And thus there are many whys we cannot solve, and many reasons we cannot penetrate, and we are often constrained to say, "Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent; even so, Father, thus it seemeth good in thy sight." At all events, we know that Abraham was chosen, and the whole race of Israel, not from any thing in them, for God tells them afterwards, "The Lord did not set his love upon you," speaking of their fathers, their roots, "did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any other people; for ye were the fewest of all people: but because the Lord loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondsmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt." He tells them, therefore, that it was in sovereignty that he chose them; and so it was in sovereignty, yet not accidentally, that he selected Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeans, and made him the father of a mighty multitude. The same sovereignty is in all that has befallen us, and is exercised whether we see second causes or not. I do not know whether that sovereignty is more magnificently displayed when it makes second causes the vehicles of its application, or when it acts without any apparent secondary causes at all. He chose Abraham because he would do so.

When God thus selected Abraham, he addressed him, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee." What can have enabled Abraham to do this? That he did, we shall see in the next verse. Why? We never, by a law in our nature, let go an existing attachment, except by the superinduced force of a higher and a stronger one. Abraham left his land, and his home, and his country, by the power of a higher attachment, and that was, his new

and stronger attachment to God. It is the lower attachment that is dissolved always by the higher; it is the sunlight that puts out all the stars; it is the stronger love that merges the lesser one. If we want, therefore, to induce a man to let go bis love of any one thing, the plan to adopt is, not to preach against that thing, but to bring to bear upon his preference a higher, a stronger, and a nobler attachment. If I were placed in the midst of a people addicted to all the follies and the vanities of human life, I should never think of commencing my address to them upon the vanity and evil of those things, for they would say, We knew this long before; we do not need to be taught it; but we have nothing better, and therefore we will only hold it the faster because you lay siege to it. What I would do would be to tell them something that would irresistibly take its place, and furnish a more enduring happiness. Then they would be so drawn by the stronger attachment, which I should try to create by the picture of better things, that they would let go gradually the weaker attachment, which already enchains and imprisons them. Hence all mere preaching against balls, and theatres, and race-courses, and gambling, may have its relative value, but it never will have the highest value, or indeed any very great effect, because, so long as men have only one spring of happiness, and know of nothing else, and they see you trying to block up that spring, where all their happiness lies, they will fight to the death in order to retain it. It is very natural that they should do so. The only way to get them to let go these broken cisterns, out of which they are drinking, is to tell them of some grand and inexhaustible fountain of living waters, to which they are freely and heartily welcome, and then they will be so smitten with the glory of the higher thing, that they will give up the lower, and cease from loving things that are

foolish, and vain, and frail, that they may love those better things, that are unseen to the eye, but seen to faith, not temporal, but eternal. We shall never induce a person, therefore, to give up that which he has, except by the power of the presentation of something far better. I would not preach merely against Popery-what is the use of that? A poor Roman Catholic likes his creed as much as I do mine, and I admire the sacrifices that he would make to uphold and spread it, and the sincerity with which he holds it, though he is not the less fatally deceived on that account. But why should I rob him of all he has? The only way to get him to let go his worship of the Virgin Mary, is to let him see what Christ is; the only way to make him give up his trust in penances and mortifications, is to show him the finished righteousness of the Son of God. You never will drive him from unworthy objects, except by attaching him to better objects; you will succeed only by applying the expulsive power of a new affection. It was so with Abraham. He was drawn from his love of Haran, and of Ur of the Chaldees, by seeing in God that which was better. And what did he see? "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad." Beautifully expressive is that text when literally translated

"Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and he leaped and danced for joy." Abraham saw Christ. The radiance of Christ's day illuminated the old patriarch's footsteps; and it was his love to Christ, whom he saw, that made him give up Haran, and Mesopotamia, which he loved; and, looking upon all that was dear and tender in his earliest recollections, he could cast all behind him, and say, "Blessed Jesus, whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none on the earth, not even my aged father Terah, nor the hills I have roamed on, nor the streams I have wandered by, nor any thing that is the

beauty and the attraction of Haran, that I prefer beside thee."

Abraham obeyed, we are told, God's word. It was God who appeared and said, "Arise and go." If he had gone on his own account, he had been a fanatic; if he had refused to go when God bade him, he would have been a sceptic; but stopping till God said, Go, and going when God said, Go, that was Christianity. A sceptic is a man who rejects all; a superstitious person is a man who takes the glare of his own fancy for the light of God's own word; a Christian is one who consults the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night, and who listens and hears the word upon his right and upon his left, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it. And when Abraham heard God's command, he had much to give up. I have shown you the ground upon which he gave up all, but I have not stated what he had to give up. In the first place, he had to give up his own country. Now persons who dwell among hills, as highlanders well know, always intensely cling to them. The Swiss, when he hears the song of his motherland upon the streets of Paris, feels a yearning for his Alpine hills and streams which is past expression; and I have read that the special melody which is the national air of Switzerland, has been forbidden to be played in the French army. And when one leaves one's native land,` under the compulsion of irresistible circumstances, often stronger than chains, one casts a sorrowful look upon the white cliffs we are leaving, or at the blue hills that dissolve by distance into the denser blue; it is a sorrowful and a painful thing to leave the land where we breathed our first breath, and the inhabitants, whose very accent, with all its barbarisms, is musical in our ears, and whose barrenness and bleakness only add to the intensity of the affection with which we regard it. Abraham had to leave his country.

He had not only to leave his country, but to leave his family and his home. Most know what pain it is to leave home. Even a school-boy, leaving home for six months, feels it painful; and it is a very beautiful affection, and one that should be cherished, not crushed. Whatever makes home beautiful to our children is always a contribution to their future consistent career; and whatever makes home gloomy, and miserable, and sad, is injurious to our children, and it cannot be any happiness to ourselves. They who leave home when they have loved it, and even those whose homes have not been all that they could wish, must feel that the old patriarch, when he left the hearth that had blazed so cheerily on many a cold and wintry night, and the garden in which was many a tree of his own planting and many a flower of his own nursing, and the streams that made music every day to his ears, and the hills so hallowed, because so instinct with thrilling and beautiful recollections, had a very heavy heart, and felt sorrowful and painful emotions.

But God said, Abraham, arise and go; and Abraham left his country, and his home, and his kindred, and his family, and all that would not follow, and went he knew not whither. What a magnificent specimen of unwavering confidence in God! a confidence that never disappointed him. Not even in the worst of his subsequent troubles did he express an atom of regret that he had trusted God, and leaned on the Unseen, but not the Unknown. What Abraham did literally, we have to do morally. God says to us, Arise, depart, this is not your rest; he translates the words that were addressed to Abraham into phraseology applicable to us. "Love not the world, neither the things of the world; if any loveth the world, how dwelleth the love of the Father in him?" So far as the world's sins are concerned, the prohibition is absolute; so far as the world's innocent things are concerned, the prohibition is relative. Love is not so