One day, as Abram was returning from the slaughter of some of his enemies, a certain Melchizedek, named with charming appropriateness King of Peace (Heb. vii., 2), went out to meet him, and blessed him. Nothing is said in Genesis to make us regard Melchizedek as the extraordinary being that he really was; for it is blasphemy to say that Melchizedek was ever born, that he had any ancestors, that he ever died (Heb. vii., 3); like Topsy, “’spects he growed”; where he is now nobody knows; he would be a most useful “Christian antiquity,” but he is not producible. On the world’s stage he made but this one appearance, “positively for the first and last time.” Melchizedek is a type of Jesus Christ. Jesus was born; Melchizedek was not. Jesus had a mother; Melchizedek had none. Jesus had his descent from David; Melchizedek was without descent. Jesus died; Melchizedek had no end of life. The correspondence between them is really striking. The only similarity is that they were both without any acknowledged father, and this peculiarity they share with many pagan heroes and with some less important folk. It is blasphemy to deny that Abram, the “friend of God,” took to himself his wife’s maid, Hagar, and that when this poor slave was about to bear him a child he chivalrously handed her over to her jealous mistress, Sarai, saying: “Behold, thy maid is in her hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee” (Gen xvi., 6). An ordinary man, under such circumstances, would have had some tender, pitiful feeling towards the mother of his unborn child; but Abram was a saint of God, and was above all weak sentiment of that kind, so he stood quietly by while Sarai ill-treated the woman who had lain in his arms, and let her flee away into the wilderness unhelped and unpitied. God’s angel drove poor Hagar back to her bondage, and after her return her son was born. At this time Abram was 86 years of age; fourteen years later Sarah had a son, Isaac, and some time after she insisted on turning out poor Ishmael, with his mother, Hagar. A sweet, womanly creature was Sarah. Abraham made no objection, but “rose up early in the morning” to send off his first-born son and his mother, and was generous enough to take “bread and a bottle of water,” and to make this splendid present to Hagar “putting it on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away.” “The child” was now about fifteen years of age, and would have been a little heavy for poor Hagar to carry if he had been an ordinary well-grown boy; he was, however, curiously small for his age, for we learn that when “the water was spent in the bottle” “she cast the child under one of the shrubs” (Gen. xxi., 15). It is blasphemy to deny that Hagar carried this big baby, and threw him about like a toy.