a ministering angel
stayed his hand, and prevented the bloody form in which he was about to
offer his only son to God; "for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing
thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me!" He needed now but
dedicate him in the moral sense to God.

The case of Samuel is another instance of the offering of children unto the
Lord. His mother had asked him of the Lord, and vowed, as she prayed, to
"give him unto the Lord all the days of his life."--1 Sam. I., 11. Her
prayer was answered, and in obedience to her holy vow, she took him, when
very young, with her to the Temple, where she offered him up as an oblation
to the Lord. "For this child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my
petition which I asked of him; therefore also have I lent him to the Lord;
as long as he liveth shall he be lent unto the Lord!" David also
consecrated all that he had to the Lord,--his possessions as well as his
children. When he built a house, he dedicated it to the Lord, and prepared
"a psalm and song at the dedication of the house."

Here in these examples of Old Testament family offerings to God, we have a
type and illustration of the oblations of the Christian home. The Lord does
not ask the Christian parent, as he did Abraham, to build an altar upon the
summit of some lofty cliff, and there to t