What need was there for Sarah to learn the lesson of the patience of faith. God had promised her great honors and blessings. There was in her nature much that needed toning up by the grace of patience, and God would take his own best time in developing her life. Her haste to anticipate the blessing promised, not only delayed its realization, but brought sorrow to her own heart, and untold trouble to her posterity, for Ishmael’s hand has been “against every man, and every man’s hand against him.” The Ishmaelites, it is said, “dwelt from Havilah unto Shur,” and it is certain that they stretched in very early times across the desert to the Persian Gulf, peopled the north and west of the Arabian peninsula, and eventually formed the chief element of the Arab nation, which has proved to be a living fountain of humanity whose streams for thousands of years have poured themselves far and wide. Its tribes are found in all the borders of Asia, in the East Indies, in all Northern Africa, along the whole Indian Ocean down to Molucca, they are spread along the coast to Mozambique, and their caravans cross India to China. These wandering hordes of the desert have always and still lead a robber life. They justify themselves in it, upon the ground of the hard treatment of Ishmael, their father, who, driven out of his paternal inheritance, received the desert for his possession, with the permission to take whatever he could find. Mohammed is in the line of Ishmael, and the followers of Islam, in their pride and delusion, claim that the rights of primogeniture belong to Ishmael instead of Isaac, and assert their right to lands and goods, so far as it pleases them. Vengeance for blood rules in them, and the innocent have often fallen victims to their horrible massacres. So that the disaster which overtook the race in this premature anticipation of divine Providence is second only to the disaster that overtook Eve in the temptation and the loss of Paradise. Could Sarah have foreseen all the sad consequences of her unseemly haste to pluck the unripened promise God meant to give her, she certainly would have cultivated the patience of faith. But the years passed on--fifteen of them nearly--since the child Ishmael had been in the home of the patriarch, and the visit of the angels under the Oaks in the plain of Mamre. During this time God had once more renewed his promise to Abraham, and also the rite of circumcision had been established, and, doubtless, the symbolical purification of Abraham and his house, opened the way for the friendly appearance of Jehovah in the persons of the angels, or men, as the patriarch at first thought them to be, as he looked up, while seated in his tent door through the heat of the noontide hours.