this Lord: and the Scriptures have distinguished these two
persons from one another by this circumstance, that God no man
hath seen at any time nor can see but the Lord whom Abraham and
his descendants worshipped was the person who appeared to them."
We are told that when chap. xxi., verse 33, of Genesis is
correctly translated, Abraham is represented as having invoked
Jehovah, the everlasting God.
In the Hebrew name Yod-He-Vau (Jehovah), was set forth the triune
character of the Creator; in other words, this name "comprehended
the essential perfections of the great God," and was used in
their Scriptures as a "kind of summary or revelation of the
attributes of the Deity."
Although Abraham, while in Egypt, was the worshipper of idols, we
are assured that "the peculiar privilege vouchsafed to him lay in
the revelation of God's holy name, Yod-He-Vau. There is indeed
much evidence going to prove that the people represented by
Abraham understood the earlier conception of a Deity, and that
while the great universal principle whose name it was sacrilege
to pronounce was still acknowledged, there was another God (the
Lord), the same as in China, whose worship they were beginning to
adopt. "And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me,
and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to
eat, and raiment to put on,
So that I come again to my Father's house in peace; then shall
the Lord be my God."
He then declared that the pillar or stone which he had set up,
and which was the emblem of male procreative energy, should be
God's house.
As at the time represented by Jacob there was evidently little or
no spirituality among the Israelites, this Lord whom they
worshipped was simply a life-giver in the most material or
practical sense.
The reproductive energy in man had become deified. It had, in
other words, come to possess all the attributes of a god, or of a
powerful man, which in reality was the same thing. It is this
god personified which is represented as appearing to Abraham and
talking with him face to face. With this same god Jacob
wrestled, while the real God--the dual or triune principle, the
Jehovah or Iav, no man could behold and live.
To conceal the fact that the God of Abraham originally consisted
