What a startling command was this!  How it must have stirred up the soul of that parent, and for the time caused a bitter conflict between natural affection and Christian faith!  “Take thy son,”—­had it been a slave, the command would not have been so stirring; but a son, an only son, the joy of his heart, and the pride and hope of his age,—­the son he so much loved,—­oh it was this that harrowed up such a revulsion in his soul, and, for the moment doubtless, caused him to shrink from the very thought of obedience.  But the command was imperious,—­it was from God; and though the parent shrunk from the deed, yet the faith of the faithful servant gained a signal triumph over all the protestations of natural affection, and silenced all its rising murmurs; for “Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with, him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.”  There he built an altar, laid the wood in order, bound Isaac, and laid him upon the wood on the altar.  But when with uplifted sacrificial knife, he was about to slay his son, just at the point where God had the true test of his faith, a ministering angel stayed his hand, and prevented the bloody form in which he was about to offer his only son to God; “for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me!” He needed now but dedicate him in the moral sense to God.

The case of Samuel is another instance of the offering of children unto the Lord.  His mother had asked him of the Lord, and vowed, as she prayed, to “give him unto the Lord all the days of his life.”—­1 Sam.  I., 11.  Her prayer was answered, and in obedience to her holy vow, she took him, when very young, with her to the Temple, where she offered him up as an oblation to the Lord.  “For this child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him; therefore also have I lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth shall he be lent unto the Lord!” David also consecrated all that he had to the Lord,—­his possessions as well as his children.  When he built a house, he dedicated it to the Lord, and prepared “a psalm and song at the dedication of the house.”

Here in these examples of Old Testament family offerings to God, we have a type and illustration of the oblations of the Christian home.  The Lord does not ask the Christian parent, as he did Abraham, to build an altar upon the summit of some lofty cliff, and there to thrust a sacrificial knife to the heart of his child, and offer his quivering flesh and bleeding body a burnt offering to him; but he commands him to bring his child to the altar of baptism in his church, and there dedicate his life, his talents, his all, as a living sacrifice “holy and acceptable unto God,” vowing before witnessing angels and men that, as the steward of God and the representative of the child, he will hold it sacred, as the property of the Lord, given to him only in trust; that he will consult and faithfully execute the will of the Lord concerning the child, and that in all his relations to it, he will seek to make it subserve his purposes and reflect his glory.