far country.
He was to pass the rest of his days as a sojourner in a land which
should be thereafter given to a people yet unborn,--to a nation which
was to descend from him.

Abraham was a lineal descendant of Shem, who was doubtless still living
while "the father of Abraham yet abode with his kindred in the land of
the Chaldees;" and from the lips of his venerable progenitor, Abraham
himself may have first received the knowledge of the true God, and have
learned lessons of wisdom and obedience, as he sat at his feet. Shem may
have conversed with Methuselah; and Methuselah must have known Adam; and
from Adam, Methuselah may have heard that history of the creation and
fall, which he narrated to Shem, and which Shem may have transmitted to
Abraham; and the history of the world would be thus remembered as the
traditional recollections of a family, and repeated as the familiar
remembrances of a single household.

Tales of the loveliness of Eden,--of the glories of the creation,--of
the blessedness of the primeval state,--of the days before the fall;
remembrances of the "mother of all living" in the days of her holiness,
when she was as beautiful as the world created for her home, in all the
dewy sweetness of the morning of its existence,--of the wisdom of man
before he yielded to the voice of temptation, when authority was
enthroned upon his brow, and all the tribes of the lower creation did
him homage;--of the good spirits who watched over to minister unto and
bless them;--of those dark, unholy and accursed ones, who came to tempt,
betray and destroy them,--were recounted as events of which those who
described them had been the witnesses. And from the remembrances thus
preserved and transmitted by tradition, each generation obscuring or
exaggerating them, have descended what we call fables of
antiquity,--great facts, now dimly remembered and darkly presented, as
shadowed over by the mists of long ages.

How must the hearts of the descendants of Shem have thrilled as they
heard from him the history of by-gone times--of a world which had passed
away! How much had the great patriarch of his race, himself, beheld? He
had seen the glory and the beauty of the world before the flood. It was
cursed for the sin of man, in the day of his fall--but slowly, as we
measure time, do the woes denounced by God often take effect, and,
though excluded from Eden, the first pair may have seen little change
pass over the face of the earth.