In the last sermon which I preached in this church, I said that the
Bible is the history of God's ways with mankind, how He has schooled
and brought them up until the coming of Christ; that if we read the
Bible histories, one after another, in the same order in which God
has put them in the Bible, we shall see that they are all regular
steps in a line, that each fresh story depends on the story which
went before it; and yet, in each fresh history, we shall find God
telling men something new--something which they did not know before.
And that so the whole Bible, from beginning to end, is one glorious,
methodic, and organic tree of life, every part growing out of the
others and depending on the others, from the root--that foundation,
other than which no man can lay, which is Christ, revealing Himself,
though not by name, in that wonderful first chapter of Genesis,--up
to the FRUIT, which is the kingdom of Christ, and Gospel of Christ,
and the salvation in which we here now stand. I told you that the
lesson which God has been teaching men in all ages is faith in God--
that the saints of old were just the men who learnt this lesson of
faith. Now this, as we all know, was the secret of Abraham's
greatness, that he had faith in God to leave his own country at
God's bidding, and become a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth,
wandering on in full trust that God would give him another country
instead of that which he had left--"a city which hath foundations,
whose builder and maker is God." This was what Abraham looked for.
Something of what it means we shall see presently.

You remember the story of the tower of Babel? How certain of Noah's
family forgot the covenant which God had made with Noah, forgot that
God had commanded them to go forth in every direction and fill the
earth with human beings, solemnly promising to protect and bless
them, and took on themselves to do the very opposite--set up a