hold to the plenary inspiration of the Old Testament must consent, for our present purpose, to suspend their faith in this doctrine, and provisionally to look at the Old Testament with the same impartial though friendly scrutiny with which we have regarded the sacred books of other nations.  Not a little will be gained for the Jewish Scriptures by this position.  If they lose the authority which attaches to the Word of God, they will gain the interest which belongs to the utterance of man.

While M. Renan finds the source of Hebrew monotheism in a like tendency in the whole Semitic race,—­a supposition which we have seen to be contradicted by the facts,—­Max Mueller regards the true origin of this tendency to be in Abraham himself, the friend of God, and Father of the Faithful.  He calls attention to the fact that both Moses and Christ, and subsequently Mohammed, preached no new God, but the God of Abraham.  “Thus,” says he, “the faith in the one living God, which seemed to require the admission of a monotheistic instinct grafted in every member of the Semitic family, is traced back to one man.”  He adds his belief that this faith of Abraham in one supreme God came to him by a special revelation.

And if, by a special revelation, is meant a grand profound insight, an inspired vision of truth, so deep and so living as to make it a reality like that of the outward world, then we see no better explanation of the monotheism of the Hebrews than this conviction transmitted from Abraham through father and son, from generation to generation.

For the most curious fact about this Jewish people is, that every one of them[348] is a child of Abraham.  All looked back with the same ancestral pride to their great progenitor, the friend of God.  This has never been the case with any other nation, for the Arabs are not a nation.  One can hardly imagine a greater spur to patriotism than this union of pride of descent with pride in one’s nation and its institutions.  The proudest and poorest Jew shared it together.  There was one distinction, and that the most honorable, which belonged equally to all.

We have seen that, in all the Semitic nations, behind the numerous divine beings representing the powers of nature, there was dimly visible one Supreme Being, of whom all these were emanations.  The tendency to lose sight of this First Great Cause, so common in the race, was reversed in Abraham.  His soul rose to the contemplation of the Perfect Being, above all, and the source of all.  With passionate love he adored this Most High God, Maker of heaven and earth.  Such was his devotion to this Almighty Being, that men, wondering, said, “Abraham is the friend of the Most High God!” He desired to find a home where he could bring up his children in this pure faith, undisturbed and unperverted by the gross and low worship around him.  In some “deep dream or solemn vision” it was borne in on his mind that he must go and find such a home.