THE WIFE--SARAH.


[Illustration]

Within a few centuries after the flood, while some who had witnessed the
sin and the destruction of the antediluvian world were still living,
Jehovah saw fit, in accordance with his designs of eternal wisdom, to
separate Abraham from his brethren, calling upon him to leave the land
of his birth and go out into a strange land, to dwell in a far country.
He was to pass the rest of his days as a sojourner in a land which
should be thereafter given to a people yet unborn,--to a nation which
was to descend from him.

Abraham was a lineal descendant of Shem, who was doubtless still living
while "the father of Abraham yet abode with his kindred in the land of
the Chaldees;" and from the lips of his venerable progenitor, Abraham
himself may have first received the knowledge of the true God, and have
learned lessons of wisdom and obedience, as he sat at his feet. Shem may
have conversed with Methuselah; and Methuselah must have known Adam; and
from Adam, Methuselah may have heard that history of the creation and
fall, which he narrated to Shem, and which Shem may have transmitted to
Abraham; and the history of the world would be thus remembered as the
traditional recollections of a family, and repeated as the familiar
remembrances of a single household.