to destroy, but to fulfil; and the God whom He
preached was the God of Abraham.

And who is the God of Jeremiah, of Elijah, and of Moses? We answer
again, the God of Abraham.

Thus the faith in the One living God, which seemed to require the
admission of a monotheistic instinct, grafted in every member of the
Semitic family, is traced back to one man, to him 'in whom all
families of the earth shall be blessed' (Genesis xii. 3, Acts iii. 25,
Galatians iii. 8). If from our earliest childhood we have looked upon
Abraham, the friend of God, with love and veneration; if our first
impressions of a truly god-fearing life were taken from him, who left
the land of his fathers to live a stranger in the land whither God
had called him, who always listened to the voice of God, whether it
conveyed to him the promise of a son in his old age, or the command to
sacrifice that son, his only son Isaac, his venerable figure will
assume still more majestic proportions when we see in him the
life-spring of that faith which was to unite all the nations of the
earth, and the author of that blessing which was to come on the
Gentiles through Jesus Christ.

And if we are asked how this one Abraham possessed not only the
primitive intuition of God as He had revealed Himself to all mankind,
but passed through the denial of all other gods to the knowledge of
the one God, we are content to answer that it was by a special Divine
Revelation. We do not indulge in theological phraseology, but we mean
every word to its fullest extent. The Father of Truth chooses His own
prophets, and He speaks to them in a voice stronger than the voice of
thunder. It is the same inner voice through which God speaks to all of
us. That voice may dwindle away, and become hardly audible; it may
lose its Divine accent, and sink into the language of worldly
prudence; but it may also, from time to time, assume its real nature,
with the chosen of God, and sound into their ears as a voice from
Heaven. A 'divine instinct' may sound more scientific, and less
theological; but in truth it would neither be an appropriate name for
what is a gift or grace accorded to but few, nor would it be a more
scientific, i. e. a more intelligible word than 'special revelation.'

The important point, however, is not whether the faith of Abraham
should be called a divine instinct or a revelation; what we wish here
to insist on is that that instinct, or that revelation, was special,
granted to