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The division of power serves likewise to check the spirit of persecution, not only as finding employment for persecutors to watch their rivals, but as causing them to be watched and their conduct exposed. While the power of papal Rome extended over Christendom, persecution raged abundantly more than it has done since the Reformation, even in popish countries. Since that period, the popish powers, both ecclesiastical and civil, have felt themselves narrowly watched by protestants, and have been almost shamed out of their former cruelties. What has been done of late years has been principally confined to the secret recesses of the Inquisition. It is by communities as it is by individuals: they are restrained from innumerable excesses by the consideration of being under the eye of each other. Thus it is, that liberty of conscience, being granted in one or two nations and becoming honourable, has insensibly made its way into the councils of many others. From the whole, we may infer two things. (1.) The harmony of divine revelation with all that we know of fact. If any object to the probability of the foregoing account, and imagine that the various languages spoken in the world must have been of human contrivance, let them point us to a page in any history, ancient or modern, which gives an account of the first making of a language, dead or living. If all that man can be proved to have done towards the formation of any language, be confined to changing, combining, improving, and reducing it to grammatical form, there is the greatest probability, independent of the authority of revelation, that languages themselves were originally the work of God, as was that of the first man and woman. (2.) The desirableness of the universal spread of Christ's kingdom. We may see, in the reasons which render a universal government among men incompatible with the liberty and safety of the world, abundant cause to pray for this, and for the union of all his subjects under him. Here there is no danger of tyranny or oppression, nor any need of those low motives of rivalship to induce him to seek the wellbeing of his subjects. A union with Christ and one another embraces the best interests of mankind.

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DISCOURSE XVIII.

THE GENERATIONS OF SHEM, AND THE CALL OF ABRAM.

Gen. xi. 10-32. xii. 1-4.

THE sacred historian, having given an account of the re-peopling of the earth, here takes leave of the children of men, and confines himself to the history of the sons of God. We shall find him all along adhering to this principle. When any of the posterity of the righteous turn their backs on God, he presently takes leave of them, and follows the true church and true religion wherever they go.

Ver. 10-26. The principal use of the genealogy of Shem to Terah, the father of Abram, may be to prove the fulfilment of all the promises in the Messiah. To this purpose it is applied in the New Testament.

Ver. 27-29. Terah, after he was seventy years of age, had three sons; Abram, Nahor, and Haran. But the order in which they here stand, does not appear to be that of seniority, any more than that of Shem and Ham and Japheth: for if Abram had been born when Terah was seventy years old, he must have been a hundred and thirty-five at the time of his father's death; whereas he is said to have been but seventy-five, when, after that event, he set out for Canaan. Haran, therefore, appears to have been the eldest of the three sons. He died in Ur of the Chaldees; but left behind him a son and two daughters; Lot, and Milcah and Iscah. The two surviving sons, Abram and Nahor, took them wives: The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, of whose descent we are not here told; but by what he said of her in Chap. xx. 12, it would seem that she was his half-sister, or his father's daughter by

another wife. In those early ages, nearer degrees of consanguinity were admitted than were afterwards allowed by the divine law. Nahor married his brother Haran's eldest daughter Milcah.

Ver. 31. It is said of Terah, that he took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and that they went from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan. But bere is something supposed which the historian reserves till he comes to the story of Abram, who, next to God, was the first mover in the undertaking, and the principal character in the story. In Chap. xii. 1. we are told that the Lord HAD said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee. Taking the whole together, it appears that God revealed himself to Abram, and called him to depart from that idolatrous and wicked country, whether any of his relations would go with him or not; that Abram told it to his father Terab, and to all the family, and invited them to accompany him; that Terah consented, as did also his grandson Lot; that Nahor and his wife Milcah were unwilling to go, and did not go at present; that seeing they refused, the venerable Terah left them; and though not the first mover in the affair, yet, being the head of the family, he is said to have taken Abram and Sarai and Lot, and journeyed towards Canaan; that stopping within the country of Mesopotamia, he called the place where he pitched his tent Haran, in memory of his son who died in Ur of the Chaldees; finally, that during his residence in this place he died, being two hundred and five years old.

But though Nahor and Milcah, as it should seem, refused to accompany the family at the time, yet as we find them, in the course of the history, settled at Haran, and Abraham and Isaac sending to them for wives, to the rejection of the idolaters among whom they lived, we may conclude that they afterwards repented. And thus the whole of Terah's family, though they do not go to Canaan, yet are rescued from Chaldean idolatry; and settling in Haran, maintain for a considerable time the worship of the true God.

Chap. xii. 1-3. But Abram must not stop at Haran. Jehovah, by whom he was called to depart from Ur, has another country in reserve for him; and he being the great patriarch of Israel, and of the church of God, we have here a more particular account of his call. It was fit that this should be clearly and fully stated, as it went to lay the foundation of a new order of things in the world. It was therefore like the spring of a great river; or rather like the hole of a quarry whence the first stone was taken of which a city was built. It is this which is referred to, for the encouragement of the church when in a low condition, and likely to become extinct. God called Abram alone, and blessed him, and increased him. Hence the faithful are directed to look to the rock whence they were hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence they were digged; and to depend upon his promise, who assured them he would comfort the waste places of Zion.

How long Abram continued at Haran, we are not told; about nine years after his departure from it, we read of his having three hundred and eighteen trained servants who were born in his house: he must therefore have kept house between twenty and thirty years, at least, before that thime, either in Haran, or in both Ur and Haran.

In the call of Abram, we may observe, (1.) The grace of it. There appears no reason to conclude that he was better than his neighbours. He did not choose the Lord, but the Lord him, and brought him out from amongst the idolaters.* (2.) Its peremptory tone: Get thee out. The language very much resembles that of Lot to his sons-in-law, and indicates the great danger of his present situation, and the immediate necessity of escaping, as it were, for his life. Such is the condition of every unconverted sinner, and such the necessity of fleeing from the wrath to come, to the hope set before us in the gospel. (3.) The self-denial required by it. He was called to leave his country, his kindred, and even his father's house, if they refused to go with him and no doubt his mind was made up to do so. Such things are easier to read concerning others, than to practise ourselves; yet he that hateth

* Neh. ix. 7.

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