The Lord, by a second oath, afterwards promised him all "from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates." The critics ask, how could God promise the Jews this immense country which they have never possessed? And how could God give to them _forever_ that small part of Palestine out of which they have so long been driven? Again, the Lord added to these promises, that Abraham's posterity should be as numerous as the dust of the earth--"so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered." Our critics insist there are not now on the face of the earth four hundred thousand Jews, though they have always regarded marriage as a sacred duty and made population their greatest object. To these difficulties it is replied that the church, substituted for the synagogue, is the true race of Abraham, which is therefore very numerous. It must be admitted that they do not possess Palestine; but they may one day possess it, as they have already conquered it once, in the first crusade, in the time of Urban II. In a word, when we view the Old Testament with the eyes of faith, as a type of the New, all either is or will be accomplished, and our weak reason must bow in silence. Fresh difficulties are raised respecting Abraham's victory near Sodom. It is said to be inconceivable that a stranger who drove his flocks to graze in the neighborhood of Sodom should, with three hundred and eighteen keepers of sheep and oxen, beat a _king of Persia, a king of Pontus, the king of Babylon, and the king of nations_, and pursue them to Damascus, which is more than a hundred miles from Sodom. Yet such a victory is not impossible, for we see other similar instances in those heroic times when the arm of God was not shortened. Think of _Gideon_, who, with three hundred men, armed with three hundred pitchers and three hundred lamps, defeated a whole army! Think of _Samson_, who slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass! Even profane history furnishes like examples. Three hundred Spartans stopped, for a moment, the whole army of Xerxes, at the pass of Thermopylæ. It is true that, with the exception of one man who fled, they were all slain, together with their king, Leonidas, whom Xerxes had the baseness to gibbet, instead of raising to his memory the monument which it deserved. It is moreover true that these three hundred Lacedæmonians, who guarded a steep passage which would scarcely admit two men abreast, were supported by an army of ten thousand Greeks, distributed in advantageous posts among the rocks of Pelion and Ossa, four thousand of whom, be it observed, were stationed behind this very passage of Thermopyl.