acts of Noah, because of its importance to the general purposes of revelation. I have now shown, that Noah's fault originated in the frailty of human nature, and by no means deserved the levity and exposure it met with from Ham, who, as one of the sons of Noah, ought to have been the last to have triumphed over his infirmities. I have also shown, that the curse upon Canaan was, in fact, a prediction of the evil which befel his posterity in after times; and that such a prediction, by inflicting upon Ham the unwelcome knowledge of the humiliation and misery of his child, was a direct and immediate punishment of his want of filial reverence. I have still further shown that the foreknowledge of this servitude of the Canaanites must have been a grief, and therefore a punishment, to Noah. Lastly, I have accounted for the introduction of this incident by Moses, because of its essential connection with the general scheme of prophecy: and what more than this can be required to remove every difficulty attending the incident, I am at a loss to imagine. Under this view of the transaction, it will surely be allowed that we ought no longer to indulge a doubt with regard to the propriety of the predictive curse of Noah, or a censure against the Scriptures for having recorded its utterance. LECTURE XIV. GOD TEMPTING ABRAHAM, PART I. GENESIS Xxii. 1, 2. "It came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. .. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains that I will tell thee of." GREAT was thy faith, O Abraham, and worthy indeed wert thou, to bear the name and the honours of the father of the faithful! To bring thy son as an offering to the altar of the Lord, and there to lift up the knife to slay thy son, thine only son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovedst, the child of thine and Sarah's age, the child of hope, the child of promise, the child of God; to bring that son as a victim to the shrine of the Almighty, and there" to lay thine hand upon the lad" to take away his life; in all this there was an evidence of such undeviating obedience to the commandment of Heaven, a testimony of such firm and unalterable faith, as few of thy sons, however nearly resembling thee in these excellent gifts, have happily been called upon to bear. It was such a trial to human wisdom and to human feelings; it was such a trial to religious principle and to parental tenderness to shed the blood of him to whom thou hadst communicated his being, seemed so to contravene the very rudiments of the law of nature; to cut off out of the land of the living, him upon whom rested all the promises of blessing upon the human race, seemed so to render the accomplishment of those promises impossible, that nothing but an irresistible conviction of the reality of a commandment to do the deeda commandment originating in him whose will is law could either have suggested, or sanctified, or carried thee through the scene. Thus far all agreed. That the trial of Abraham was difficult, beyond the difficulties to which men are subject in the ordinary temptations of life, is universally allowed. But from this point, the line of separation between the children of belief and the children of infidelity begins, and grows wider and wider at every step, as they proceed in the discussion of those principles, upon which the solution of the controversy must ultimately rest. The children of belief and of Abraham, taking for an ensample the dependence of their forefather upon the simple and unadulterated word of God, believe upon the authority of Moses, that the Patriarch acted upon a sure and ascertained commandment from the Lord; and therefore was justified in his awful deed. They rest, in the second place, upon the inspiration of St. Paul, for their information with regard to the motives by which the Patriarch was influenced to obedience, and the means by which he reconciled the seeming contrariety of the two declarations he had received; namely, that Isaac should be slain in sacrifice, and yet live to become the father of the promised seed. They hold it to be a faithful saying, that Abraham accounted God to be able to raise up his slain and offered son even from the dead: and thus do they think that they remove from his mind every apprehension of inconsistency between the commandment to sacrifice, and the promise to bless his son. Supported, lastly, by the united assertions of the Prophet and the Apostle, they maintain that because Abraham believed the power, and submitted himself meekly to the recognised will of God, his obedience in that faith was rightly counted to him for righteousness in the eye of eternal mercy, though he was himself far, no doubt, from being perfect in personal righteousness, when weighed in the balance of impartial justice. For God, that chargeth even the angels with folly, must needs be supposed to have beheld enough of impurity and imperfection, even in the character of faithful Abraham, to have blotted him out for ever from the book of independent merit. These are the arguments of them that believe. The children of unbelief, on the other hand, trusting to the conclusions of human reason, as drawn only from their own general principles of moral obligation, and their own philosophical systems of religious faith, maintain, that all these reasonings are feeble and inconclusive. Of the tenderness of Abraham's heart, and of the piety of his intention, and of the struggle which there must have been in his mind between the sense of duty and desire, they express no positive or considerable degree of doubt. But they argue, that he ought to have allowed no mode of divine communication to prevail over his better feelings, and bring him to the commission of what they deem a manifest act of paternal cruelty. That in Abraham's conduct we have a powerful example of the triumph of what was supposed to be |