bridged the gulf that separates a wandering horde from the
cultured greatness of civilization. The future grandeur of Zion was
already held in the grasp of Abraham's faith. But the invented blessing
had also a heavenly side. The more correct rendering of the Apostle's
words in the Revised Version expresses this higher thought: "He looked
for the city which hath the foundations"--_the_ city; for, after all,
there is but one that hath the eternal foundations. It is the holy
city,[263] the heavenly Jerusalem, seen by the faith of Abraham in the
early morning of revelation, seen again in vision by the Apostle John at
its close. The expression cannot mean anything that comes short of the
Apostle's description of faith as the assurance of things hoped for in
the unseen world. Abraham realised heaven as an eternal city, in which
after death he would be gathered to his fathers. A sublime
conception!--eternity not the dwelling-place of the solitary spirit, the
joy of heaven consisting in personal fellowship for ever with the good
of every age and clime. There the past streams into the present, not, as
here, the present into the past. All are contemporaries there, and death
is no more. Whatever makes civilization powerful or beautiful on
earth--laws, arts, culture--all is there etherealised and endowed with
immortality. Such a city has God only for its Architect,[264] God only
for its Builder.[265] He Who conceived the plan can alone execute the
design and realise the idea.

Of this sort was Abraham's obedience. He continued to endure in the face
of God's delay to fulfil the promise. His reward consisted, not in an
earthly inheritance, not in mere salvation, but in larger hopes and in
the power of a spiritual imagination.

_Second_, Abraham's faith is compared with Enoch's, whose story is most
sweetly simple. He is the man who has never doubted, across whose placid
face no dark shadow of unbelief ever sweeps. A virgin soul, he walks
with God in a time when the wickedness of man is great in the earth and
the imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually,
as Adam walked with God in the cool of the evening before sin had
brought the hot fever of shame to his cheek. He walks with God, as a
child with his father; "and God takes him" into His arms. Enoch's
removal was not like the entrance of Elijah into heaven: a victorious
conqueror returning into the city in his triumphal car. It was the quiet
passing away, with