torial benefices alone, that is, those which vations, laws,-whether old or new, pay annats to the Pope, produce a reve-abrogated, revived, or mitigated,—charrue of nine millions; and two millions ters, whether real or supposed,―the past, fity thousand livres are to nine millions the present, and the future, alike subseras 1 is to 416-41. Whence I conclude, vient to the grand end of obtaining the that your abbots are not sufficiently rich, good things of this world; yet it is always and that they ought to have ten times for the greater glory of God. more. I have the honour to be, &c." He answered me by the following short letter:-"Dear Sir, I do not understand you. You, doubtless, feel with me, that millions of your money are rather too much for those who have made a vow In general it signifies more than capable, of poverty; yet you wish that they had more than well-informed, whether applied nety. I beg you will explain this to an artist, a general, a man of learning, Enigma." I had the honour of immedi- or a judge. A man may have read all ely replying:-"Dear Sir, there was that has been written on war, and may ce a young man to whom it was pro-have seen it, without being able to conposed to marry a woman of sixty, who duct a war: he may be capable of comwould leave him all her property; he manding, but to acquire the name of an wered, that she was not old enough." able general, he must command more -The German understood my enigma. than once with success. A judge may The reader must be informed that, in know all the laws, without being able to 1575, in was proposed in a council of apply them. A learned man may not be Henry III. King of France, to erect all able either to write or to teach. An able the abbeys of monks into secular com- man, then, is he who makes a great use of mendams, and to give them to the officers what he knows. A capable man can do a of his court and his army; but this mo- thing; an able one does it. This word arth happening afterwards to be excom- cannot be applied to efforts of pure municated and assassinated, the project genius: we do not say, an able poet, an was of course not carried into effect. able orator; or if we sometimes say so of an orator, it is when he has ably, dexterously, treated a thorny subject. ABLE-ABILITY. ABLE.—An adjective term, which, like almost all others, has different acceptations as it is differently employed. In 1750, Count d'Argenson, minister of war, wished to raise pensions from the benefices for chevaliers of the military Bossuet, for example, having, in his order of St. Louis: nothing could be funeral oration over the Great Condé, to are simple, more just, more useful; but treat of his civil wars, says, that there is his efforts were fruitless. Yet the princess a penitence as glorious as innocence of Conti had had an abbey under Lewis itself. He manages this point ably; of XIV.; and even before his reign seculars the rest he speaks with grandeur. possessed benefices: the Duke de Sulli We say, an able historian; meaning, uad an abbey, although he was a Hugonot. one who has drawn his materials from The father of Hugh Capet was rich good sources, compared different relaonly by his abbeys, and was called Hugh tions, and judged soundly of them;the Abbot. Abbeys were given to queens One, in short, who has taken great pains. to furnish them with pin-money. Ogine, If he has, moreover, the gift of narrating mother of Louis d'Outremer, left her son with suitable eloquence, he is more than because he had taken from her the abbeyable, he is a great historian, like Titus of St. Mary of Laon, and given it to his { Livius, De Thou, &c. wife Gerberge. The word able is applicable to those Each one strives to make customs, inno- the hand, as painting and sculpture. C We say of a painter or sculptor, he is an able artist, because these arts require a long novitiate; whereas a man becomes a poet nearly all at once, like Virgil, Ovid, &c. or may even be an orator with very little study, as several preachers have been. Why do we, nevertheless, say, an able preacher? It is because more attention is then paid to art than to eloquence, which is no great eulogium. We do not say of the sublime Bossuet, he was an able maker of funeral orations. A mere player of an instrument is able; a composer must be more than able; he must have genius. The workman executes cleverly what the man of taste has designed ably. An able man in public affairs is wellinformed, prudent and active; if he wants either of these three qualifications, he is not able. The term an able courtier implies blame rather than praise, since it too often mean an able flatterer: it may also be used to designate simply a clever man, who is neither very good nor very wicked. The fox who, when questioned by the lion respecting the odour of his palace, replied, that he had taken cold, was an able courtier; the fox who, to revenge himself on the wolf, recommended to the old lion the skin of a wolf newly flayed, to keep His Majesty warm, was something more than able. We shall not here discuss those points of our subject which belong more particularly to morality, as the danger of wishing to be too able, the risks which an able woman runs when she wishes to govern the affairs of her household without advice, &c. We are afraid of swelling this Dictionary with useless declamations. They, who preside over this great and important work, must treat at length those articles relating to the arts and sciences which interest the public, while those to whom they entrust little articles of literature must have the merit of being brief. ABILITY. This word is to capacity what able is to capable.—Ability in a science, in an art, in conduct. We express an acquired quality by saying, he has ability-an action, by saying, he conducts that affair with ability. ABLY has the same acceptations ;—he works, he plays, he teaches ably. He has ably surmounted that difficulty. ABRAHAM. SECTION I. We must say nothing of what is divine in Abraham, since the Scriptures have said all. We must not even touch, except with a respectful hand, that which belongs to the profane-that which appertains to geography, the order of time, manners, and customs; for these, being connected with sacred history, are so many streams which preserve something of the divinity of their source. Abraham, though born near the Euphrates, makes a great epoch with the Western nations, yet makes none with the Orientals, who, nevertheless, respect him as much as we do. The Mahometans have no certain chronology before their Hegira. The science of time, totally lost in those countries which were the scene of great events, has re-appeared in the regions of the West, where those events were unknown. We dispute about everything that was done on the banks of the Euphrates, the Jordan, and the Nile, while they who are masters of the Nile, the Jordan, and the Euphrates, enjoy without disputing. Although our great epoch is that of Abraham, we differ sixty years with respect to the time of his birth. The account, according to the registers, is as follows: "And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abraham, Nahor, and Haran. "And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years, and Terah died in Haran." "Now the Lord had said unto Abraham, get thee of thy country and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show i nation." thee. And I will make of thee a great It is sufficiently evident from the text, guide us in this labyrinth of conjectures that Terah, having had Abraham at the and contradictions from the very first age of seventy, died at that of two hun-verse to the very last?-Resignation. dred and five; and Abraham, having quitted Chaldea immediately after the death of his father, was just one hundred and thirty-five years old when he left his country. This is nearly the opinion of St. Stephen, in his discourse to the Jews. But the Book of Genesis also says, “And Abraham was seventy and five years old when he departed out of this town or village of Haran was, or where it was situated. What thread shall Haran." This is the principal cause (for there are several others) of the dispute on the subject of Abraham's age. How could he be at once a hundred and thirty-five years and only seventy-five? St. Jerome od St. Augustine say that this difficulty is inexplicable. Father Calmet, who confesses that these two saints could not resolve the problem, thinks he does it, by saying that Abraham was the youngest of Terah's son's, although the Book of Genesis names him the first, and consequently as the eldest. The Holy Spirit did not intend to teach us chronology, metaphysics, or logic; but only to inspire us with the fear of God: since we can comprehend nothing, all that we can do is to submit. It is equally difficult to explain satisfactorily how it was that Sarah, the wife of Abraham, was also his sister. Abraham says positively to Abimelech, king of Gerar, who had taken Sarah to himself on account of her great beauty, at the age of ninety, when she was pregnant of Isaac-"And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife." The old Testament does not inform us how Sarah was her husband's sister. Calmet, whose judgment and sagacity are known to every one, says that she might be his niece. With the Chaldeans it was probably no more an incest than with their neighAccording to Genesis, Abraham was bours the Persians. Manners change born in his father's seventieth year: while, with times and with places; it may he according to Calmet, he was born when supposed that Abraham, the son of Terah his father was a hundred and thirty. an idolater, was still an idolater when he Such a reconciliation has only been a new married Sarah, whether Sarah was his cause of controversy. Considering the uncertainty in which we are left by both text and commentary, the best we can do is to adore without dispating. There is no epoch in those ancient times which has not sister or his niece. There are several Fathers of the Church who do not think Abraham quite so excusable, for having said to Sarah in Egypt. "It shall come to pass, when the Egyp tians shall see thee, that they shall say, tude of different opinions. According to but they will save thee alive. Say, I pray Moreri, there were in his day seventy thee, thou art my sister, that it may be systems of chronology founded on the well with me for thy sake." She was history dictated by God himself. There then only sixty-five; since she had twentyhave since appeared five new methods of five years afterwards, the king of Gerar Thus there are as many disputes about twenty-five years younger she had kindled reconciling the various texts of Scripture. for a lover, it is not surprising that, when produced a multi-This is his wife; and they will kill me, Abraham as the number of his years (according to the text) when he left Haran. Indeed she was taken away by him in the And of these seventy-five systems, there same manner as she was afterwards taken by some passion in Pharaoh of Egypt. is not one which tells us precisely what Abimelech, the king of Gerar, in the desert. Abraham received presents at the court of Pharaoh, of many" sheep, and oxen, and he-asses, and men-servants, and maid-servants, and she-asses, and camels." These presents, which were considerable, prove that the Pharaohs had already become very great kings; the country of Egypt must therefore have been very populous. But to make the country inhabitable, and to build towns, it must have cost immense labour. It was necessary to construct canals for the purpose of draining the waters of the Nile, which overflowed Egypt during four or five months of each year, and stagnated on { the soil. It was also necessary to raise the town at least twenty feet above these canals. Works so considerable seem to have required thousands of ages. There were only about four hundred years betwixt the Deluge and the period at which we fix Abraham's journey into Egypt. The Egyptians must have been very ingenious and indefatigably laborious. since, in so short a time, they invented all the arts and sciences, set bounds to the Nile, and changed the whole face of the country. Probably they had already built some of the great Pyramids; for we see that the art of embalming the dead was in a short time afterwards brought to perfection; and the pyramids were only the tombs in which the bodies of their princes were deposited with the most august ceremonies. This opinion of the great antiquity of the pyramids receives additional countenance from the fact, that three hundred years earlier, or but one hundred years after the Hebrew epoch of the Deluge of Noah, the Asiatics had built, in the plain of Sennaar, a tower which was to reach to heaven. St. Jerome, in his commentary or Isaiah, says that this tower was already four thousand paces high, when God came down to stop the progress of the work. Let us suppose each pace to be two feet and a half; four thousand paces, then, are ten thousand feet; consequently the Tower of Babel was twenty times as high as the pyramids of Egypt, which are only about five hundred feet. But what a prodigious quantity of instruments must have been requisite to raise such an edifice! All the arts must have concurred in forwarding the work. Whence commentators conclude, that men of those times were incomparably larger, stronger, and more industrious than those of modern nations. So much may be remarked with respect to Abraham, as relating to the arts and sciences. With regard to his person, it is most likely that he was a man of considerable importance. The Chaldeans and the Persians each claim him as their own. The ancient religion of the Magi has, from time immemorial, been called Kish { Ibrahim, Milat Ibrahim; and it is agreed that the word Ibrahim is precisely the same with Abraham, nothing being more common amongst the Asiatics, who rarely {write the vowels, than to change the iinto a or the a into i in pronunciation. It has even been asserted that Abraham was the Brama of the Indians, and that their notions were adopted by the people of the countries near the Euphrates, who traded with India from time immemorial. The Arabs regarded him as the founder of Mecca. Mabommet, in his Koran, always viewed in him the most respectable of his predecessors. In his third sura or chapter, he speaks of him thus:"Abraham was neither Jew nor Christian: he was an orthodox Mussulman ; he was not of the number of those who imagine that God has colleagues." The temerity of the human understanding has even gone so far as to imagine that the Jews did not call themselves the descendants of Abraham until a very late period, when they had at last established themselves in Palestine. They were strangers, hated and despised by their neighbours. They wished, say some, to relieve themselves by passing for descendants of that Abraham who was so much reverenced in a great part of Asia. The faith which we owe to the Other critics, no less hardy, start other 13 said to be inconceivable that a stranger who drove his flocks to graze in the neigh bourhood of Sodom, should, with three hundred and 'eighteen keepers of sheep and oxen, beat a king of Persia, a king of Pontus, the king of Babylon, and the king of nations, and pursue them to DaThe Lord appeared to him after he mascus, which is more than a hundred went out of Egypt, and said, "Lift up miles from Sodom. Yet such a victory now thine eyes, and look from the place is not impossible, for we see other similar where thou art, northward and south-instances in those heroic times, when the ward, and eastward, and westward. For arm of God was not shortened. Think of all the land which thou seest, to thee will Gideon, who, with three hundred men, I give it, and to thy seed for ever." armed with three hundred pitchers and The Lord, by a second oath, afterwards three hundred lamps, defeated a whole promised him all "from the river of army! Think of Sampson, who slew a Egypt unto the great river, the river thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of Euphrates." an ass! The critics ask, how could God proEven profane history furnishes like exse the Jews this immense country amples. Three hundred Spartans stopped, which they have never possessed? and for a moment, the whole army of Xerxes, error could God give to them for ever that at the pass of Thermopyla. It is true all part of Palestine out of which they that, with the exception of one man who have so long been driven?" fled, they were all slain, together with their Again, the Lord added to these pro-king Leonidas, whom Xerxes had the mises, that Abraham's posterity should baseness to gibbet, instead of raising to be as numerous as the dust of the earth his memory the monument which it deso that if a man can number the dust served. It is moreover true, that these of the earth, then shall thy seed also be three hundred Lacedæmonians, who guarded a steep passage which would scarcely admit two men abreast, were supported by an army of ten thousand Greeks, distributed in advantageous posts among the rocks of Pelion and Ossa, four numbered." Our critics insist that there are not duty, and made population their greatest object. thousand of whom, be it observed, were stationed behind this very passage of To these difficulties it is replied, that Thermopyla. the church, substituted for the synagogue, therefore very numerous. These four thousand perished after a long combat. Having been placed in a situation more exposed than that of the thousand victims, whereas, none are is the true race of Abraham, who are A still more memorable though much Fresh difficulties are raised respecting less celebrated action, was that of fifty Abraham's victory near Sodom. It is Swiss, who, in 1315, routed at Morgat |