He gazed a moment into the fire of hickory logs before which they sat,
and then went on, more confidentially:

"Now you take that promise to Abraham--'Lift up your eyes and behold the
stars. So shall thy seed be as numberless as the stars. Go to the
seashore and look at the sand, and behold the smallness of the particles
thereof'--I am giving you the gist of the Lord's words, you
understand--'and then realise that your seed shall be as numberless as
those sands.' Now think for a minute how many particles there are, say
in a cubit foot of sand--about one thousand million particles. Think of
that! In eight thousand years, if the inhabitants of earth increased one
trillion a century, three cubic yards of sand would still contain more
particles than there would be people on the whole globe. Yet there you
got the promise of the Lord in black and white. Now how was Abraham to
manage to get a foundation laid for this mighty kingdom? Was he to get
it all through one wife? Don't you see how ridiculous that is? Sarah saw
it, and Sarah knew that unless seed was raised to Abraham he would come
short of his glory. So what did Sarah do? She gave Abraham a certain
woman whose name was Hagar, and by her a seed was to be raised up unto
him. And was that all? No. We read of his wife Keturah, and also of a
plurality of wives which he had in the sight and favour of God, and from
whom he raised up many sons. There, then, was a foundation laid for the
fulfilment of that grand promise concerning his seed."

He peered again into the fire, and added, by way of clenching his
argument: "I guess it would have been rather slow-going, if the Lord had
confined Abraham to one wife, like some of these narrow, contracted
nations of modern Christianity. You see, they don't know that a man's
posterity in this world is to constitute his glory and kingdom and