easy to be on his side when there are many with us. But to stand alone when there is no friendly voice to cheer us on, no one on whom we can lean, no brother to support us by his example, then to declare plainly whose we are and whom we desire to serve, this does indeed require no small amount of grace. What a blessed thought it is that the Lord has always had his servants in the world! In Cain's days there was a righteous Abel; afterward an Enoch, and then a Noah. Sometimes on a dark night, when no stars are seen and the lonely traveler loses his way, how welcome is the light that glitters from some solitary cottage by the roadside! So in the world's darkest time, when wickedness filled the earth, how blessed to know that there was one dwelling from which the light of God's truth shone forth! Such was the household of Noah. There alone was the Sabbath kept holy; there alone was the voice of prayer and praise heard; there alone was the family altar raised and sacrifice offered; there, in that dwelling, was the home of holiness and peace. And now God honors Noah by making known to him his purpose concerning the fearful punishment that was hanging over the world. He tells him of the coming flood, and bids him prepare for it. Observe, however, the goodness of God. He does not instantly send the flood, but he mercifully pauses before he strikes the blow. A long, long warning is given. A respite of a hundred and twenty years is granted to a world of sinners. Long did he sound the warning bell before he poured out his fury upon them. How was this time spent? As for Noah, God had directed him to build an ark in which he and his family might be preserved, and he takes God at his word and instantly begins the work appointed him. St. Paul says, in Heb. xi., “Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house." And the rest, what did they do? How did they employ the precious breathing-time so graciously allotted to them? Did the A B R A НАМ. N Abraham we have one who, save our first father Adam, is in some respects the most remarkable man, the greatest character, in history. Not the mighty Nimrods nor Pharaohs nor Alexanders nor Cæsars nor any other man, has left such a broad mark on the world, though he had no home on its surface but a tent, nor property in its soil but a tomb. His name is known where the greatest emperors and conquerors were never so much as heard of. There is no quarter of the globe to which it has not been carried, and it is the only one which is venerated alike by Jews and Christians and Mohammedans; for whatever be their differences and jealousies, all of them, in one sense or another, claim an equal relationship with this distinguished patriarch, saying, “We have Abraham to our father." Other men, of great statesmanship or military powers, have founded nations; but since the days of the creation or of the deluge he is the only man who was the father of a nation—the fountain from which a whole people sprang. The oldest of our families are but of yesterday compared with his. And as no house in the world is so ancient, to none has the world owed so much as to his. Through him the Saviour came. To his descendants God committed those great truths which have overthrown the most ancient idolatries, have tamed the wildest savage, have emancipated the slave, have raised prostrate humanity, have dried up its bitterest tears and redressed its greatest wrongs, and are destined to overturn Satan's empire throughout the whole bounds of earth, and establish on its ruins the reign of a holy and universal peace, restoring Eden to a defiled and distracted world, and, as in the days of primeval innocence, to humanity the image of its God. The biographer of any distinguished man considers himself fortunate if he can present, in the frontispiece, his readers with a likeness of his subject. We are fortunate enough to possess one of Abraham, and in it a likeness more to be depended on than those of the Pharaohs the Egyptians have left us carved on their tombs, or the marble busts of the Cæsars that adorn the galleries of Rome. Our likeness of Abraham is a genuine one, he, indeed, being the only Scripture character, or rather, the only character in all ancient history, of whose portrait so much can be affirmed. We have it not in any antique sculpture or painting, but in a form more true and faithful. He lives in the well-known and characteristic features of his descendants. Types of the Church, his race have suffered, and also survived, the changes of four thousand years, the saying that described their early being equally applicable to their later history—this, namely, the more they were afflicted, "the more they multiplied and grew." With a tenacity of life unexampled in the history of any other people, and which proves them to have been God's peculiar care, neither Babylonian, nor Assyrian, nor Grecian, nor Roman, nor long centuries of Christian oppression, has been able to destroy, or even to absorb them. Clinging as tenaciously to each other as to their faith, they have lived, wedded, died, buried among themselves, mingled as little with other nations as oil with the water amid which it floats. The English, for example, are a mixed race-so mixed that the blood of Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, meets and mingles in their veins. Not so the Jews. It is nigh four thousand years since Isaac and Ishmael met to lay their father in his rocky tomb, yet the blood of Abraham flows as pure in the veins of his Hebrew children as when |