ance this act of obedience would put an end to all his flattering prospects. This, however, was merely a trial of his faith, and the order to sacrifice his son was countermanded.

When Isaac was forty year old, and his father one hundred and forty, he was married; but twen. ty years more elapsed before he had a son, so that Abraham was one hundred and sixty years old, and saw no more than two grand children, and when they were boys of fifteen he died. His expectation, therefore, of a numerous posterity could not have arisen from any thing that he saw, but altogether from his faith in the divine promise.

After this the hopes of the family, were limited to Jacob one of the sons of Isaac; and he did not marry till he was near fourscore years of age,, and at his outset he appeared to have been greatly inferior to his brother. For when he returned from Padan Aram no mention is made but of his wives, his children, and his cattle, whereas his brother met with him with four hundred men, and made very light of the very valuable present that Jacob forced upon his acceptance.

In the family of Jacob we see, however, at length, the rudiments of a clan, or nation; and

when they went into Egypt they mustered seventy males, but their situation in servitude, to which they were soon reduced, was very unpromising with respect to any future greatness. The life of Jacob himself had little in it to be envied. After leaving his parents, where though he was the favourite of the mother, he was by no means so of the father, he served his uncle Laban twenty years; and by his own account he underwent great hardships, and was grievously imposed upon. At his return he suffered much from the fear of his brother's resentment. The behaviour of several of his sons must have been a source of much affliction to him, and the loss of Joseph must have gone near to break his heart. In this state he continued fifteen years, when near the close of his life he was comforted by the recovery of his favorite son, and the settlement of all his family in a plentiful country. But though he knew, from the warning that God gave to Abraham, that his descendants would soon be reduced to a state of great oppression, and would continue in it many years, he died in the firmest faith that they would in future time become a great and flourishing nation; and he distinctly foretold the fate of each of his sons, as the heads of great tribes, of which that of Judah would be the most distinguished. Joseph

Joseph, the most pious and virtuous of his sons, was exercised in the severest manner. After being the favourite of his father till he had attained the age of seventeen, he was sold for a slave; and, in consequence of a false accusation, confined in prison several years. But these unfavourable circumstances were probably those that contributed most to the peculiar excellencies of his character; disposing him to be humble and serious, wholly resigned to the will of God; and believing that his providence had the disposal of every thing, he entertained no sentiment of revenge on account of the injuries that had been done to him. Looking forward to the future greatness of his descendants, and confiding ́in the divine promise, that the family would become possessed of the land of Canaan, he ordered that he should not be buried in Egypt, but be embalmed, in order to be carried to the promised land when they should remove thither.

Though the descendants of Jacob multiplied greatly in Egypt; yet no person, seeing the state of abject servitude to which they were there reduced, could have imagined that they were destined to rise superior to their proud masters, and make the figure they afterwards did under David and Solomon, and much less that they would become the

most distinguished ofallnations, which if the predictions concerning them have their accomplishment, they are to be. The Israelites in general seem to have abandoned all hopes of the kind, and to have acquiesced, through despair, in their servile condition.

Moses, their future deliverer, fled from the country at the age of forty, and continued forty years more among the Arabs, where he married, and evi, dently never thought of returning to join his brethren; when the divine Being appeared in a most extraordinary manner in their favour, delivering them as it is said, with a high hand and an outstretched arm, from the power of the Egyptians, at a time when there were no visible means of accomplishing it.

But though the nation was in this extraordinary manner delivered from their state of servitude in Egypt, yet, wandering as they did no less than forty years in the wilderness, surrounded by warlike nations, they could not, except in reliance on the divine favour by which they were conducted, have expected to make the conquest of such a country as Palestine then was, fully peopled, and by nations in the habits of war, with all their considerable towns fortified

fortified: Yet in this manner was the favourite nati on training up for their future greatness, when, to an indifferent spectator, their condition would have appeared very uncertain and hazardous; not likely to make any greater figure than one of the hordes of Arabs, and having nothing but the very worst and least cultivable part of Arabia to settle in; every fertile spot in the country being already occupied,

The people in general at this time thought so ill of their situation and prospects, that nothing but very extraordinary interpositions in their favour could have prevented their returning into Egypt, which they again and again wished to do. The faith, however, of the more pious among them never failed; and after the expiration of the forty years they were put into the possession of a considerable tract of country on the East of the river Jordan. But at this time not only were the descendants of Esau a well settled and considerable nation, but even those of Moab and Ammon, the two sons of Lot, though they were destined to bow to the superiority of the wandering Israelites.

After they got possession of the land of Canaan, in a manner as extraordinary as their emancipation from their bondage in Egypt, they made no consiC 5,

derable