which his latest descendant looked back with thankfulness.[106] We may not be able to prove that Abraham’s conception of Deity was monotheistic in our conception of the word. It lacked the sublimity of Isaiah’s conception and the definiteness of that of Moses. There was naturally a great deal of darkness clinging about it, but his ideas of duty and religion and worship were far higher than entered the thoughts of a Vedic or Brahmanic sage. The rite of Blood Covenant, universal in the Semitic tribes, he felt divinely impelled to offer Godward; and the same impulse is said to have led him to offer in proof of his allegiance to his unseen and almighty Friend the sacrifice of his only son. But there was unmistakably imparted by Abraham to the ancient rite of circumcision a far higher and more spiritual idea, and it is noteworthy that while the spiritual part of his awful sacrifice was accepted, the slaying of the son was rejected, with the effect of stamping, in the very morning of Hebrew history, the Divine abhorrence upon that form of propitiation to which the unrestrained instinct of man has everywhere been prone. His worship, his sacrifice, his whole service, instead of being regarded as a means of making Deity serviceable to man, or of raising man to the comfortable condition of Deity, meant the surrender of the heart and of the whole life to His will, not as only mightier, but juster and more merciful than he was himself, and therefore perfectly worthy of trust and love. And so it is plain that whether the patriarchs represent a race fallen because of sin, from purer knowledge and more intimate communion with God, or one providentially educated from the very lowest animalism, they indicate a religious stage to which the greatest things became possible. They are stammering at least the glorious Name, comprised in three letters, whose significance millennial ages of study can never exhaust. They believe in God, who, behind and beyond Nature, and greater than it, is revealing Himself as one infinitely worthy of their allegiance and adoration, and their faith becomes righteousness.