the plain of Mamre, near or in Hebron, and again erected an altar to
his God.

Here Abram remained in true patriarchal dignity without further
migrations, abounding in wealth and power, and able to rescue his nephew
Lot from the hands of Chedorlaomer the King of Elam, and from the other
Oriental monarchs who joined his forces, pursuing them even to Damascus.
For this signal act of heroism Abram was blessed by Melchizedek, in the
name of their common lord the most high God. Who was this Prince of
Salem? Was he an earthly potentate ruling an unconquered city of the
aboriginal inhabitants; or was he a mysterious personage, without
father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning nor
end of days, nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God, an
incarnation of the Deity, to repeat the blessing which the patriarch had
already received?

The history of Abram until his supreme trial seems principally to have
been repeated covenants with God, and the promises held out of the
future greatness of his descendants. The greatness of the Israelitish
nation, however, was not to be in political ascendancy, nor in great
attainments in the arts and sciences, nor in cities and fortresses and
chariots and horses, nor in that outward splendor which would attract
the gaze of the world, and thus provoke conquests and political
combinations and grand alliances and colonial settlements, by which the
capital on Zion's hill would become another Rome, or Tyre, or Carthage,
or Athens, or Alexandria,--but quite another kind of greatness. It was
to be moral and spiritual rather than material or intellectual, the
centre of a new religious life, from which theistic doctrines were to go
forth and spread for the healing of the nations,--all to culminate, when
the proper time should come, in the mission of Jesus Christ, and in his