first given on that selfsame day, but to be held in everlasting remembrance. The change of a syllable and of a letter gave a prophetic significancy to the names of Abram and Sarai, and, in their new names Abraham and Sarah, imbodied the promise of the Lord, of which future ages have manifested the fulfilment. Nations have called her mother who was then known only as aged and childless: and races of kings in Jerusalem and Samaria, after the lapse of a thousand years, gloried in their pedigree from the venerable pair that pitched their tent in the plain of Mamre many centuries before there was a king in Israel. Prophecies yet unfulfilled speak of their descendants, when finally restored to Zion, as those for whom the isles shall surely wait, unto whom the kings of the Gentiles shall minister, and whom the nations and kingdoms shall serve or be destroyed. But the name of Sarah or princess, as given by the Lord, has received such illustrations of its significancy in ages past, as naturally startled, on their announcement, the faith of Abraham. And God said unto Abraham, as for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be. And I will bless her and give thee a son also of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of people shall be of her. Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear ?* The incredulity of man may ever be overruled for the confirmation of the word that is of God. And while the covenant, which, whether in its observance or its breach on the part of the Israelites or Edomites, has been ratified by blessings and by judgments, such as no other covenant but that made with Adam ever was, has stood for nearly four thousand years, and yet awaits its final and everlasting confirmation, the laughter of Abraham, though he had fallen on his face, and of Sarah who subsequently laughed within herself and denied it with her tongue, has from that hour been commemorated, though unconsciously, in the name of Isaac. And God said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac (i. e., laughter); and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him.t Never were names so indelibly affixed to any covenant between man and man, as those which may thus be identified as originating in the covenant of God with Abraham. There was not then another man upon the earth of whose descendants even the existence is now known, or to whom such a promise could, in truth, have been given. And is there a man upon the earth who knows not at sight the He * Genesis xvii., 15, 16, 17. † Ibid. xvii., 19. brew race or who may not see from their existence and their number that God alone could have given to Abram the Hebrew the name of Abraham? In no country on earth could we search in vain for living commentaries on that name. And there was not then, besides Hagar, another woman upon earth but Sarah only, whom any nation or any individual now calls mother, or of whom it is recorded that kings were descended. But to her unchangeable name, when once it was given by the Lord, is attached the unrepealed promise, kings of the nations shall be of her. And if belief be founded on experience, as our enemies maintain, and as Christians may fearlessly concede, millenaries or thousands of years go far by their testimony to prove that that covenant was everlasting, the apparent and natural impossibility of the ratification of which, even for a single year, gave rise to the incredulity, even in the breast of Abraham, which has yet its memorial in every enunciation of the name of Isaac. It needs no proof that human compacts are dissolved by time, as their seals of wax melt before the fire. The longer that is the declared term of their validity, the more surely, in general, are they ultimately valueless, or pass away as if they had never been. Who can tell how great is the number-the numbers without number—of compacts between man and man, or of treaties between nation and nation, which have never been heard of, or are nothing now? And how many, though designated perpetual, are ever vanishing away like bubbles on the ocean? But the declaration that the covenant of the Lord with Abraham and with his then unborn son was to be everlasting, is now, after the lapse of thirty-eight centuries, a strong confirmation that it was the covenant of Him who changeth not, and with whom all things are possible; for who but God, setting up the very name as a witness that it was then deemed incredible, could have said that it would have lasted till now? And to that covenant in that selfsame day, as may here be passingly noted, there was affixed a perpetual seal, which, throughout all intervening ages, has set apart the seed of Abraham from the uncircumcised Gentiles. While the Arabs, the descendants of Ishmael, the eldest son of Abraham, "armed against mankind," have ever maintained their prophetic character, and still continue unsubdued and wild, till "Kedar's wilderness afar" shall make its voice to be heard in the harmonious symphony of all nations, the name of Ishmael, i. e., the Lord shall hear,* testifies to the fact that, when his mother, Hagar, harshly dealt with by the envious Sarai, fled from her face, and sat houseless, disconsolate, and forlorn by a fountain of water in the wil * Genesis xvi., 11. K derness, the fountain in the way of Shur, the Lord heard her affliction, and named, by his angel, her yet unborn son, and there gave the promise which he has fulfilled, in despite of all the efforts of Persians, Grecians, Romans, Moguls, and Tartars, who in vain have sought to subjugate the seed of Ishmael. And as the promise has thus its proofs that it was given by the Lord, the name of Ishmael testifies that the Lord did hear when a friendless and lonely outcast cried at a fountain in a wilderness; and that fountain had from thence its name-Beer-lahai-roi, i. e., the well of him that liveth and seeth me*-and thus became another witness or memorial of the fact, to be added to the name of Ishmael. The name of Beer-sheba, the well of the oath, brings us back to witness, in all the simplicity of patriarchal times, the covenant between Abraham and Abimelech.† There, where Abraham planted a grove, Isaac built a city, which was long famous in Israel as forming the termination of Judea on the south, and which subsisted under the same name, at least, till the fifth century of our era; ‡ and the name, yet marking the spot, is still a memorial of that covenant which itself was to last but for three generations. Abraham left not the mountain where his hand was stayed, after it was stretched forth to slay his son, without consecrating the place, by a new name, to the glory of God, who had provided a burnt-offering in the stead of Isaac-Jehovahjireh, the Lord will provide. In desolate Edom we see the proofs that the judgments pronounced against the Edomites, because of their hatred against the children of Israel, were indeed of God: and in the very name of Edom, i. e., red, therefore given unto Esau, we see the colour of the dear-bought mess for which he forfeited the birthright he despised; and the line of promise was transferred from him, when wilfully renounced, to his younger brother. The name of Zoar, little, which long subsisted as a town after the great and guilty cities of the plain were buried in the waters of the Dead Sea, is a comment on the words of Lot as he fled from the impending destruction. This city is near to flee unto, and it is a little one; therefore the name of the city was called Zoar.|| As the land and cities of Moab, desolate and broken down, plainly show at present that the prophets of Israel literally foretold their fate, so the name of Moab, i. e., of the father, has ever told as plainly in its literal significancy the incestuous origin of the son of Lot, who was the father of the Moabites. T * Genesis xvi., 14. Genesis XXV., 30. † Ibid. xxi., 27-32. Hieron, t. iii., 174. Neither diversity of condition, nor change of place, nor distance of time, has obliterated the marks by which the Jews were distinguished as a peculiar people, and even the fashion of their countenance testifies the common origin of the Hebrew race. The family likeness of the seed of Jacob is clearly traceable between the Israelitish bondsmen in the days of Pharaoh, and the Israelitish creditors of European kingdoms in the present day; and their fate in every age and in every land, as foretold by the prophets, is of itself a standing miracle. And, in like manner, the history of the father of the twelve tribes of Israel is not only recorded in scripture with all the precision of a tale of yesterday, but names which are as familiar as those of a friend, or of the place of our habitation, may serve to set the chief facts of that history before us. Whether at his birth he took his twin but elder brother by the heel, or in his manhood supplanted him and obtained from his father the blessing of the firstborn, as indicated by the name of Jacob,* signifying both the heel and he that supplanteth, even as his race, according to express predictions and to fact, has supplanted and survived that of Esau; or whether the childless Jacob, then a houseless wanderer, in danger of his life, having fled from the face of his angry brother, lay down at night to sleep, with nothing but the earth for his couch and a stone for his pillow, and saw in his dream a ladder set up on the earth but reaching to heaven, and saw the Lord stand above it, and heard the promise that he, the God of Abraham and of Isaac, would give to him and to his seed the land whereon he lay, and that his seed should be as the dust of the earth, as still they are; and that he should spread abroad to the east and to the west, to the north and to the south, as they have been; and that in his seed all the families of the earth should be blessed, as now they may; and Jacob, awaking, said, This is none other than the house of God, and set up the stone for a pillar, and poured oil on it, and called the name of that place Bethel, i. e., the house of God, whence originated that celebrated city and everlasting name: whether he made a covenant with Laban, and desired his brethren to take stones and make a heap, and called it Galeed, or the heap of witness, as a witness between them; or, appealing to the Lord to watch between them, he called it Mizpah, i. e., the watch-tower, as the city of that name more than the heap did in future ages testify, and as the history of his race and the yet auspicious prophecies respecting them bear witness that the Lord is the watchtower of Israel: whether, on his return to Canaan, the an gels of the Lord met him on his way, and he called the name of that place-also in after ages a city long famous in Israel-Mahanaim, or two hosts ;* or whether, soon after the Lord appeared unto him, on his again settling in that land after an absence of many years, and said unto him, Thy name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, i. e., a prince of God, shall thy name be, for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed: whether he called the name of that place Peniel, i. e., the face of God,‡ because he had there seen God face to face; or bought, as his first purchase in Canaan, a parcel of a field near to Shechem, and erected there an altar, and called it El-eloi-israel, God the God of Israel :§ whether, on journeying to Succoth, he built him a house and made booths for his cattle, he therefore called the name of the place Succoth, or booths ;|| or, removing to Bethel to dwell there, he built an altar and called it El-bethel, the God of Bethel:¶ whether twelve sons were born to Jacob or two to Joseph, all of whom were fathers of the tribes of Israel, the name of each had a significant appellation: whether Deborah, Rebecca's nurse, died. and was buried under an oak, and the name of it was called Allon-bachuth, i. e., the oak of weeping ;** or whether the embalmed body of Jacob, as we read in the last chapter of Genesis, was brought up from Egypt to be buried in Canaan by Joseph and his brethren, accompanied by all the elders of the land of Egypt, who mourned with a great and very sore lamentation for seven days at the floor of Atad, and the Canaanites called the name of the place Abel-mizraim, or the mourning of the Egyptians ;tt each of these events, besides being committed to a written record, had an express and appropriate designation in the literal significancy of the names which still represent or describe them. The sites of cities in Israel marked the wanderings, and their names told the chief acts of Jacob, the father of the fathers of its tribes. And while the facts which these names set forth are guarantied by their association with the repeated renewal to Jacob of the covenant of the Lord with Abraham and Isaac, and with prophecies hitherto accomplished, and while it remains yet to be seen, whenever the "set time" shall be come, that the Lord did give the name of Israel unto Jacob, and that, at the last, as at the first, it is he who, as a prince of God, shall prevail with God and with men, we may look back to the days of his pilgrimage on earth as it is recorded in the Bible, and see, in the history of Jacob, how the names of persons and of places were the constituted memorials or * Gen. xxxii., 2. + Ib. xxxii., 28. + Ib. xxxii., 30. |