And if we are asked how this one Abraham possessed not only the primitive intuition of God as He had revealed Himself to all mankind, but passed through the denial of all other gods to the knowledge of the one God, we are content to answer that it was by a special Divine Revelation. We do not indulge in theological phraseology, but we mean every word to its fullest extent. The Father of Truth chooses His own prophets, and He speaks to them in a voice stronger than the voice of thunder. It is the same inner voice through which God speaks to all of us. That voice may dwindle away, and become hardly audible; it may lose its Divine accent, and sink into the language of worldly prudence; but it may also, from time to time, assume its real nature, with the chosen of God, and sound into their ears as a voice from Heaven. A 'divine instinct' may sound more scientific, and less theological; but in truth it would neither be an appropriate name for what is a gift or grace accorded to but few, nor would it be a more scientific, i. e. a more intelligible word than 'special revelation.' The important point, however, is not whether the faith of Abraham should be called a divine instinct or a revelation; what we wish here to insist on is that that instinct, or that revelation, was special, granted to one man, and handed down from him to Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans, to all who believe in the God of Abraham. Nor was it granted to Abraham entirely as a free gift. Abraham was tried and tempted before he was trusted by God. He had to break with the faith of his fathers; he had to deny the gods who were worshipped by his friends and neighbours. Like all the friends of God, he had to hear himself called an infidel and atheist, and in our own days he would have been looked upon as a madman for attempting to slay his son. It was through special faith that Abraham received his special revelation, not through instinct, not through abstract meditation, not through ecstatic visions. We want to know more of that man than we do; but, even with the little we know of him, he stands before us as a figure second only to one in the whole history of the world. We see his zeal for God, but we never see him contentious. Though Melchisedek worshipped God under a different name, invoking Him as Eliun, the Most High, Abraham at once acknowledged in Melchisedek a worshipper and priest of the true God, or Elohim, and paid him tithes. In the very name of Elohim we seem to trace the conciliatory spirit of Abraham. Elohim is a plural, though it is followed by the verb in the singular. It is generally said that the genius of the Semitic languages countenances the use of plurals for abstract conceptions, and that when Jehovah is called Elohim, the plural should be translated by 'the Deity.' We do not deny the fact, but we wish for an explanation, and an explanation is suggested by the various phases through which, as we saw, the conception of God passed in the ancient history of the