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"Yes," said the archdeacon; "Sir Abraham has given most minute attention to the case; indeed, I knew he would; most minute attention; and his opinion is, and as to his opinion on such a subject being correct, no one who knows Sir Abraham's character can doubt, his opinion is, that they hav'n't got a leg to stand on." "But as how, archdeacon?"
He had only left a note, stating the time of his return. "It was a week ere he came. Mary had not improved in his absence, yet no one deemed her very ill. "I dreaded Abraham's coming home, because he had left me in silent anger; but how could I have replied to his question otherwise than I did? No one, not Mr. McKey himself, had asked me; and should I give him, my brother, my answer first?
The Dean enjoyed it as a specimen of English "phlegm," recalling with amusement his last visit to the Paris of the Second Empire Paris torn between government and opposition, the salons of the one divided from the salons of the other by a sulphurous gulf, unless when some Lazarus of the moment, some well-known novelist or poet, cradled in the Abraham's bosom of Liberalism, passed amid shrieks of triumph or howls of treason into the official inferno.
And so must Jacob in his turn. Now this, I think, is just what the story teaches us concerning God. God chooses Abraham's family to grow into a great nation, and to be a peculiar people. The next question will be: If God favours that family, will he do unjust things to help them? will he let them do unjust things to help themselves? The Bible answers positively, No.
Indeed he only is; all others have and shall be; but in eternity there is no distinction of tenses; and therefore that terrible term predestination, which hath troubled so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in respect to God no prescious determination of our states to come, but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the instant that he first decreed it; for to his eternity, which is indivisible and all together, the last trump, is already sounded, the reprobates in the flame and the blessed in Abraham's bosom.
The very existence of Ishmael was a memorial of Abraham's failure in faith and patience. For he thought that the promised heir was long in coming, and so he thought that he would help God.
But the main importance of the incident is in the wonderful picture of Abraham's intercession, which, in like manner, veils, under a strangely sensuous representation, lofty truths for all ages. But He was also in the One before whom Abraham stood. The first great truth enshrined in this part of the story is that the friend of God is compassionate even of the sinful and degraded.
That great numbers were thus sacrificed is only too apparent from the accounts in the Jewish scriptures Abraham's acts and those of Jephtha being examples of the manner in which this god was propitiated. In Micah, vi. chap., 7th verse, occurs an interrogation which furnishes something more than a hint of the practice among the Jews of child sacrifice.
The Moabites took alarm, though these, as descended from Abraham's nephew Lot, were to be left unharmed; and their king, Balak, sent, as it appears, even to Mesopotamia for Balaam, a true prophet, though a guilty man, in hopes that he would bring down the curse of God on them.
He would rather not have a view till the run comes to its close. "But," continued Mr. Prendergast, "it is necessary that I should say a few words to you about this letter. Abraham's mother was, I suppose, not exactly an an educated woman?" "I never saw her, sir." "She died when he was very young?" "Four years old, sir." "And her son hardly seems to have had much education?"
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