It was the voice of an angel from heaven; and then Hagar looked, and there, close at hand, was a spring of water in the desert.  How glad Hagar was as she filled the bottle with water and took it to her suffering boy under the bush!

[Illustration:  Learned to shoot with the bow and arrow]

After this Hagar did not go down to Egypt.  She found a place where she lived and brought up her son in the wilderness, far from other people.  And Ishmael grew up in the desert and learned to shoot with the bow and arrow.  He became a wild man, and his children after him grew up to be wild men also.  They were the Arabians of the desert, who even to this day have never been ruled by any other people, but wander through the desert, and live as they please.  So Ishmael came to be the father of many people, and his descendants, the wild Arabians of the desert, are living unto this day in that land.

THE STORY OF ABRAHAM AND ISAAC

You remember that in those times of which we are telling, when men worshipped God, they built an altar of earth or of stone, and laid an offering upon it as a gift to God.  The offering was generally a sheep, or a goat, or a young ox—­some animal that was used for food.  Such an offering was called “a sacrifice.”

But the people who worshipped idols often did what seems to us strange and very terrible.  They thought that it would please their gods if they would offer as a sacrifice the most precious living things that were their own; and they would take their own little children and kill them upon their altars as offerings to the gods of wood and stone, that were no real gods, but only images.

God wished to show Abraham and all his descendants, those who should come after him, that he was not pleased with such offerings as those of living people, killed on the altars.  And God took a way to teach Abraham, so that he and his children after him would never forget it.  Then at the same time he wished to see how faithful and obedient Abraham would be to his commands; how fully Abraham would trust in God, or, as we would say, how great was Abraham’s faith in God.

So God gave to Abraham a command which he did not mean to have obeyed, though this he did not tell to Abraham.  He said: 

“Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love so greatly, and go to the land of Moriah, and there on a mountain that I will show you, offer him for a burnt-offering to me.”

Though this command filled Abraham’s heart with pain, yet he would not be as surprised to receive it as a father would in our day; for such offerings were very common among all those people in the land where Abraham lived.  Abraham never for one moment doubted or disobeyed God’s word.  He knew that Isaac was the child whom God had promised, and that God had promised, too, that Isaac should have children, and that those coming from Isaac should be a great nation.  He did not see how God could keep his promise with regard to Isaac, if Isaac should be killed as an offering; unless indeed God should raise him up from the dead afterward.