tative centre in its day. Rising
sheer from the midst of it, we are told, was an immense tower, or
observatory, from the height of which men, reputed wise, watched the
movements of the heavenly bodies; and especially the moon, for the moon
was worshipped in Ur of the Chaldees as the great tutelary deity of
this people. Here it was that Terah lived, at this time an old man,
and "to trade," as the Scotch people would say, a maker of images. His
craft was in things which symbolized some form of this lunar worship,
and which people bought to put in their houses.

Terah had a son called Abram, who, as he came to years of thought, did
not fall in very readily with this worship of the moon. He appears to
have become very early in life one of an order of doubters to whom the
world owes much; to have suspected, at least, that the moon was not, as
the priests taught, a cause in itself, but the effect of a cause. What
was that cause? What was the fashioning hand behind the effect? In
other words, he had come upon the doubt which explains much of the
faith and achievement of the reformers and path-finders of the world.
Neither doubt nor belief has any virtue in itself; we must determine
the moral quality by its expression in action. Had Abram merely begun
and ended with his doubts about the moon, he would have died and been
as soon forgotten as any other commonplace sceptic before or since his
day. The trouble is not that men doubt, but that they are often
content to do nothing else. It may be better that they should believe
wrong things, than that they should cease to believe in anything.

Abram began, we imagine, to talk to his father about his misgivings,
and notwithstanding the fact that Terah's trade was dependent on the
popular religion, he seems to have yielded with something like
enthusiasm to the greater personality of his son. Eventually they
determined to leave Ur of the Chaldees and go, no matter how far, until
they came to some place where they could worship in the new light which
had come to them, or, as we should say, according to conscience.

It was a formidable undertaking, for they knew not their
destination--if even, indeed, they knew their direction. Some one--I
forget who--has traced their route through Larsa, where men worshipped
the sun; through Erech, where they worshipped the planet Venus--the
bright evening star; through Nipur, where they bowed the knee to Baal;
through Borsippa, where they w