"In its mass [that is, of the lower chaos] he made a boiling, The God Uru [the moon] he caused to rise out, the night he overshadowed. To fix it also for the light of the night until the shining of the day, That the month might not be broken and in its amount be regular. At the beginning of the month at the rising of the night, His horns are breaking through to shine in the heavens. On the seventh day to a circle he begins to swell, And stretches toward the dawn farther." We now come to the historical connection of all this with Abraham and with the Hebrew Scriptures. The early life of the "Father of the Faithful" belongs to the time when Turanian and Semitic elements were mingled in the Euphratean valley. Himself of the stock of Shem, he dwelt in Ur of the Chaldees, a city in whose ruins, now known by the name of Mugheir, Chaldean inscriptions have been found of a date anterior to that of the patriarch. In the time of Abraham a polytheistic religion already existed in Ur, for we are told that his father "served other gods." Further, the legends of the creation and the deluge, and the antediluvian age, with the history of Nimrod and other postdiluvian heroes, existed in a written form; and, strange though this may seem, there can be little doubt that Abraham, before he left Ur of the Chaldees, had read the same creation legends that have so recently been translated and published by Mr. Smith. But Abraham's relation to these was of a peculiar kind. With a spiritual enlightenment beyond that of his age, he dissented from the Turanian animism and polytheism, and maintained that pure and spiritual monotheism which, according to the Bible, had been the original faith of the sons of Noah. But he was overborne by the tendencies of his time, and probably by the royal and priestly influence then dominant in Chaldea, and he went forth from his native land in search of a country where he might have freedom to worship God. It is thus that Abraham appears as the earliest reformer, the first of those martyrs of conscience who fear not to differ from the majority, the father and prototype of the faithful of every age, and the earliest apostle of the monotheistic faith which still reigns among all the higher races of men.