Dods, M., The Book of Genesis (Expositor's Bible) (1888), 81.
Dykes, J. O., Abraham, the Friend of God (1883).
Fairbairn, A. M., Christ in the Centuries (1893), 90.
Fraser, J., University Sermons (1887), 1.
Funcke, O., The World of Faith and the Everyday World (1891), 1.
Gunsaulus, F. W., Paths to the City of God (1906), 295.
Kittel, R., A History of the Hebrews, i. (1895) 172.
Meyer, F. B., Abraham, or the Obedience of Faith.
Pinches, T. G., The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records of Assyria and Babylonia (1903), 141, 192.
Stanley, A. P., Sinai and Palestine (1877), 148, 288.
Stanley, A. P., Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church, i. (1889) 1.
Westphal and Du Pontet, The Law and the Prophets (1910), 62, 83.
Expositor, 1st Ser., x. (1881) 216 (R. E. Bartlett).
Machpelah
These all died in faith.- Heb_11:13.
It was now many years since Abraham and Sarah had left their common Chaldæan home. Splendid hopes had shone upon the path which led the young patriarch and his fair wife towards the promised land. His quick and reverent eye had seen through the manifold idolatries of the then peoples to the eternal God, who made all things and loved all beings; and now, less sad but more noble than the first pair, the man led forth the woman that together they might found a people for God. Great was the purpose, but the performance seemed poor. Of the promised land no field, no rood, became his; the son through whom the people was to come was long delayed. The man remained a childless nomad, without home, without family, possessed of hopes that seemed born but to die. And in those years of weary waiting both natures seemed to suffer, though, as was but fit, the deepest suffering, least lightened by hope, came to the smaller spirit of the woman. But the man's broader nature, with its larger and more illumined horizon, touched, penetrated, assimilated the woman's, made it in the image, gave it the outlook of his own. And thus these two, mated in their brilliant youth, grew through a wandering and disappointed yet disciplinary life into a ripe and beautiful and hopeful old age, made by the son they loved younger and more bountiful than their earlier age had been.
It is very easy, in one sense, to grow old. You have but to sit still and do nothing, and Time passing over you will make you old. But to grow old wisely and genially is one of the most difficult tasks to which a human being can ever set himself.1 [Note: A. K. H. Boyd, The Recreations of a Country Parson, ii. 208.]
