CHAPTER XVI. PATRIARCHAL SLAVES - SARAI'S ADVICE TO ABRAHAM - HER QUARRELLING WITH ITS CONSEQUENCES -HAGAR IN THE DESERT THE ANGEL OF THE LORD ISHMAEL THE ARABS OF THE DESERT. It shows how far the influence of facts has extended down the ages, when we recollect that the name Hagar is derived from the same word; and, indeed, is the origin of the name Hegira, from which the Mahometans calculate their chronology. Hagar means "flight," and Hegira, so called because the date of the flight of Mahomet is to the Mahometan, for all chronological purposes, what the birth of Christ is to the Christian world. Hagar, it is plain from the record before us, was an Egyptian slave, and a slave born in the house. Slavery did then exist. At the same time, it ought to be known that slavery in those days had intermingled with it many beautiful traits, and, under the circumstances in which it was practised, was certainly far more justifiable, as it was far more tolerable, than it can possibly be made in any recent times. The slaves of the patriarchs were, next to the children of the patriarchs, beloved and treated with attention and respect, rather than as chattels and as goods, as they have been where slavery has existed in subsequent times. We see here one of the earliest instances of the practice of polygamy, and the results of it certainly are not calculated to show that it is, or can be, a blessing. Sarai believed God's promise that a child should spring from Abraham, which should be in the lineage and family of Him who was to be a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of his people Israel; but Sarai then, just like ourselves now, confounded God's promise with God's precepts a very frequent confusion in modern times; not a very just but very frequent confusion. God has given a promise that this shall be so, and foolishly and unwarrantably we set ourselves to fulfil it, and in trying to fulfil God's promises, with which we have no business, we forget God's precepts, which are the declarations of the duties that absolutely devolve upon us. Now, here, Sarai, under the idea that she was honoring God, and helping God to fulfil a promise, forgot express precepts, or at least subordinated real and great duties to supposed ones, and violated a plain commandment, in order, as she thought, to help God to carry out one of his ancient promises. We should never forget that when God gives a promise, it is his prerogative to fulfil it. We need not trouble ourselves about the fulfilment of what God has promised, or prophesied, or predicted, to attend to them is his own great prerogative. What he asks us to be anxious to carry out, are his plain and obvious precepts. But such is the tendency, the corruption of man, that he likes to put the precept into the background, because it is contrary to flesh and blood to obey it, and he professes to help God to carry out his promises, because that gratifies his own conceit, and gives him a momentary excuse for palpable disobedience to a plain and obvious requirement. Abraham, therefore, married Hagar; for she was his wife, —a secondary wife, I admit, but still legally a wife, not a concubine, that is, by the laws and usages of those days, his wife. It was not adultery, but polygamy. Sarai, having given this bad advice, which she ought not to have given, was the very first to quarrel with the results that her own advice had precipitated. In fact, Sarai seems, throughout the whole of this, to have acted as a peevish, disappointed, passionate, irritable woman. Although it was she who gave the prescription, yet she was the very first to find fault with the issue of that prescription. How truly does the great ground-work of human nature, the primeval granite, if I may so speak, emerge in every age and century, and show that from Adam's days down to the present hour, poor man is the same in all the essential characteristics and features of his nature! The language she employed was most unjustifiable: "My wrong be upon thee;" she imprecated a malediction upon her husband, and then she said, “I have given my maid into thy bosom; and when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her eyes," the natural result; the Lord judge between me and thee." But Abraham, who seems to have been in constitutional temper highly amiable, and, through grace, truly unselfish, as we have seen in his dealings with Lot, had learned in patriarchal times the lesson that a soft answer turneth away wrath. No one has ever yet fully felt the overwhelming eloquence of a soft answer to an irritated opponent. If you retaliate in the same terms with which you are assailed, you not only do what is unchristian, but you exasperate the passions which you ought, or wish, to try to allay; but when the passionate person hears in your answers, not "reviling for reviling," but a mild, and gentle, and Christian remark, it acts like oil upon the troubled waters - his passions are laid, and he is ashamed as well as subdued. Abraham, therefore, said to Sarai, in his own mild and forbearing way, "Behold, the maid is in thy hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee;" just as he said to Lot. And when Sarai dealt "hardly with her, she fled from her face." Such were the results of polygamy in the first instance in which we read of it— suffered, we are told by our Saviour, on account of the hardness of the human heart; for, be it remembered, there are many faults recorded in the Scriptures that are not to be construed by us, or proposed by God, as precedents for the present; yet how often do we find that the unsanctified man, when he reads the Old Testament, picks out the flaws and defects, the infirmities and the sins of the patriarchs, and tries to justify his own sins by the light of these! He quotes, not Abraham's excellences, so many and so beautiful, but Abraham's defects, few and far between, but real, as precedents or apologies for his sins. Our blessed Lord has told us that this was suffered, but not applauded, and that the original law of marriage is, one man and one woman; and the numerical balance of the human family shows that it ought to be so; the express word of God declares that it must be so; and in Mahometan and other countries, where this great primal and divine law is violated, one has only to read their every-day history, and to watch their physical and national decline, to see how pernicious and destructive it is. The result of it in this instance was, that Sarai, after being betrayed into a culpable expedient, was next betrayed into expressions of impiety, next into undutifulness to Abraham, and, lastly, into cruelty to Hagar; and no doubt these facts are recorded to show us that polygamy, in the first instance that it occurred, instead of being a blessing, was a curse to that family, and that such it will ever be found to be, wherever it has had its advocates or its subjects. We next read that the angel of the Lord appeared to Hagar, when she was driven forth by her mistress into the wilderness. I may mention that this expression, "angel of the Lord," occurs very frequently in the Old Testament. It is, literally translated from the Hebrew, " Angel Jehovah," or, "sent Jehovah;" and when we recollect what Jesus said, "God hath sent his only begotten Son," and what is predicated of this angel, the inference is, that this angel of the Lord was none other than our blessed Lord, in the language of theologians in his anthropomorphic appearance, that is, in some created form, before he was made man. Now that this being was greater than a created angel, is plain from what he said to Hagar in the ninth verse: "And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands;" and in the tenth verse: "And the angel of the Lord said unto her, I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude," — the very language applied to Abraham by God. "And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael, because the Lord hath heard thy affliction." That this angel, therefore, was not a created being, but the uncreated Jehovah, appears to me plain. He requires her to return to her mistress, from whom she had escaped without warrant, which was her duty; and then he predicted the character of that son that shall be born to her that he should be, literally translated, " a wild ass man," like the wild ass of the desert, untamed and untamable. We have a picture of this animal in Job 39: 5: "Who hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass? whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwelling. He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the crying of the driver. The range of the mountains is his pasture, and he searcheth after every green thing;" that is, a wild, untamed and untamable animal. The prediction respecting Ishmael is, that he should be like the wild ass described by Job, untamed, untamable, living in the desert; that his hand should be against every man, and every man's hand against him. The Bedouins of the desert, or the Arabs, are the lineal descendants of Ishmael, and you have only to read their history, a short sketch of which I have now before me, to see how this prediction has been fulfilled. It is here stated that "the manners and cus |