gaze of the world, and thus provoke conquests and political combinations and grand alliances and colonial settlements, by which the capital on Zion’s hill would become another Rome, or Tyre, or Carthage, or Athens, or Alexandria,—­but quite another kind of greatness.  It was to be moral and spiritual rather than material or intellectual, the centre of a new religious life, from which theistic doctrines were to go forth and spread for the healing of the nations,—­all to culminate, when the proper time should come, in the mission of Jesus Christ, and in his teachings as narrated and propagated by his disciples.

This was the grand destiny of the Hebrew race; and for the fulfilment of this end they were located in 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.