with the sons of Heth respecting the burial-place of Sarah, and his directions respecting the marriage of Isaac, are the only other memorable records concerning him. And why are they memorable? Simply because they concern the great commonplaces of humanity, because they have to do with those events in which one man has the same interest as another. Readers are sure when they lay down the book of Genesis that they have perused a very marvellous narrative. Learned critics supply them with a phrase, and tell them that they have not been occupied with history in the strict sense, but with mythical stories which contain moral or spiritual lessons of more or less value. Alas for men who spend all their lives in their studies, and have never yet discovered that birth, marriage, death, burial, belong to the facts, and not to the legends of mankind! The marvel of the history, as I tried to shew you last Sunday, lies in the absence of the peculiar, the grotesque; in the homeliness of all the details; in the inherent littleness of the personages who are the subjects of it. But the feeling of the reader is right and natural, though the explanation of the critic is forced and artificial. That is a strange history which teaches us to look upon the familiar as most wonderful; upon the every-day order of existence as a divine order; which connects God not with exceptional acts, but with the habitual course and current of existence. The Bible is unlike other books precisely on this ground. It is more offensive than other books precisely on this

ground. We can tolerate a religion, any religion; but a history which exhibits God as an actual personal Being, without whom the vulgarest affairs of men are unintelligible and anomalous, interferes with the different schemes we have made for ourselves;—we are glad, by any outrage upon the letter of the story, to persuade ourselves that it belongs to a region of cloud-land, with which we have nothing to do.

The story of Isaac's first meeting with his wife has so much of simple quiet beauty, that we expect to find their after life in some degree corresponding to it. We are disappointed to hear merely of a man who is rich in flocks and herds, whose chief controversies with his neighbours have respect to the digging of wells, who repeats the falsehood of his father respecting his wife, whose story seems not only free from romantic incidents like that of the elder patriarch, but whose character wants the marked individuality of his. He is the heir of the covenant. This is his one distinction, the only one of which he is conscious himself, or which he can transmit to his descendants. He lives in tents, away from the cities of the plain, expecting that at some distant day his seed will become a great nation through which the families of the earth shall be blessed. This belief mingles with all his care of his flocks and his herds, with the digging of his wells, with his love for his wife. Whenever he loses this recollection, the coarse Adam nature is all that we discern; the man sinks into the creature made out of the dust of the ground. Upon him and upon

Rebecca both, the desire of offspring, the expectation of a birth, the actual occurrence of it, confer a blessing which they could gain in no other way. Their faith and hope are called forth. They feel at once their connexion with God. The mother is taught that two nations are in her womb; the elder shall serve the younger. A mysterious feeling of her relation to the future, of generations to be blessed through her, raises her above the sordidness and selfishness of her earthly nature. The glory of being a mother illuminates her whole existence. The children are born. She has the sense of a prophecy hanging over them. She wonders how it may be fulfilled. They grow up with just the opposition of characters that may be seen among members of the same family in a patriarchal tent, or in an English home of the nineteenth century. The one has the strong impulses of the hunter the other dwells near the hearth caring for all plain quiet occupations. As we might expect, courage, frankness, a sense of dominion, belong to the first; thoughtfulness, timidity, subtlety, to the other. The one realises half the blessing of man. He has the feeling that he can govern the earth and subdue it. The other half, that he is made in the image of an invisible Being, seldom presents itself in his dreams or aspirations. To the feeble man, conscious of personal insignificance, the thought of the unseen and the future, the vague dim promise of the covenant, appears as something actual; all the more true because it is not what his hands can grasp, or what they

are required to mould. The moment comes which brings the thoughts of their hearts forth into act. Jacob makes his brother's hunger an occasion for bargaining with him for his birthright. Esau says, "What profit shall this birthright do to me?"

Neither one nor the other knew what good it would do. The vision of something to be realised now or hereafter dawned upon Jacob, a vision probably mixed with many sensual and selfish expectations; still a good not tangible, a good which must come to him as a gift from God. The absence of all want, all discontent with the present and the visible, is the feeling which exhibits itself in the acts and utterances of Esau. There is one desire common to both. The father's last blessing is a very sacred thing, to which great advantages must be attached. Each would have this. Esau feels that he has a claim to it. Rebecca will fulfil the prophecy, and win it for her younger son if she can. She has a strange notion that it is God's prophecy, and therefore must come to pass, and therefore that she must do something to make it come to pass. Jacob's faith is of the same kind with hers. He enters into the plot and carries it through. The old man finds that he has been deceived. The blessing once given cannot be recalled. But Esau's bitter cry brings the assurance that his dwelling too shall be in the fatness of the earth.

Esau has apparently been robbed of the trea-
But has he really lost

sure that he desired most.

anything? Was there any occasion for his ex

ceeding bitter cry? All that he had ever thought to win comes to him in the richest abundance. Instead of the dreary pastoral life, he has the rich free hunter's life. A society soon forms itself around him. He becomes the chief of a tribe, a tribe which rises, it would appear, speedily to consequence among the people of the desert, which acquires possessions and government. His frankness and courage are thought to deserve a reward. He has it. Just the one he would have chosen for himself, just the one which qualities such as his can win.

And what did Jacob, who so meanly bought the birthright and earned the blessing, gain by these acts? First of all, he has to leave his father's tent; then, with no share of his brother's courage and recklessness of danger, to make a lonely journey through a desert, then to come among kinsfolk who cheat him as he has cheated, then to exhibit himself in the pitiful condition of a suppliant before Esau and to receive his forgiveness, then to be the witness of his daughter's shame and of the crimes of those who were to be the heads of the chosen race, to see them making themselves hateful in the eyes of their neighbours, and plotting against one another.

Was his blessing nothing then? Had he been deceiving himself all the while as well as others? No surely. The blessing came to him even as soon as he had begun his wanderings. For he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set.

And he took of