As for me, behold my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations.  Neither shall thy name be any more Abram [Father of Elevation] but thy name shall be Abraham [Father of a Multitude], for a father of many nations have I made thee.”  We observe that the covenant was repeatedly renewed; in connection with which was the rite of circumcision, which Abraham and his posterity, and even his servants, were required scrupulously to observe, and which it would appear he unreluctantly did observe as an important condition of the covenant.  Why this rite was so imperatively commanded we do not know, neither can we understand why it was so indissolubly connected with the covenant between God and Abraham.  We only know that it was piously kept, not only by Abraham himself, but by his descendants from generation to generation, and became one of the distinctive marks and peculiarities of the Jewish nation,—­the sign of the promise that in Abraham all the families of the earth should be blessed,—­a promise fulfilled even in the patriarchal monotheism of Arabia, the distant tribes of which, under Mohammed, accepted the One Supreme God.

A still more serious test of the faith of Abraham was the sacrifice of Isaac, on whose life all his hopes naturally rested.  We are told that God “tempted,” or tested, the obedient faith of Abraham, by suggesting to him that it was his duty to sacrifice that only son as a burnt-offering, to prove how utterly he trusted the Lord’s promise; for if Isaac were cut off, where was another legitimate heir to be found?  Abraham was then one hundred and twenty years old, and his wife was one hundred and ten.  Moreover, on principles of reason why should such a sacrifice be demanded?  It was not only apparently against reason, but against nature, against every sacred instinct, against humanity, even an act of cruelty,—­yea, more, a crime, since it was homicide, without any seeming necessity.  Besides, everybody has a right to his own life, unless he has forfeited it by crime against society.  Isaac was a gentle, harmless, interesting youth of twenty, and what right, by any human standard, had Abraham to take his life?  It is true that by patriarchal customs and laws Isaac belonged to Abraham as much as if he were a slave or an animal.  He had the Oriental right to do with his son as he pleased.  The head of a family had not only absolute control over wife and children, but the power of life and death.  And this absolute power was not exercised alone by Semitic races, but also by the Aryan in their original settlements, in Greece and Italy, as well as in Northern India.  All the early institutions of society recognized this paternal right.  Hence the moral sense of Abraham was not apparently shocked at the command of God, since his son was his absolute property.  Even Isaac made no resistance, since he knew that Abraham had a right to his life.