ssibility of being understood to refer to Ur of the
Chaldees. They were not mindful of the earthly home, the cradle of their
race, which they had left for ever. Not once did they cast a wistful
look back, like Lot's wife and the Israelites in the wilderness. Yet
they yearned for their fatherland.[269] Plato imagined that all our
knowledge is a reminiscence of what we learned in a previous state of
existence; and Wordsworth's exquisite lines, which cannot lose their
sweet fragrance however often they are repeated, are a reflection of the
same visionary gleam,--

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star.
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, Who is our home."

Our author too suggests it; and it is true. We need not maintain it as
an external fact in the history of the soul, according to the old
doctrine, resuscitated in our own times, of Traducianism. The Apostle
represents it rather as a feeling. There is a Christian consciousness of
heaven, as if the soul had been there and longed to return. And if it
is a glorious attainment of faith to regard heaven as a city, more
consoling still is the hope of returning there, storm-tossed and
weather-beaten, as to a home, to look up to God as to a Father, and to
love all angels and saints as brethren in the household of God, over
which Christ is set as a Son. Such a hope renders feeble, sinful men not
altogether unworthy of God's Fatherhood. For He is not ashamed to be
called their God, and Jesus Christ is not ashamed to call them
brethren.[270] The proof is, that God has prepared for them a settled
abode in the eternal city.

_Third_, the faith of Abraham is compared with the faith of Abel. In the
case of Abel faith is more than a realisation of the unseen. For Cain
also believed in the existence of an invisible Power, and offered
sacrifice. We are expressly told in the narrative[271] that "Cain
brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord." Yet he
was a wicked man. The Apostle John says[272] that "Cain was of the Evil
One." He had the faith which St. James ascribes to the demons, who
"believe there is one God, and shudder."[273] He was possessed with the
same hatred, and had also the same faith. It was the union of the tw