make him into a nation--that this same God gave the earth to
whomsoever He would, and allotted to each people their proper
portion of it. "He (said St. Paul on the Areopagus) hath determined
the times before appointed for all nations, and the bounds of their
habitation, that they may seek after the Lord and find Him." Ah!
this must have been a strange and a new feeling to Abraham; but,
stranger still, though God had given him this land, he was not to
take possession of a single foot of it; the land was already in the
hands of a different nation, the people of Canaan; and Abraham was
to go wandering about a sojourner, as the text says, in this very
land of promise which God had given him, without ever taking
possession of his own, simply because it belonged to others already.
How this must have taught Abraham that the rights of property were
sacred things--things appointed by God; that it was an awful and a
heinous sin to make wanton war on other people, to drive them out
and take possession of their land; that it was not mere force or
mere fancy which gave men a right to a country, but the providence
of Almighty God! Now Abraham needed this warning, for the men of
Babel seem from the first to have gone on the plan of driving out
and conquering the tribes round them. They seem to have set up
their city partly from ambition. "Let us make us a name," they
said, meaning, 'Let us make ourselves famous and terrible to all the
people around us, that we may subdue them.' And we read of Nimrod,
who was their first king and the founder of Babel, that he was a
mighty hunter before the Lord, that is, as most learned men explain
it, a mighty conqueror and tyrant in defiance of God and His laws,
as the poet says of him,


"A mighty hunter, and his game was man."