Without hesitation, Abraham, according to the narrative, takes his son to the place, binds him to the wood, and deliberately prepares to carry out the sacrifice. Abraham either deceives the men (verse 5) and misleads his son (verses 7 and 8), or Abraham did not believe in the consummation of the sacrifice, and in the latter case the faith for which he is praised would be no more than hypocritic pretence. Nay, the text expressly represents God as affirming that Abraham was ready to carry out the sacrifice of his son (verse 16): “By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son.” If Abraham only offered to kill his son as a sacrifice with the mental qualification that the offer would not be accepted, and that the sacrifice would not be exacted, then the Lord must have been misled into the swearing recited in the text. Evidently Mr. Gladstone, himself a humane man and loving father, is not quite at ease in dealing with this part of Abraham’s history. He says (1) “that the narrative does not supply us with a complete statement of particulars;” (2) that “the command was addressed to Abraham under conditions essentially different from those which now determine for us the limits of moral obligations;” (3) “that the estimate of human life at the time was different;” (4) that “the position of the father in the family was different: its members were regarded as in some sense his property.” I rejoin (1) that to read into the text vital words of explanation which are not specifically expressed in the “divine revelation”—and to so read because without these words the text is incredible—is perilously near downright infidelity. And that, given the incompleteness of Genesis, the added explanation must vary with the intellect, training, and temper of the expositor, e.g. Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Spurgeon, or the man who killed his child in America, would fill up each imagined hiatus in very diverse fashions. (2) Mr. Gladstone’s argument can only be maintainable on the assumption that the limits of moral obligation were in the time of Abraham differently determined—for or by, “the Lord”—from such limits today, that is, that the “divine guide” is not immutable. (3) That to render this argument permissible on the part of a believer in Christianity it must be assumed that “the Lord” then estimated the value of human life differently from the manner in which he now would estimate it, because—unless “the Lord” was simply deceiving Abraham in the original direction and the subsequent swearing—“the Lord” concurred in and approved the proposed sacrifice by Abraham; as he also afterwards concurred in and approved the actual sacrifice by Jephthah. (4) [nvolves the assumption that the morality of family relation is now admittedly higher under modern civilisation than when specially regulated by “divine guidance.” 3 “Capital and Wages,” p. 19. 4 “Perversion of Scotland,” p. 197.