a favored country, separated from other
nations by mountains, deserts, and seas, and yet capable by cultivation
of sustaining a great population, while they were governed by a polity
tending to keep them a distinct, isolated, and peculiar people. To the
descendants of Ham and Japhet were given cities, political power,
material civilization; but in the tents of Shem religion was to dwell.
"From first to last," says Geikie, "the intellect of the Hebrew dwelt
supremely on the matters of his faith. The triumphs of the pencil or the
chisel he left with contemptuous indifference to Egypt, or Assyria, or
Greece. Nor had the Jew any such interest in religious philosophy as has
marked other people. The Aryan nations, both East and West, might throw
themselves with ardor into those high questions of metaphysics, but he
contented himself with the utterances of revelation. The world may have
inherited no advances in political science from the Hebrew, no great
epic, no school of architecture, no high lessons in philosophy, no wide
extension of human thought or knowledge in any secular direction; but he
has given it his religion. To other races we owe the splendid
inheritance of modern civilization and secular culture, but the
religious education of mankind has been the gift of the Jew alone."

For this end Abram was called to the land of Canaan. From this point of
view alone we see the blessing and the promise which were given to him.
In this light chiefly he became a great benefactor. He gave a religion
to the world; at least he established its fundamental principle,--the
worship of the only true God. "If we were asked," says Max Mueller, "how
it was that Abraham possessed not only the primitive conception of the
Divinity, as he has revealed himself to all mankind, but passed, through
the denial of all other gods, to the knowledge of the One God, we are
content to answer that it was by a _special divine revelation_." [1]

[Footnote 1: Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i. p. 372.]

If the greatness of the Jewish race was spiritual rather than temporal,
so the real greatness of Abraham was in his faith. Faith is a sentiment
or a principle not easily defined. But be it intuition, or induction, or
deduction,--supported by reason, or without reason,--whatever it is, we
know what it means.

The faith of Abraham, which Saint Paul so urgently commends, the same in
substance as his own faith in Jesus Christ, stands out in history as so