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this bloody tragedy and greatest act of worship, with Isaac restored to his arms, as they climbed, they shall descend, the mount together. Who can help exclaiming, "O Abraham, great is thy faith!"

Yet the patriarch had his failings-as who has not?-and they are written to warn him "who thinketh he standeth, to take heed lest he fall." "If thou hast run with the footmen and they have wearied thee," asks the prophet, "canst thou contend with horsemen ?" Yet, strange to say, though Abraham contended successfully in the race with horsemen, distancing them all, he was outstripped by footmen. He trusted God to restore the life of his son, yet did not trust him to protect the honor of his wife. Telling a lie about Sarah, he failed in the very grace for which he was most distinguished. Should not these things teach us to watch and pray that we enter not into temptation, and never under any circumstances to forget the warning, "Be not highminded, but fear"? When Nehemiah, bold as a lion, said, "Shall such a man as I flee?" how much more might we have expected such a man as Abraham to say, "Shall such a man as I lie?" His faith failed him. This great and venerable patriarch stands convicted of a mean equivocation. And who that sees him vainly trying to gloss over his shame can help exclaiming, "Lord, what is man?" Surely the best and worst of men have but one refuge-the blood and righteousness of Jesus.

Another practical and equally important remark we may draw from Abraham's history, ere he leaves the stage to give place to his servant, whom we shall next introduce. Paul explains the patriarch's pre-eminent triumph by his pre-eminent faith. But what explains it? What fed the faith wherein his great strength lay? Challenging comparison with any, and excelling all, in that grace, we may justly apply to him the gowing terms and bold figures of the prophet: "He was a cedar in Lebanon, with high stature and fair branches and shadowing shroud—the cedars of God could not hide him-the fir trees were not like his boughs,

and the chestnut trees were not like his branches, nor was any tree in the garden of God like unto him for beauty: his root," he adds, explaining how this cedar towered above the loftiest trees, giant monarch of the forest-"his root was by the great waters." And what that root found in streams which, fed by the snows and seaming the sides of Lebanon, hottest summers never dried and coldest winters never froze, the unequaled faith of Abraham found in close and constant communion with God. Like Enoch, he walked with God. Each important transaction of life was entered on in a pious spirit and hallowed by religious exercises. His tent was a moving temple; his household was a pilgrim church. Wherever he rested, whether by the venerable oak of Mamre, or on the olive slopes of Hebron, or on the lofty, forest-crowned ridge of Bethel, an altar rose, and his prayers went up with its smoke to heaven. Such daily intimate and loving communion did this grand saint maintain with heaven that God calls him his "friend ;" and honoring his faith with a higher than any earthly title, the Church has crowned him. "Father of the Faithful." He lived on terms of fellowship with God such as had not been seen since the days of Eden. Voices addressed him from the skies, angels paid visits to his tent, and visions of celestial glory hallowed his lowly couch and mingled with his nightly dreams. He was a man of prayer, and therefore he was a man of power. Setting us an example that we should follow his steps, thus, to revert to language bcrrowed from the stateliest of Lebanon's cedars-thus was he "fai in his greatness and in the length of his branches, for his root vas by the great waters."

IV.

ELIEZER.

HE French have established a diligence that starts from the seacoast at Beyrout, and now climbing the steeps and now winding through the picturesque valleys of Lebanon, descends after a long day's journey on the city of Damascus. This city is a point of interest to every traveler who visits the Holy Land; nor any wonder, since there are points not a few in which it claims pre-eminence over any other place in the world.

Akin to the veneration with which the men of his day regarded Methuselah, hoar with the snows of nine hundred sixty and nine years with which we ourselves should gaze on the oldest living man, which I felt on looking even on the ruins of a decayed but living yew that, a sapling at the date of David's battle with Goliah, was a great tree, mantled in the mists or white with the snows of our hills, that winter night the Saviour was born-akin to this is the feeling with which an intelligent and thoughtful traveler must tread the streets of Damascus. Said by Josephus to have been founded by a great-grandson of Noah, and certainly spreading along the banks of Abana at the time Abraham entered the land of Canaan, Damascus is the oldest existing inhabited city of the world. Of all those that were coeval with it, it only stands. The hand of Time, committing its ravages less suddenly but no less surely than the flood that swept away Enoch, the first

city, as it did Eden, the first garden in the world, has left no other memorial of these than their names in the page of history or some desolate and lonely ruin. It is not so with Damascus. Long anterior to the building either of Athens or of Rome it was a busy city, and, sole survivor of a remote antiquity, it is a busy city still. How great its age! It boasts of streets along which the tide of human life has ebbed and flowed for nearly four thousand years. Were the title one which could be properly applied to any place but heaven, not Rome, but Damascus, should be called "The Eternal City."

Singularly interesting to antiquaries on account of its extreme antiquity, this city presents also features of peculiar interest to men engaged in the pursuits of trade, whether they be the arts of peace or war they cultivate. Famous during long ages for its silk manufactures, it gives its own name to a fabric which is esteemed of superior richness and value-damask being called so from the circumstance that it was invented in Damascus and first woven in its looms. Its weapons of steel were even more famous than its webs of silk. Happy the man in battle who carried a Damascus blade, no other place forging swords of such exquisite temper. I know not but probably the Bible alludes to the superior excellence of these where it says, "Shall iron break the northern iron and the steel?" I once happened to see this steel put to the test. It was in France, and in the chemistry class of the Sorbonne. In the course of a lecture on iron, Thenard, the professor, produced a Damascus blade, stating that he believed that these swords owed their remarkable temper to the iron of which they were made being smelted by the charcoal of a thorn-bush that grew in the desert. To put it to the trial, he placed the sword in the hand of a very powerful man, his assistant, desiring him to strike it with all his might against a bar of iron. With the arm of a giant the assistant sent the blade flashing around his head, and then down on the iron block, into which, when I expected to see it shivered like glass, it embedded

itself, quivering but uninjured, giving, besides a remarkable proof of the trustworthiness of the sword, new force to the proverb, True as steel.

But Damascus, which her poets dignify with the title of "Pearl of the East," presents attractive charms to travelers that have no stake in trade and feel no interest in antiquarian studies; for besides being the oldest, it is in some of its aspects the most beautiful, of cities. With its white towers and minarets shooting up through the groves of green palms into the transparent air, it lies within sight of the snow-crowned Hermon, reposing at the feet of a grand mountain-range, and encircled by a zone of gardens and of orchards of variously-tinted foliage and the finest fruits. Its plain is watered by Abana and Pharpar. These rivers, reckoned by the Syrian leper better than all the waters of Israel, rush forth from their mountain-gorges to be parted into a thousand streams, which, foaming onward, dance and sparkle in bright sunshine, and cover the soil on their banks with a carpet of flowery verdure. No city in the world is more, perhaps none so much, worthy of the encomium which the pride and patriotism of the Jews pronounced on their Jerusalem, "Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth." Travelers have used the most glowing terms and exhausted the powers of language in their attempts to describe its charms, but no expressions can give us so vivid an idea of them as the part Mohammed acted when, a camel-driver traversing the neighboring mountains, he stood in the gorge where the city first burst on his view. Rapt for a while in astonishment, he gazed on the wondrous scene, but by and by recovered himself; and fearing, should he venture down into the city, that its charms would seduce him into forgetting the vast schemes of his life, he turned aside and passed on, saying, with a self-denial and determination of purpose Christians would do well to imitate, Man can have but one paradise, and mine is fixed above.

Legends also cling to Damascus and the places around which

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