From this arose occasional heart- burnings and feuds, in which Abraham bore his part according to the custom of the country.
Personal, family, or national feuds render some more inimical than others, but always from a desire to guard their own interests, never out of a delight in evil for its own sake.
But as yet the new party was merely inchoate, its elements distrustful, jealous, and discordant; the feuds and battles of a quarter of a century were not easily forgotten or buried.
And as to those mortal feuds which, in certain conjunctures, spread a conflagration through a whole nation, or through a very large proportion of it, proceeding either from weighty causes of discontent given by the government or from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm, they do not fall within any ordinary rules of calculation.