“Notwithstanding no devoted thing, that a man shall devote unto the Lord of all that he hath, both of man and beast, and of the field of his possession, shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing is most holy unto the Lord. None devoted which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed but shall surely be put to death”— and must also involve the express condemnation of the particular bargain assented to and completed alike by Jephthah and by “the Lord.” With the challenge as to Jephthah, Col. Ingersoll asked Dr. Field “What of Abraham?” and this, too, is taken up by Mr. Gladstone who says of Abraham: “He is not commended because, being a father, he made all the preparations antecedent to plunging the knife into his son. He is commended (as I read the text) because, having received a glorious promise, a promise that his wife should be the mother of nations, and that kings should be born of her (Genesis xvii, 6), and that by his seed the blessings of redemption should be conveyed to man, and the fulfilment of the promise being dependent solely upon the life of Isaac, he was nevertheless willing that the chain of these promises should be broken by the extinction of that life, because his faith assured him that the Almighty would find the way to give effect to his own designs” (Heb. xi, 16-19). But the text is surely clear on this. Abraham is praised because he offered up Isaac, that is, that he was ready and willing to offer a human sacrifice to “the Lord” similar to that which was actually offered by Jephthah. Jephthah’s sacrifice was voluntary; Abraham’s uncompleted sacrifice was undertaken in obedience to the pressure of temptation by God. Mr. Gladstone observes that “the facts... are grave and startling,” and he might well write thus if he had before him any record of the case of a man tried in the United States for the murder of his son. The man imagined and believed, as Abraham is stated to have imagined and believed, that he heard God command him to kill his son as a sacrifice; the man obeyed what he believed to be the divine command. While Abraham only “took the knife to slay his son,” the American actually killed his child. On the trial the jury found that the man was insane; that the imagined divine command was delusion; that what the man claimed to be an act of faith in God was an act of human insanity. Mr. Gladstone says that Abraham’s faith “may have been qualified by a reserve of hope that God would interpose before the final act,” that is, that the interposition would come before he, like Jephthah, actually killed his child as a human sacrifice to the Deity who tempted him. The Bible text gives no support to Mr. Gladstone’s qualifying theory. Genesis xxii, 1, 2, says: “God did tempt Abraham.... And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.”