patience under the most trying calamities (Jas. v. 11). BOOK II. THE PATRIARCHAL AGE. CHAPTER I. _THE CALL OF ABRAHAM._ GEN. XI. B.C. 1921. THERE will always, perhaps, be a doubt as to the exact period after the Flood when Job lived, but there can be no doubt that neither his constancy nor his faithfulness to the one true God, were the characteristics of the age succeeding the Flood. Within ten generations after that event mankind had again become forgetful of their Maker, and corrupted their way, threatening a fresh outbreak of violence and irreligion. Now, however, it was not the purpose of the Almighty to visit the earth with any universal judgment. In the counsels of Redemption it was His will to select a man, and through him, a nation, to be His witness upon earth, to withdraw this nation from contact with the surrounding world, to place it under a special and peculiar constitution, to entrust to it the guardianship of ancient truths and of future hopes, and out of it to bring, _in the fulness of time_ (Gal. iv. 4), the promised Saviour of the human race. At this point, then, Sacred History becomes more full, and its stream hitherto slender widens into a broad river. Mighty empires and great nations seem for a while to be forgotten, but only because we are now to be more especially concerned with the history of that particular nation, in and through which _all nations of the earth were to be blessed_ (Gen. xii. 3).