upon the ground. But his wife looked back from behind
    him, and she became a pillar of salt.'--GENESIS xix. 15-26.

The religious significance of this solemn page of revelation is but
little affected by any of the interesting questions which criticism
raises concerning it, so that I am free to look at the whole narrative
for the purpose of deducing its perennial lessons. There are four
clearly marked stages in the story: the lingering of Lot in the doomed
city, and the friendly force which dragged him from it; the prayer of
abject fear, and the wonderful answer; the awful catastrophe; and the
fate of the wretched woman who looked back.

1. Lot's lingering and rescue by force. Second thoughts are not always
best. When great resolves have to be made, and when a clear divine
command has to be obeyed, the first thought is usually the nobler; and
the second, which pulls it back, and damps its ardour, is usually of
the earth, earthy. So was it with Lot. Overnight, in the excitement of
the terrible scene enacted before his door, Lot had been not only
resolved himself to flee, but his voice had urged his sons-in-law to
escape from the doom which he then felt to be imminent. But with the
cold grey light of morning his mood has changed. The ties which held
him in Sodom reassert their power. Perhaps daylight made his fears seem
less real. There was no sign in the chill Eastern twilight that this
day was to be unlike the other days. Perhaps the angels' summons roused
him from sleep, and their 'arise' is literally meant. It might have
given wings to his flight. Urgent, and resonant, like the morning
bugle, it bids him be stirring lest he be swept away 'in the punishment
of the city.' Observe that the same word means 'sin' and
'punishment,'--a testimony to the profound truth that at bottom they
are one, sin being pain in the root, pain being sin in the flower. So
our own word 'evil' covers all the ground, and means both sin and
sorrow. But even that pealing note does not shatter his hesitation. He
still lingers. What kept him? That which had first taken him
there--material advantages. He had struck root in Sodom. The tent life
which he had kept to at first has been long given up; we find him
sitting in the gate of the city, the place for gossip and friendly
intercourse. He has either formed, or is going to form, marriage
alliances for his daughters with men of the city who are as black as
the rest. Perhaps his wife, whom the story will not name, for pity or
for horror, was a Sodomite. To escape meant to leave all this and his
wealth behind. If he goes out, he goes out a pauper. So his heart,
which is where his treasure is, makes his movements slow. What insanity
his lingering must have seemed to the angels! I wonder if we, who cling
so desperately to the world, and who are so slow to go where God would
have us to be for our own safety, if thereby we shall lose anything of
this world's wealth, seem very much wiser to eyes made clear-sighted
with the wisdom of heaven. This poor hesitating lingerer, too much at
home in the city of destruction to get out of it even to save his life,
has plenty of brothers to-day. Every man who lets the world hold him by
the skirts when Christ is calling him to salvation, and every man who
is reluctant to obey any clear call to sacrifice and separation from
godless men, may see his own face in this glass, and perhaps get a
glimpse of its ugliness.

What a homely picture, full of weighty truth, the story gives us, of
the angels each taking two of the reluctant four by the hand, and
dragging them with some degree of kindly force from destruction into
safety! So, in a great fire, domestic animals and horses seem to find a
strange fascination in the flames, and have to be carried out of
certain death by main force. They 'set him'--or we might read, 'made
him rest'--outside the city. It was but a little distance, for these
'cities' were tiny places, and the walls were soon reached. But it was
far enough to change Lot's whole feelings. He passes to feeble despair
and abject fear, as we shall see. That forlorn group, homeless,
friendless, stripped of everything, shivering outside the gate in the
cold morning air, may teach us how wise and prudent the man is who
seeks the kingdom of God second, and the other things first.

2. There was a pause outside the city. A new voice speaks now to Lot.
'They' brought him forth; but 'He' said 'escape.' The same 'Lord' to
whom Abraham had prayed, has now rejoined the mysterious pair whom He
had sent to Sodom. And Lot's entreaty is addressed to Him whom he calls
'my Lord.' He uses singular pronouns throughout, although the narrator
says that he 'said unto _them_.' There seems to be here the same idea
as is embodied in the word 'Elohim'; namely, that the divine powers are
regarded as in some sense separable, and yet all inhering in a personal
unity. At all events, we have here a distinct representation of an
intercourse between God and man, in which thoughts are conveyed to the
human spirit direct from the divine, and desires pass from the human to
the divine. The manner of the intercourse we do not know, but the
possibility of the fact can scarcely be denied by any believer in a
God; and, however we may call this miraculous or abnormal, the essence
of the event can be repeated in the experience of each of us. God still
speaks to men, and men may still plead with God. Unless our religion is
communion, it is nothing.

The divine voice reiterates the angels' urgent command in still more
stringent words: 'Escape for thy life.' There is to be no more
angel-leading, but Lot's feet are to be made as hinds' feet by the
thought of the flaming death that is pursuing. His lingering looks are
sternly forbidden, since they would delay his flight and divide his
heart. The direction of his flight is for the first time pointed out.
The fertile plain, which had lured him down from the safe hills, is
prohibited. Only on the mountain-side, probably the eastern mountains,
where the morning red was beginning to blush, is there safety.

Lot's answer shows a complete change of feeling. He is too fully
alarmed now. His fright is so desperate that it has killed faith and
common sense. The natural conclusion from God's mercy, which he
acknowledges, would have been trust and obedience. 'Therefore I can
escape,' not 'but I cannot escape,' would have been the logic of faith.
The latter is the irrationality of fear. When a man who has been
cleaving to this fleeting life of earthly good wakes up to believe his
danger, he is ever apt to plunge into an abyss of terror, in which
God's commands seem impossible, and His will to save becomes dim. The
world first lies to us by 'You are quite safe where you are. Don't be
in a hurry to go.' Then it lies, 'You never can get away now.' Reverse
Lot's whimpering fears, and we get the truth. Are not God's directions
how to escape, promises that we shall escape? Will He begin to build,
and not be able to finish? Will the judgments of His hand overrun their
commission, like a bloodhound which, in its master's absence, may rend
his friend? 'We have all of us one human heart,' and this swift leap
from unreasoning carelessness to as unreasoning dread, this failure to
draw the true conclusion from God's past mercy, and this despairing
recoil from the path pointed for us, and craving for easier ways,
belongs to us. 'A strange servant of God was this,' say we. Yes, and we
are often quite as strange. How many people awakened to see their
danger are so absorbed by the sight that they cannot see the cross, or
think they can never reach it!

God answered the cry, whatever its fault, and that may well make us
pause in our condemnation. He hears even a very imperfect petition, and
can see the tiniest germ of faith buried under thick clods of doubt and
fear. This stooping readiness to meet Lot's weakness comes in wonderful
contrast with the terrible revelation of judgment which follows. What a
conception of God, which had room for this more than human patience
with weakness, and also for the flashing, lurid glories of destructive
retribution! Zoar is spared, not for the unworthy reason which Lot
suggested--because its minuteness might buy impunity, as some noxious
insect too small to be worth crushing--but in accordance with the
principle which was illustrated in Abraham's intercession, and even in
Lot's safety; namely, that the righteous are shields for others, as
Paul had the lives of all that sailed with him given to him.

God's 'cannot' answers Lot's 'cannot.' His power is limited by His own
solemn purpose to save His faltering servant. The latter had feared
that, before he could reach the mountain, 'the evil' would overtake
him. God shows him that his safety was a condition precedent to its
outburst. Lot barred the way. God could not 'let slip the dogs of'
judgment, but held them in the leash until Lot was in Zoar. Very awful
is the command to make haste, based on this impossibility, as if God
were weary of delay, and more than ready to smite. However we may find
anthropomorphism in these early narratives, let us not forget that,
when the world has long been groaning under some giant evil, and the
bitter seed is grown up into a waving forest of poison, there is
something in the passionless righteousness of God which brooks no
longer delay, but seeks to make 'a short work' on the earth.

3. So we are brought face to face with the grim story of the
destruction. There is a world of tragic meaning in the simple note of
time given. 'The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into
Zoar.' The low-lying cities of the plain would lie in shadow for some
time before the sun topped the eastern hills. What a dawn! At that
joyous hour, just when the sunshine struck down on the smiling plain,
and lake and river gleamed like silver, and all things woke to new
hopes and fresh life, then the sky darkened, and the earth sank, and
horrible rain of fiery bitumen fell from the black pall, salt mud
poured in streams, and over all hung a column of fat, oily smoke. It is
not my province to discuss the physical cause of the destruction; but I
may refer to the suggestions of Sir J. W. Dawson, in his _Egypt and
Syria_, and in _The Expositor_ for May 1886, in which he shows that
great beds of bituminous limestone extend below the Jordan valley and
much of the Dead Sea, and that the escape of inflammable gag from these
through the opening of a fissure along a great 'line of fault,' is
capable of producing all the effects described. The 'brimstone' of the
Authorised Version is probably rather some form of bituminous matter
which would be carried into the air by such an escape of gas, and a
thick saline mud would accompany the eruption, encrusting anything it
reached. Subsidence would follow the ejection of quantities of such
matter; and hence the word 'overthrew,' which seems inappropriate to a
mere conflagration, would be explained.

But, however this may be, we have to recognise a supernatural element
in the starting of the train of natural causes, as well as in the
timing of the catastrophe, and a divine purpose of retribution, which
turns the catastrophe, however effected, into a judgment.

So regarded, the event has a double meaning. In the first place, it is
a revelation of an element in the divine character and of a feature in
the divine government. To the men of that time, it might be a warning.
To Abraham, and through him to his descendants, and through them to us,
it preaches a truth very unwelcome to many in this day: that there is
in God that which constrains Him to hate, fight against, and punish,
evil. The temper of this generation turns away from such thoughts, and,
in the name of the truth that 'God is love,' would fain obliterate the
truth that He does and will punish. But if the punitive element be
suppressed, and that in God which makes it necessary ignored or
weakened, the result will be a God who has not force enough to love,
but only weakly to indulge. If He does not hate and punish, He does not
pardon. For the sake of the love of God, we must hold firm by the
belief in the judgments of God. The God who destroyed Sodom is not
merely the God of an earlier antiquated creed. 'Is He the God of the
Jews only? Is He not also of the Gentiles? Yea, of the Gentiles also.'

Again, this event is a prophecy. So our Lord has employed it; and much
of the imagery in which the last judgment is represented is directly
drawn from this narrative. So far from this story showing to us only
the superstitions of a form of belief which we have long outgrown, its
deepest meaning lies far ahead, and closes the history of man on the
earth. We know from the lips which cannot lie, that the appalling
suddenness of that destruction foreshadows the swiftness of the coming
of that last 'day of the Lord.' We know that in literality some of the
physical features shall be reproduced; for the fire which shall burn up
the world and all its works is no figure, nor is it proclaimed only by
such non-authoritative voices as those of Jesus and His apostles, but
also by the modern possessors of infallible certitude, the men of
science. We know that that day shall be a day of retribution. We know,
too, that the crime of Sodom, foul and unnatural as it was, is not the
darkest, but that its inhabitants (who have to face that judgment too)
will find their doom more tolerable, and their sins lighter, than some
who have had high places in the Church, than the Pharisees and wise men
who have not taken Christ for their Saviour.

4. The fate of the loiterer. Her backward look must have been more than
momentary, for the destruction of the cities did not begin till Lot was
safe in Zoar. She must have lingered far behind, and been overtaken by
the eruption of liquid saline mud, which, as Sir J. W. Dawson has
shown, would attend or follow the outburst of bituminous matter, so
that her fate was the natural consequence of her heart being still in
Sodom. As to the 'pillar of salt' which has excited cavils on the one
hand and foolish legends on the other, probably we are to think rather
of a heap than of a pillar. The word does not occur in either meaning
elsewhere, but its derivation implies something raised above the level
of the ground; and a heap, such as would be formed by a human body
encrusted with salt mud, would suit the requirements of the expression.
Like a man who falls in a snowstorm, or, still more accurately, just as
some of the victims at Pompeii stumbled in their flight, and were
buried under the ashes, which still keep the outline of their figures,
so Lot's wife was covered with the half-liquid slimy mud. Granted the
delay in her flight, the rest is perfectly simple and natural. She was
buried in a horrible tomb; and, in pity to her memory, no name has been
written upon it. She remains to all generations, in a far truer sense
than superstition dreamed of when it pointed to an upright salt rock as
her prison and her monument, a warning of the danger of the backward
look, which betrays the true home of the heart, and may leave us
unsheltered in the open plain when the fiery storm bursts. 'Remember
Lot's wife.'

When the angels awoke Lot, the day was breaking. By the time that
Abraham had risen 'early in the morning,' and reached the place by his
tent from which he had yesterday looked on the smiling plain, all was
over, and the heavy smoke cloud wrapped the dead with its pall-like
folds. So swift and sudden is to be the coming of the Son of man,--as
the lightning which rushes in one fierce blinding flash from one side
of heaven to the other. Wherefore, God calls to each of us: 'Escape for
thy life; look not behind thee.'

FAITH TESTED AND CROWNED

    'And it came to pass after these things, that God did
    tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said,
    Behold, here I am. And He said, Take now thy son, thine
    only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the
    land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering
    upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And
    Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his
    ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac
    his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and
    rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told
    him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes,
    and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said unto his
    young men, 'Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the
    lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.
    And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid
    it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand,
    and a knife; and they went both of them together. And
    Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father:
    and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the
    fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt
    offering! And Abraham said, My son, God will provide
    Himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both
    of them together. And they came to the place which God
    had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and
    laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and
    laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched
    forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And
    the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven,
    and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And
    He said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do
    thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest
    God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only
    son from Me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked,
    and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his
    horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered
    him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.
    And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh:
    as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it
    shall be seen.'--GENESIS xxii. 1-14.

A life of faith and self-denial has usually its sharpest trials at or
near its beginning. A stormy day has generally a calm close. But
Abraham's sorest discipline came all sudden, like a bolt from blue sky.
Near the end, and after many years of peaceful, uneventful life, he had
to take a yet higher degree in the school of faith. Sharp trial means
increased possession of God. So his last terrible experience turned to
his crowning mercy.

1. The very first words of this solemn narrative raise many questions.
We have God appointing the awful trial. The Revised Version properly
replaces 'tempt' by 'prove.' The former word conveys the idea of
appealing to the worse part of a man, with the wish that he may yield
and do the wrong. The latter means an appeal to the better part of a
man, with the desire that he should stand. Temptation says: 'Do this
pleasant thing; do not be hindered by the fact that it is wrong.'
Trial, or proving, says: 'Do this right and noble thing; do not be
hindered by the fact that it is painful.' The one is 'a sweet,
beguiling melody,' breathing soft indulgence and relaxation over the
soul; the other is a pealing trumpet-call to high achievements.

God's proving does not mean that He stands by, watching how His child
will behave. He helps us to sustain the trial to which He subjects us.
Life is all probation; and because it is so, it is all the field for
the divine aid. The motive of His proving men is that they may be
strengthened. He puts us into His gymnasium to improve our physique. If
we stand the trial, our faith is increased; if we fall, we learn
self-distrust and closer clinging to Him. No objection can be raised to
the representation of this passage as to God's proving Abraham, which
does not equally apply to the whole structure of life as a place of
probation that it may be a place of blessing. But the manner of the
trial here presents a difficulty. How could God command a father to
kill his son? Is that in accordance with His character? Well, two
considerations deserve attention. First, the final issue; namely,
Isaac's deliverance, was an integral part of the divine purpose from
the beginning of the trial; so that the question really is, Was it
accordant with the divine character to require readiness to sacrifice
even a son at His command? Second, that in Abraham's time, a father's
right over his child's life was unquestioned, and that therefore this
command, though it lacerated Abraham's heart, did not wound his
conscience as it would do were it heard to-day. It is impossible to
conceive of a divine injunction such as this being addressed to us. We
have learned the inalienable sacredness of every life, and the awful
prerogative and burden of individuality. God's command cannot enforce
sin. But it was not wrong in Abraham's eyes for a father to slay his
son; and God might shape His message to the form of the existing
morality without derogation from His character, especially when the
result of the message would be, among other things, to teach His
abhorrence of human sacrifices, and so to lift the existing morality to
a higher level.

2. The great body of the history sets before us Abraham standing the
terrible test. What unsurpassable beauty is in the simple story! It is
remarkable, even among the scriptural narratives, for the entire
absence of anything but the visible facts. There is not a syllable
about the feelings of father or of son. The silence is more pathetic
than many words. We look as into a magic crystal, and see the very
event before our eyes, and our own imaginations tell us more of the
world of struggle and sorrow raging under that calm outside than the
highest art could do. The pathos of reticence was never more perfectly
illustrated. Observe, too, the minute, prolonged details of the slow
progress to the dread instant of sacrifice. Each step is told in
precisely the same manner, and the series of short clauses, coupled
together by an artless 'and,' are like the single strokes of a passing
bell, or the slow drops of blood heard falling from a fatal wound. The
homely preparations for the journey are made by Abraham himself. He
makes no confidante of Sarah; only God and himself knew what that
bundle of wood meant. What thoughts must have torn his soul throughout
these weary days! How hard to keep his voice round and full while he
spoke to Isaac! How much the long protracted tension of the march
increased the sharpness of the test! It is easier to reach the height
of obedient self-sacrifice in some moment of enthusiasm, than to keep
up there through the commonplace details of slowly passing days. Many a
faith, which could even have slain its dearest, would have broken down
long before the last step of that sad journey was taken.

The elements of the trial were two: first, Abraham's soul was torn
asunder by the conflict of fatherly love and obedience to God. The
narrative intimates this struggle by continually insisting on the
relationship between the two. The command dwells with emphasis on it:
'thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest.' He takes with him
'Isaac his son'; lays the wood on 'Isaac his son.' Isaac 'spake unto
Abraham his father'; Abraham answers, 'Here am I, my son'; and again,
'My son, God will provide.' He bound 'Isaac his son'; he 'took the
knife to slay his son'; and lastly, in the glad surprise at the end, he
offers the ram 'in the stead of his son.' Thus, at every turn, the
tender bond is forced on our notice, that we may feel how terrible was
the task laid on him--to cut it asunder with his own hand. The friend
of God must hold all other love as less than His, and must be ready to
yield up the dearest at His bidding. Cruel as the necessity seems to
flesh and blood, and specially poignant as his pain was, in essence
Abraham's trial only required of him what all true religion requires of
us. Some of us have been called by God's providence to give up the
light of our eyes, the joy of our homes, to Him. Some of us have had to
make the choice between earthly and heavenly love. All of us have to
throne God in our hearts, and to let not the dearest usurp His place.
In our weakness we may well shrink from such a test. But let us not
forget that the trial of Abraham was not imposed by his own mistaken
conceptions of duty, nor by a sterner God than the New Testament
reveals, but is distinctly set before every Christian in essence,
though not in form, by the gentle lips from which flowed the law of
love more stringent and exclusive in its claims than any other: 'He
that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.'

The conflict in Abraham's soul had a still more painful aspect in that
it seemed to rend his very religion into two. Faith in the promise on
which he had been living all his life drew one way; faith in the later
command, another. God seemed to be against God, faith against faith,
promise against command. If he obeys now, what is to become of the
hopes that had shone for years before him? His whole career will be
rendered nugatory, and with his own hand he will crush to powder his
life's work. That wonderful short dialogue which broke the stern
silence of the journey seems to throw light on his mood. There is
nothing in literature sacred or secular, fact or fiction, poetry or
prose, more touching than the innocent curiosity of Isaac's boyish
question, and the yearning self-restraint of the father's desperate and
yet calm answer. But its value is not only in its pathos. It seems to
show that, though he knew not how, still he held by the hope that
somehow God would not forget His promise. Out of his very despair, his
faith struck, out of the flint of the hard command, a little spark
which served to give some flicker of light amid the darkness. His
answer to his boy does not make his sacrifice less, but his faith more.
The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews gives a somewhat different
turn to his hopes, when he tells us that he offered up the heir of the
promises, 'accounting that God was able to raise him from the dead.'
Both ways of clinging to the early promise, even while obeying the
later command, seem to have passed through his mind. The wavering from
the one to the other is natural. He is sure that God had not lied
before, and means what He commands now. He is sure that there is some
point of reconciliation--perhaps this, perhaps that, but certainly
somewhat. So he goes straight on the road marked for him, quite sure
that it will not end in a blind alley, from which there is no exit.
That is the very climax of faith--to trust God so absolutely, even when
His ways seem contradictory, as to be more willing to believe apparent
impossibilities than to doubt Him, and to be therefore ready for the
hardest trial of obedience. We, too, have sometimes to take courses
which seem to annihilate the hope and aims of a life. The lesson for us
is to go straight on the path of clear duty wherever it leads. If it
seem to bring us up to inaccessible cliffs, we may be sure that when we
get there we shall find some ledge, though it may be no broader than a
chamois could tread, which will suffice for a path. If it seem to bring
us to a deep and bridgeless stream, we shall find a ford when we get to
the water's edge. If the mountains seem to draw together and bar a
passage, we shall find, when we reach them, that they open out; though
it may be no wider than a cañon, still the stream can get through, and
our boat with it.

3. So we have the climax of the story--faith rewarded. The first great
lesson which the interposition of the Divine voice teaches us, is that
obedience is complete when the inward surrender is complete. The
outward act was needless. Abraham would have done no more if the
flashing knife had buried itself in Isaac's heart. Here is the first
great proclamation of the truth which revolutionises morality and
religion, the beginnings of the teaching which culminates in the ethics
of the Sermon on the Mount, and in the gospel of salvation, not by
deeds, but through faith. The will is the man, the true action is the
submission of the will. The outward deed is only the coarse medium
through which it is made visible for men: God looks on purpose as
performance.

Again, faith is rewarded by God's acceptance and approval. 'I know that
thou fearest God,' not meaning that He learned the heart by the
conduct, but that, on occasion of the conduct, He breathes into the
obedient heart that calm consciousness of its service as recognised and
accepted by Him, which is the highest reward that His friend can know.
'To be well pleasing to Him' is our noblest aim, which, cherished,
makes sacrifice sweet, and all difficult things easy. 'Nor know we
anything more fair Than is the smile upon Thy face.'

Again, faith is rewarded by a deeper insight into God's will. Much has
been said about the sacrifice of Isaac in its bearing upon the custom
of human sacrifice. We do not believe that Abraham was led to his act
by a mistaken idea, borrowed from surrounding idolatries. His position
as the sole monotheist amid these, the absence of evidence that human
sacrifice was practised then among his neighbours, and, above all, the
fact of the divine approval of his intention, forbid our acceptance of
that theory. Nor can we regard the condemnation of such sacrifices as
the main object of the incident. But no doubt an incidental result,
and, we may perhaps say, a subsidiary purpose of it, was to stamp all
such hideous usages with the brand of God's displeasure. The mode of
thought which led to them was deeply rooted in the consciousness of the
Old World, and corresponded to a true conception of the needs of
humanity. The dark sense of sin, the conviction that it required
expiation, and that procurable only by death, drove men to these horrid
rites. And that ram, caught in the thicket, thorn-crowned and
substituted for the human victim, taught Abraham and his sons that God
appointed and provided a lamb for an offering. It was a lesson won by
faith. Nor need we hesitate to see some dim forecast of the great
Substitute whom God provided, who bears the sins of the world.

Again, faith is rewarded by receiving back the surrendered blessing,
made more precious because it has been laid on the altar. How strange
and solemn must have been the joy with which these two looked in each
other's faces! What thankful wonder must have filled Abraham's heart as
he loosed the cord that had bound his son! It would be many days before
the thrill of gratitude died away, and the possession of his son seemed
to Abraham, or that of life seemed to Isaac, a common thing. He was
doubly now a child of wonder, born by miracle, delivered by miracle. So
is it ever. God gives us back our sacrifices, tinged with a new beauty,
and purified from earthly alloy.

We never know how sweet our blessings are till we have yielded them to
Him. 'There is no man that hath left' anything or any person for
Christ's sake and the gospel's who will not 'receive a hundred-fold
more in this life, and in the world to come life everlasting.'

Lastly, Abraham was rewarded by being made a faint adumbration, for all
time, of the yet more wondrous and awful love of the divine Father,
who, for our sakes, has surrendered His only-begotten Son, whom He
loved. Paul quotes the very words of this chapter when he says: 'He
that _spared_ not His _own Son_, but delivered Him up for us all.' Such
thoughts carry us into dim regions, in which, perhaps, silence is best.
Did some shadow of loss and pain pass over the divine all-sufficiency
and joy, when He sent His Son? Was the unresisting innocence of the son
a far-off likeness of the willing eagerness of the sinless Sufferer who
chose to die? Was the resolved surrender of the father a faint prelude
of the deep divine love which gave His only Son for us? Shall we not
say, 'Now I know that Thou lovest me, because Thou hast not withheld
Thy Son, Thine only Son, from me'? Shall we not recognise this as the
crown of Abraham's reward, that his act of surrender of his dearest to
God, his Friend, has been glorified by being made the mirror of God's
unspeakable gift of His Son to us, His enemies?

THE CROWNING TEST AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH

II

The first words of this lesson give the keynote for its meaning. 'God
did prove Abraham'; the strange command was a test of his faith. In
recent times the incident has been regarded chiefly as embodying a
protest against child-sacrifices, and no doubt that is part of its
intention, and their condemnation was part of its effect, but the other
is the principal thing. Abraham, as the 'Father of the Faithful,' has
his faith tested by a series of events from his setting out from Haran,
and they culminate in this sharpest of all, the command to slay his
son. The life of faith is ever a life of testing, and very often the
fire that tries increases in heat as life advances. The worst conflicts
are not always at the beginning of the war.

Our best way of knowing ourselves is to observe our own conduct,
especially when it is hard to do nobly. We may easily cheat ourselves
about what is the basis and ruling motive of our lives, but our actions
will show it us. God does not 'test' us as if He did not know what was
gold and what base metal, but the proving is meant to make clear to
others and ourselves what is the worth and strength of our religion.
The test is also a means of increasing the faith which it demonstrates,
so that the exhortation to 'count it all joy' to have faith tried is no
overstrained counsel of perfection.

The narrative plainly declares that the command to sacrifice his son
was to Abraham unmistakably divine. The explanation that Abraham,
living beside peoples who practised child-sacrifice, heard but the
voice of his own conscience asking, 'Canst thou do for Jehovah what
these do for Moloch?' does not correspond to the record. No doubt God
does speak through conscience; but what sent Abraham on his terrible
journey was a command which he knew did not spring up within, but came
to him from above. We may believe or disbelieve the possibility or the
actuality of such direct and distinguishable commands from God, but we
do not face the facts of this narrative unless we recognise that it
asserts that God made His will known to Abraham, and that Abraham knew
that it was God's will, not his own thought.

But is it conceivable that God should ever bid a man commit a crime? To
the question put in that bald way, of course there can be but one
answer, No. But several conditions have to be taken into account.
First, it is conceivable that God should test a man's willingness to
surrender what is most precious to him, and what all his hopes are
fixed on; and this command was given with the purpose that it should
not be obeyed in fact, if the willingness to obey it was proved. Again,
the stage of development of the moral sense at which Abraham stood has
to be remembered. The child-sacrifices around him were not regarded as
crimes, but as worship, and, while his affections were the same as
ours, and his father's heart was wrung, to slay Isaac did not present
itself to him as a crime in the way in which it does so to us. God
deals with men on the moral and spiritual level to which they have
attained, and, by descending to it, raises them higher.

The purpose of the command was to test faith, even more than to test
whether earthly love or heavenly obedience were the stronger. There is
a beautiful and instructive climax in the designations of Isaac in
verse 2, where four times he is referred to, 'thy son, thine only son,'
in whom all the hopes of fulfilment of the divine promise were
concentrated, so that, if this fruit from the aged tree were cut off,
no other could ever grow; 'whom thou lovest,'--there the sharp point
pierces the father's heart; 'even Isaac,' in which name all the ties
that knit him to Abraham are gathered up. Each word heightens the
greatness of the sacrifice demanded, and is a fresh thrust of the
dagger into Abraham's very life. Each suggests a reason for not slaying
Isaac, which sense might plead. God does not hide the painfulness of
surrender from us. The more precious the treasure is, the more are we
bound to lay it on the altar. But it was Abraham's faith even more than
his love that was tested. The Epistle to the Hebrews lays hold on this
as the main element in the trial, that he who 'had received the
promises' was called to do what seemed to blast all hope of their being
fulfilled. What a cruel position to have God's command and God's
promise apparently in diametrical opposition! But faith loosened even
that seemingly inextricable tangle of contradiction, and felt that to
obey was for man, and to keep His promise was for God. If we do our
duty, He will see to the consequences. 'Tis mine to obey; 'tis His to
provide.'

Nothing in literature is more tenderly touched or more truly imagined
than that long, torturing journey--Abraham silent, Isaac silently
wondering, the servants silently following. And, like a flash, at last
'the place' was seen afar off. How calmly Abraham speaks to the two
followers, mastering his heart's throbbing even then! 'We will worship,
and come again to you'--was that a 'pious fraud' or did it not rather
indicate that a ray of hope, like pale light from a shrouded sun, shone
for him? He 'accounted that God was able to raise him up even from the
dead.' Somehow, he knew not how, Isaac slain was still to live and
inherit the promises. Anything was possible, but that God's word should
fail was impossible. That picture of the father and son alone, the one
bearing the wood, the other the fire and the knife, exchanging no word
but once, when the innocent wonder of Isaac's question must have shaken
Abraham's steadfastness, and made it hard for him to steady his voice
to answer, touches the deepest springs of pity and pathetic sublimity.
But the answer is in the same spirit as that to the servants, and
indicates the same hope. 'God will provide Himself a lamb, my son.' He
does not know definitely what he expects; he is ready to slay Isaac,
but his faith is not quenched, though the end seems so inevitable and
near. Faith was never more sharply tested, and never more triumphantly
stood the test.

The divine solution of the riddle was kept back till the last moment,
as it usually is. The place is slowly reached, the hill slowly climbed,
the altar built, the unresisting Isaac bound (with what deep thoughts
in each, who can tell?), the steady hand holding the glittering knife
lifted--a moment more and it will be red with heart's blood, and not
till then does God speak. It is ever so. The trial has 'its perfect
work.' Faith is led to the edge of the precipice, one step farther and
all is over. Then God speaks, all but just too late, and yet 'right
early.' The willingness to make the sacrifice is tested to the utmost,
and being proved, the sacrifice is not required.

Abraham had said to Isaac, 'God will provide a lamb,' and the word
'provide' is that which appears in the name he gave to the
place--Jehovah-_jireh_. The name, then, commemorated, not the servant's
faith but the Lord's mercy, and the spirit of it was embodied in what
became a popular saying, 'In the mount of the Lord it shall be
provided.' If faith dwells there, its surrenders will be richly
rewarded. How much more dear was Isaac to Abraham as they journeyed
back to Beersheba! And whatever we lay on God's altar comes back a
'hundred-fold more in this life,' and brings in the world to come life
everlasting.

JEHOVAH-JIREH

    'And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh;
    (that is, The Lord will provide).'-GENESIS xxii. 14.

As these two, Abraham and Isaac, were travelling up the hill, the son
bearing the wood, and the father with the sad burden of the fire and
the knife, the boy said: 'Where is the lamb?' and Abraham, thrusting
down his emotion and steadying his voice, said: 'My son, God will
provide Himself a lamb.' When the wonderful issue of the trial was
plain before him, and he looked back upon it, the one thought that rose
in his mind was of how, beyond his meaning, his words had been true. So
he named that place by a name that spoke nothing of his trial, but
everything of God's provision--'The Lord will see,' or 'The Lord will
provide.'

1. The words have become proverbial and threadbare as a commonplace of
Christian feeling. But it may be worth our while to ask for a moment
what it was exactly that Abraham expected the Lord to provide. We
generally use the expression in reference to outward things, and see in
it the assurance that we shall not be left without the supply of the
necessities for which, because God has made us to feel them, He has
bound Himself to make provision. And most blessedly true is that
application of them, and many a Christian heart in days of famine has
been satisfied with the promise, when the bread that was given has been
scant.

But there is a meaning deeper than that in the words. It is true, thank
God! that we may cast all our anxiety about all outward things upon
Him, in the assurance that He who feeds the ravens will feed us, and
that if lilies can blossom into beauty without care, we shall be held
by our Father of more value than these. But there is a deeper meaning
in the provision spoken of here. What was it that God provided for
Abraham? What is it that God provides for us? A way to discharge the
arduous duties which, when they are commanded, seem all but impossible
for us, and which, the nearer we come to them, look the more dreadful
and seem the more impossible. And yet, when the heart has yielded
itself in obedience, and we are ready to do the thing that is enjoined,
there opens up before us a possibility provided by God, and strength
comes to us equal to our day, and some unexpected gift is put into our
hand, which enables us to do the thing of which Nature said: 'My heart
will break before I can do it'; and in regard to which even Grace
doubted whether it was possible for us to carry it through. If our
hearts are set in obedience to the command, the farther we go on the
path of obedience, the easier the command will appear, and to try to do
it is to ensure that God will help us to do it.

This is the main provision that God makes, and it is the highest
provision that He can make. For there is nothing in this life that we
need so much as to do the will of our Father in heaven. All outward
wants are poor compared with that. The one thing worth living for, the
one thing which being secured we are blessed, and being missed we are
miserable, is compliance in heart with the commandment of our Father;
and that compliance wrought out in life. So, of all gifts that He
bestows upon us, and of all the abundant provision out of His rich
storehouses, is not this the best, that we are made ready for any
required service? When we get to the place we shall find some lamb
'caught in the thicket by its horns'; and heaven itself will supply
what is needful for our burnt offering.

And then there is another thought here which, though we cannot
certainly say it was in the speaker's mind, is distinctly in the
historian's intention, 'The Lord will provide.' Provide what? The lamb
for the burnt offering which He has commanded. It seems probable that
that bare mountain-top which Abraham saw from afar, and named
Jehovah-jireh, was the mountain-top on which afterwards the Temple was
built. And perhaps the wood was piled for the altar, on which Abraham
was called to lay his only son, on that very piece of primitive rock
which still stands visible, though Temple and altar have long since
gone; and which for many a day was the place of the altar on which the
sacrifices of Israel were offered. It is no mere forcing of Christian
meanings on to old stories, but the discerning of that prophetic and
spiritual element which God has impressed upon these histories of the
past, especially in all their climaxes and crises, when we see in the
fact that God provided the ram which became the appointed sacrifice,
through which Isaac's life was preserved, a dim adumbration of the
great truth that the only Sacrifice which God accepts for the world's
sin is the Sacrifice which He Himself has provided.

This is the deepest meaning of all the sacrificial worship, as of
Israel so of heathen nations--God Himself will provide a Lamb. The
world had built altars, and Israel, by divine appointment, had its
altar too. All these express the want which none of them can satisfy.
They show that man needed a Sacrifice; and that Sacrifice God has
provided. He asked from Abraham less than He gives to us. Abraham's
devotion was sealed and certified because he did not withhold his son,
his only son, from God. And God's love is sealed because He hath not
withheld His only-begotten Son from us.

So this name that came from Abraham's grateful and wondering lips
contains a truth which holds true in all regions of our wants. On the
lowest level, the outward supply of outward needs; on a higher, the
means of discharging hard duties and a path through sharp trials; and,
on the highest of all, the spotless sacrifice which alone avails for
the world's sins--these are the things which God provides.

2. So, note again on what conditions He provides them.

The incident and the name became the occasion of a proverb, as the
historian tells us, which survived down to the period of his writing,
and probably long after, when men were accustomed to say, 'In the mount
of the Lord it shall be provided.' The provision of all sorts that we
need has certain conditions as to the when and the where of the persons
to whom it shall be granted. 'In the mount of the Lord it shall be
provided.' If we wish to have our outward needs supplied, our outward
weaknesses strengthened, power and energy sufficient for duty, wisdom
for perplexity, a share in the Sacrifice which taketh away the sins of
the world, we receive them all on the condition that we are found in
the place where all God's provision is treasured. If a man chooses to
sit outside the baker's shop, he may starve on its threshold. If a man
will not go into the bank, his pockets will be empty, though there may
be bursting coffers there to which he has a right. And if we will not
ascend to the hill of the Lord, and stand in His holy place by simple
faith, and by true communion of heart and life, God's amplest provision
is nought to us; and we are empty in the midst of affluence. Get near
to God if you would partake of what He has prepared. Live in fellowship
with Him by simple love, and often meditate on Him, if you would drink
in of His fulness. And be sure of this, that howsoever within His house
the stores are heaped and the treasury full, you will have neither part
nor lot in the matter, unless you are children of the house. 'In the
mount of the Lord it shall be provided.' And round it there is a waste
wilderness of famine and of death.

Further, note _when_ the provision is realised.

When the man is standing with the knife in his hand, and next minute it
will be red with the son's blood--then the call comes: 'Abraham!' and
then he sees the ram caught in the thicket. There had been a long weary
journey from their home away down in the dry, sunny south, a long tramp
over the rough hills, a toilsome climb, with a breaking heart in the
father's bosom, and a dim foreboding gradually stealing on the child's
spirit. But there was no sign of respite or of deliverance. Slowly he
piles together the wood, and yet no sign. Slowly he binds his boy, and
lays him on it, and still no sign. Slowly, reluctantly, and yet
resolvedly, he unsheathes the knife, and yet no sign. He lifts his
hand, and then it comes.

That is God's way always. Up to the very edge we are driven, before His
hand is put out to help us. Such is the law, not only because the next
moment is always necessarily dark, nor because God will deal with us in
any arbitrary fashion, and play with our fears, but because it is best
for us that we should be forced to desperation, and out of desperation
should 'pluck the flower, safety.' It is best for us that we should be
brought to say, 'My foot slippeth!' and then, just as our toes are
sliding upon the glacier, the help comes and 'Thy mercy held me up.'
'The Lord is her helper, and that right early.' When He delays, it is
not to trifle with us, but to do us good by the sense of need, as well
as by the experience of deliverance. At the last moment, never before
it, never until we have found out how much we need it, and never too
late, comes the Helper.

So 'it is provided' for the people that quietly and persistently tread
the path of duty, and go wherever His hand leads them, without asking
anything about where it does lead. The condition of the provision is
our obedience of heart and will. To Abraham doing what he was
commanded, though his heart was breaking as he did it, the help was
granted--as it always will be.

3. And so, lastly, note what we are to do with the provision when we
get it.

Abraham christened the anonymous mountain-top, not by a name that
reminded him or others of his trial, but by a name that proclaimed
God's deliverance. He did not say anything about his agony or about his
obedience. God spoke about that, not Abraham. He did not want these to
be remembered, but what he desired to hand on to later generations was
what God had done for him. Oh! dear friends, is that the way in which
we look back upon life? Many a bare, bald mountain-top in your career
and mine we have got our names for. Are they names that commemorate our
sufferings or God's blessings? When we look back on the past what do we
see? Times of trial or times of deliverance? Which side of the wave do
we choose to look at, the one that is smitten by the sunshine or the
one that is all black and purple in the shadow? The sea looked at from
the one side will be all a sunny path, and from the other dark as
chaos. Let us name the heights that lie behind us, visible to memory,
by names that commemorate, not the troubles that we had on them, but
the deliverances that on them we received from God.

This name enshrines the duty of commemoration--ay! and the duty of
expectation. 'The Lord will provide.' How do you know that, Abraham?
and his answer is, 'Because the Lord did provide.' That is a shaky kind
of argument if we use it about one another. Our resources may give out,
our patience may weary. If it is a storehouse that we have to go to,
all the corn that is treasured in it will be eaten up some day; but if
it is to some boundless plain that grows it that we go, then we can be
sure that there will be a harvest next year as there has been a harvest
last. And so we have to think of God, not as a storehouse, but as the
soil from which there comes forth, year by year and generation after
generation, the same crop of rich blessings for the needs and the
hungers of every soul. If we have to draw from reservoirs we cannot
say, 'I have gone with my pitcher to the well six times, and I shall
get it filled at the seventh.' It is more probable that we shall have
to say, 'I have gone so often that I durst not go any more'; but if we
have to go, not to a well, but to a fountain, then the oftener we go,
the surer we become that its crystal cool waters will always be ready
for us. 'Thou hast been with me in six troubles; and in seven thou wilt
not forsake me,' is a bad conclusion to draw about one another; but it
is the right conclusion to draw about God.

And so, as we look back upon our past lives, and see many a peak
gleaming in the magic light of memory, let us name them all by names
that will throw a radiance of hope on the unknown and un-climbed
difficulties before us, and say, as the patriarch did when he went down
from the mount of his trial and deliverance, 'The Lord will provide.'

GUIDANCE IN THE WAY

    'I being in the way, the Lord led me.'--GENESIS xxiv. 27.

So said Abraham's anonymous servant when telling how he had found
Rebekah at the well, and known her to be the destined bride of his
master's servant. There is no more beautiful page, even amongst the
many lovely ones in these ancient stories, than this domestic idyll of
the mission of the faithful servant from far Canaan across the desert.
The homely test by which he would determine that the maiden should be
pointed out to him, the glimpse of old-world ways at the well, the
gracious courtesy of the fair damsel, and the simple devoutness of the
speaker, who recognises in what to others were trivial commonplaces
God's guidance to the end which He had appointed, his recognition of
the divine hand moving beneath all the nothings and littlenesses of
daily life--may teach us much.

1. The first thing that these words seem to me to suggest is the
conditions under which we may be sure that God leads--'I being in the
way.'

Now, of course, some of you may know that the words of our text are, by
the Revised Version and others, rendered so as to obliterate the clause
telling where the speaker was when the Lord led him, and to make the
whole a continuous expression of the one fact--'As for me, the Lord
hath led me in the way to the house of my master's brethren.' The
literal rendering is, 'I in the way, Jehovah led me.' No doubt the
Hebrew idiom admits of the 'I' being thus emphatically premised, and
then repeated as 'me' after the verb, and possibly no more is to be
made of the words than that. But the fuller and more impressive meaning
is possible, and I venture to retain it, and to see in it the
expression of the truth that it is when we are 'in the way' that God
will certainly lead us.

So that suggests, first, how the people that have any right to expect
any kind of guidance from God are those who have their feet upon a path
which conscience approves. Many men run into all manner of perplexities
by their own folly and self-will, and never ask whether their acts are
right or wrong, wise or foolish, until they begin to taste the bitter
consequences. Then they cry to God to help them, and think themselves
very religious because they do. That is not the way to get God's help.
Such folk are like Italian brigands who had an image of the Virgin in
their hats, and sometimes had the Pope's commission in their pockets,
and therefore went out to murder and ravish, in sure and certain hope
of God's favour and protection.

But when we are 'in the way,' and know that we are doing what we ought
to do, and conscience says, 'Go on; never mind what stands against
you,' it is then, and only then, that we have a right to be sure that
the Lord will lead us. Otherwise, the best thing that can happen to us
is that the Lord should thwart us when we are on the wrong road.
Resistance, indeed, may be guidance; and it is often God's manner of
setting our feet in the way of His steps. We have no claim on Him for
guidance, indeed, unless we have submitted ourselves to His
commandments; yet His mercies go beyond our claims. Just as the
obedient child gets guidance, so the petulant and disobedient child
gets resistance, which is guidance too. The angel of the Lord stands in
front of Balaam, amongst the vines, though the seer sometimes does not
see, and blocks the path for him, and hedges up the way with his
flaming sword. Only, if we would have the sweet, gracious,
companionable guidance of our Lord, let us be sure, to begin with, that
we are 'in the way,' and not in any of the bypaths into which arrogance
and self-will and fleshly desires and the like are only too apt to
divert our feet.

Another consideration suggested by these words, 'I being in the way,'
is that if we expect guidance we must diligently do present duty. We
are led, thank God, by one step at a time. He does with His child, whom
He is teaching to read His will, as we sometimes do with our children,
when we are occupied in teaching them their first book-learning: we
cover the page up, all but the line that we want them to concentrate
their eyes upon; and then, when they have got to the end of that, slip
the hand down, low enough to allow the next line to come into view. So
often God does with us. One thing at a time is enough for the little
brains. And this is the condition of mortal life, for the most
part--though there do come rare exceptions. Not that we have to look a
long way ahead, and forecast what we shall do this time ten years off,
or to make decisions that involve a distant future--except once or
twice in a lifetime--but that we have to settle what is to be done in
this flying minute, and in the one adjacent to it. 'Do the duty that
lies nearest thee,' and the remoter duty will become clearer. There is
nothing that has more power to make a man's path plain before his feet
than that he should concentrate his better self on the manful and
complete discharge of the present moment's service. And, on the other
hand, there is nothing that will so fill our sky with mists, and blur
the marks of the faint track through the moor, as present negligence,
or still more, present sin. Iron in a ship's hull makes the magnet
tremble, and point away from its true source. He that has complied with
evil to-day is the less capable of discerning duty to-morrow; and he
that does all the duty that he knows will thereby increase the
probability that he will know all that he needs. 'If any man wills to
do His will, he shall know of the teaching'--enough, at any rate, to
direct his steps.

But there is another lesson still in the words; and that is that, if we
are to be guided, we must see to it that we expect and obey the
guidance.

This servant of Abraham's, with a very imperfect knowledge of the
divine will, had, when he set out on his road, prayed very earnestly
that God would lead him. He had ventured to prescribe a certain token,
naïve in its simplicity: 'If the girl drops her pitcher, and gives us
drink gladly, and does not grudge to fill the troughs for the cattle,
that will show that she is of a good sort, and will make the right wife
for Isaac.' He had prayed thus, and he was ready to accept whomsoever
God so designated. He had not made up his mind, 'Bethuel's daughter is
a relation of my master's, and so she will be a suitable wife for his
son.' He left it all with God, and then he went straight on his road,
and was perfectly sure that he would get the guidance that he had
sought. And when it came the good man bowed and obeyed.

Now there is a picture for us all. There are many people that say, 'O
Lord! guide me.' when all the while they mean, 'Let me guide Thee.'
They are perfectly willing to accept the faintest and moat questionable
indications that may seem to point down the road where their
inclination drives them, and like Lord Nelson at Copenhagen, will put
the telescope to the blind eye when the flag is flying at the admiral's
peak, signalling 'Come out of action,' because they are determined to
stay where they are.

Do not let us forget that the first condition of securing real guidance
in our daily life is to ask it, and that the next is to look for it,
and that a third is to be quite willing to accept it, whether the
finger points down the broad road that we would like to go upon, or
through some tangled path amongst the brushwood that we would fain
avoid. And if you and I, dear brethren, in the littlenesses of our
daily life, do fulfil these conditions, the heavens will crumble, and
earth will melt, before God will leave His child untaught in the way in
which he should go.

Only, let us be patient. Do you remember what Joshua said to the
Israelites? 'Let there be a good space of vacant ground between you and
the guiding ark, that you may know by which way you ought to go.' When
men precipitately press on the heels of half-disclosed providences,
they are uncommonly apt to mistake the road. We must wait till we are
sure of God's will before we try to do it. If we are not sure of what
He would have us do, then, for the present, He would have us do nothing
until He speaks. 'I being in the way, the Lord led me.'

2. Now a word about the manner of the guidance.

There was no miracle, no supernatural voice, no pillar of cloud or
fire, no hovering glory round the head of the village maiden. All the
indications were perfectly natural and trivial. A thousand girls had
gone to the wells that day all about Haran and done the very same
things that Rebekah did. But the devout man who had prayed for
guidance, and was sure that he was getting it, was guided by her most
simple, commonplace act; and that is how we are usually to be guided.
God leaves a great deal to our common sense. His way of speaking to
common sense is by very common things. If any of us fancy that some
glow at the heart, some sudden flash as of inspiration, is the test of
a divine commandment, we have yet to learn the full meaning of the
Incarnation of Jesus Christ. For that Incarnation, amongst all its
other mighty influences, hallowed the commonest things of life and
turned them into ministers of God's purposes. So remember, God's
guidance may come to you through so insignificant a girl as Rebekah. It
may come to you through as commonplace an incident as tipping the water
of a spring out of an earthen pot into a stone trough. None the less is
it God's guidance; and what we want is the eye to see it. He will guide
us by very common indications of His providence.

3. And now, the last thing that I would say a word about is the
realisation in daily life of this guidance as a plain actual fact.

This anonymous trusted servant of Abraham's, whose name we should like
to have known, had a mere segment of the full orb of the knowledge of
God that shines upon our path. With true Oriental freedom to speak
about the deepest matters, he was not afraid nor ashamed to stand
before Bethuel and Laban, and all these other strangers that crowded
round the doorway, and say, 'The Lord led me.' There is a pattern for
some of us tongue-tied, shamefaced Christians. Whatever may be the
truth about the degradations of which heathen religion is full, there
is a great deal in heathen religion that ought to teach, and does
teach, Christendom a lesson, as to willingness to recognise and to
confess God's working in daily life. It may be very superficial; it may
be very little connected with high morality; but so far as it goes it
is a thousand-fold better than the dumb religion that characterises
such hosts of Christian people.

A realisation of the divine guidance is the talisman that makes crooked
things straight and rough places plain; that brings peace and calmness
into our hearts, amid all changes, losses, and sorrows. If we hold fast
by that faith, it will interpret for us the mysterious in the
providences concerning our own lives, and will help us to feel that, as
I said, resistance to our progress may be true guidance, and thwarting
our wills may be our highest good. For the road which we travel should,
in all its turnings, lead us to God; and whatsoever guides us to Him is
only and always blessed.

May I, for one moment, turn these words in another direction, and
remind you, dear friends, of how the sublimest application of them is
still to be realised? As a climber on a mountain-peak may look down the
vale up which he had painfully toiled for many days and see the dusty
path lying, like a sinuous snake, down all along it, so, when we get up
yonder, 'Thou shalt remember all the way by which the Lord thy God hath
led thee these many years in the wilderness,' and shalt see the green
pastures and the still waters, valleys of the shadow of death, and
burning roads with sharp flints, which have all brought thee hither at
last. We shall know then what we believe now, that the Lord does indeed
go before them who desire to follow Him, and that the God of Israel is
their reward. Then we shall say with deepened thankfulness, deepened by
complete understanding of life here, seen in the light of its attained
end, 'I being in the way, the Lord led me,' and 'I shall dwell in the
house of the Lord for ever.'

THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM

    'Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old
    age, an old man, and   full of years; and was gathered
    to his people.'--GENESIS xxv. 8.

'Full of years' does not seem to me to be a mere synonym for longevity.
That would be an intolerable tautology, for we should then have the
same thing said three times over--'an old man,' 'in a good old age,'
'full of years.' There must be some other idea than that in the words.
If you notice that the expression is by no means a usual one, that it
is only applied to one or two of the Old Testament characters, and
those selected characters, I think you will see that there must be some
other significance in it than merely to point to length of days.

It may be well to note the instances. In addition to our text, we find
it employed, first, in reference to Isaac, in Genesis xxxv. 29, where
the words are repeated almost _verbatim_. That calm, contemplative
life, so unlike the active, varied career of his father, also attained
to this blessing at its close. Then we find that the stormy and
adventurous course of the great king David, with its wonderful
alternations both of moral character and of fortune, is represented as
being closed at last with this tranquil evening glory: 'He died in a
good old age, full of days, riches, and honour.' Once more we read of
the great high priest Jehoiada, whose history had been crowded with
peril, change, brave resistance, and strenuous effort, that with all
the storms behind him he died at last, 'full of days.' The only other
instance of the occurrence of the phrase is at the close of the book of
Job, the typical record of the good man suffering, and of the abundant
compensations given by a loving God. The fair picture of returning
prosperity and family joy, like the calm morning sunshine after a night
of storm and wreck, with which that wonderful book ends, has this for
its last touch, evidently intended to deepen the impression of peace
which is breathed over it all: 'So Job died, being old and full of
days.' These are all the instances of the occurrence of this phrase,
and I think we may fairly say that in all it is meant to suggest not
merely length of days, but some characteristic of the long life over
and above its mere length. We shall, I think, understand its meaning a
little better if we make a very slight and entirely warranted change,
and instead of reading '_full_ of years,' read '_satisfied_ with
years.' The men were satisfied with life; having exhausted its
possibilities, having drunk a full draught, having nothing more left to
wish for. The words point to a calm close, with all desires gratified,
with hot wishes stilled, with no desperate clinging to life, but a
willingness to let it go, because all which it could give had been
attained.

So much for one of the remarkable expressions in this verse. There is
another, 'He was gathered to his people,' of which we shall have more
to say presently. Enough for the present to note the peculiarity, and
to suggest that it seems to contain some dim hint of a future life, and
some glimmer of some of the profoundest thoughts about it.

We have two main things to consider.

1. The tranquil close of a life.

It is possible, then, at the end of life to feel that it has satisfied
one's wishes. Whether it does or no will depend mostly on ourselves,
and very slightly on our circumstances. Length of days, competence,
health, and friends are important; but neither these nor any other
externals will make the difference between a life which, in the
retrospect, will seem to have been sufficient for our desires, and one
which leaves a hunger in the heart. It is possible for us to make our
lives of such a sort, that whether they run on to the apparent maturity
of old age, or whether they are cut short in the midst of our days, we
may rise from the table feeling that it has satisfied our desires, met
our anticipation, and been all very good.

Possibly, that is not the way in which most of us look at life. That is
not the way in which a great many of us seem to think that it is an
eminent part of Christian and religious character to look at life. But
it is the way in which the highest type of devotion and the truest
goodness always look at it. There are people, old and young, who,
whenever they look back, whether it be over a long tract of years or
over a short one, have nothing to say about it except: 'Vanity of
vanities! all is vanity and vexation of spirit'; a retrospect of weary
disappointments and thwarted plans.

How different with some of us the forward and the backward look! Are
there not some listening to me, whose past is so dark that it flings
black shadows over their future, and who can only cherish hopes for
to-morrow, by giving the lie to and forgetting the whole of their
yesterdays? It is hard to paint the regions before us like 'the Garden
of the Lord,' when we know that the locusts of our own godless desires
have made all the land behind us desolate. If your past has been a
selfish past, a godless past, in which passion, inclination, whim,
anything but conscience and Christ have ruled, your remembrances can
scarcely be tranquil; nor your hopes bright. If you have only
'prospects drear,' when you 'backward cast your eye,' it is not
wonderful if 'forwards though you cannot see,' you will 'guess and
fear.' Such lives, when they come towards an end, are wont to be full
of querulous discontent and bitterness. We have all seen godless old
men cynical and sour, pleased with nothing, grumbling, or feebly
complaining, about everything, dissatisfied with all which life has
thus far yielded them, and yet clinging desperately to it, and afraid
to go.

Put by the side of such an end this calm picture of the old man going
down into his grave, and looking back over all those long days since he
came away from his father's house, and became a pilgrim and a stranger.
How all the hot anxieties, desires, occupations, of youth have quieted
themselves down! How far away now seem the warlike days when he fought
the invading kings! How far away the heaviness of heart when he
journeyed to Mount Moriah with his boy, and whetted the knife to slay
his son! His love had all been buried in Sarah's grave. He has been a
lonely man for many years; and yet he looks back, as God looked back
over His creative week, and feels that all has been good. 'It was all
for the best; the great procession of my life has been ordered from the
beginning to its end, by the Hand that shapes beauty everywhere, and
has made all things blessed and sweet. I have drunk a full draught; I
have had enough; I bless the Giver of the feast, and push my chair
back; and get up and go away.' He died an old man, and satisfied with
his life.

Ay! And what a contrast that makes, dear friends, to another set of
people. There is nothing more miserable than to see a man, as his years
go by, gripping harder and tighter at this poor, fleeting world that is
slipping away from him; nothing sadder than to see how, as
opportunities and capacities for the enjoyment of life dwindle, and
dwindle, and dwindle, people become almost fierce in the desire to keep
it. Why, you can see on the face of many an old man and woman a hungry
discontent, that has not come from the mere wrinkles of old age or
care; an eager acquisitiveness looking out of the dim old eyes,
tragical and awful. It is sad to see a man, as the world goes from him,
grasping at its skirts as a beggar does at the retreating passer-by
that refuses him an alms. Are there not some of us who feel that this
is our case, that the less we have before us of life here on earth, the
more eagerly we grasp at the little which still remains; trying to get
some last drops out of the broken cistern which we know can hold no
water? How different this blessed acquiescence in the fleeting away of
the fleeting; and this contented satisfaction with the portion that has
been given him, which this man had who died willingly, being satisfied
with life!

Sometimes, too, there is satiety--weariness of life which is not
satisfaction, though it looks like it. Its language is: 'Man delights
me not; nor woman neither. I am tired of it all.' Those who feel thus
sit at the table without an appetite. They think that they have seen to
the bottom of everything, and they have found everything a cheat. They
expect nothing new under the sun; that which is to be hath already
been, and it is all vanity and striving after the wind. They are at
once satiated and dissatisfied. Nothing keeps the power to charm.

How different from all this is the temper expressed in this text,
rightly understood! Abraham had had a richly varied life. It had
brought him all he wished. He has drunk a full draught, and needs no
more. He is satisfied, but that does not mean loss of interest in
present duties, occupations, or enjoyments. It is possible to keep
ourselves fully alive to all these till the end, and to preserve
something of the keen edge of youth even in old age, by the magic of
communion with God, purity of conduct, and a habitual contemplation of
all events as sent by our Father. When Paul felt himself very near his
end, he yet had interest enough in common things to tell Timothy all
about their mutual friends' occupations, and to wish to have his books
and parchments.

So, calmly, satisfied and yet not sickened, keenly appreciating all the
good and pleasantness of life, and yet quite willing to let it go,
Abraham died. So may it be with us too, if we will, no matter what the
duration or the externals of our life. If we too are his children by
faith, we shall be 'blessed with faithful Abraham.' And I beseech you
to ask yourselves whether the course of your life is such as that, if
at this moment God's great knife were to come down and cut it in two,
you would be able to say, 'Well! I have had enough, and now contentedly
I go.'

Again, it is possible at the end of life to feel that it is complete,
because the days have accomplished for us the highest purpose of life.
Scaffoldings are for buildings, and the moments and days and years of
our earthly lives are scaffolding. What are you building inside the
scaffolding, brother? What kind of a structure will be disclosed when
the scaffolding is knocked away? What is the end for which days and
years are given? That they may give us what eternity cannot take
away--a character built upon the love of God in Christ, and moulded
into His likeness. 'Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him
for ever.' Has your life helped you to do that? If it has, though you
be but a child, you are full of years; if it has not, though your hair
be whitened with the snows of the nineties, you are yet incomplete and
immature. The great end of life is to make us like Christ, and pleasing
to Christ. If life has done that for us, we have got the best out of
it, and our life is completed, whatever may be the number of the days.
Quality, not quantity, is the thing that determines the perfectness of
a life. And like as in northern lands, where there is only a week or
two from the melting of the snow to the cutting of the hay, the whole
harvest of a life may be gathered in a very little space, and all be
done which is needed to make the life complete. Has your life this
completeness? Can you be 'satisfied' with it, because the river of the
flowing hours has borne down some grains of gold amidst the mass of
mud, and, notwithstanding many sins and failures, you have thus far
fulfilled the end of your being, that you are in some measure trusting
and serving the Lord Jesus Christ?

Again, it is possible, at the end of life, to be _willing_ to go as
satisfied.

Most men cling to life in grim desperation, like a climber to a cliff
giving way, or a drowning man clutching at any straw. How beautiful the
contrast of the placid, tranquil acquiescence expressed in that phrase
of our text! No doubt there will always be the shrinking of the bodily
nature from death. But that may be overcome. There is no passion so
weak but in some case it has 'mated and mastered the fear of death,'
and it is possible for us all to come to that temper in which we shall
be ready for either fortune, to live and serve Him here, or to die and
enjoy Him yonder. Or, to return to an earlier illustration, it is
possible to be like a man sitting at table, who has had his meal, and
is quite contented to stay on there, restful and cheerful, but is not
unwilling to put back his chair, to get up and to go away, thanking the
Giver for what he has received.

Ah! that is the way to face the end, dear brethren, and how is it to be
done? Such a temper need not be the exclusive possession of the old. It
may belong to us at all stages of life. How is it won? By a life of
devout communion with God. The secret of it lies in obeying the
commandment and realising the truth which Abraham realised and obeyed:
'I am the Almighty God, walk before Me, and be thou perfect.' 'Fear
not, Abram, I am thy shield and thine exceeding great reward.' That is
to say, a simple communion with God, realising His presence and feeling
that He is near, will sweeten disappointment, will draw from it its
hidden blessedness, will make us victors over its pains and its woes.
Such a faith will make it possible to look back and see only blessing;
to look forward and see a great light of hope burning in the darkness.
Such a faith will check weariness, avert satiety, promote satisfaction,
and will help us to feel that life and the great hereafter are but the
outer and inner mansions of the Father's house, and death the short
though dark corridor between. So we shall be ready for life or for
death.

2. Now I must turn to consider more briefly the glimpse of the joyful
society beyond, which is given us in that other remarkable expression
of our text: 'He was gathered to his people'

That phrase is only used in the earlier Old Testament books, and there
only in reference to a few persons. It is used of Abraham, Ishmael,
Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Aaron, and once (Judges ii. 10) of a whole
generation. If you will weigh the words, I think you will see that
there is in them a dim intimation of something beyond this present life.

'He was gathered to his people' is not the same thing as 'He died,'
for, in the earlier part of the verse, we read, 'Abraham gave up the
ghost and died ... and was gathered to his people.' It is not the same
thing as being buried. For we read in the following verse: 'And his
sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the
field of Ephron, the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre.'
It is then the equivalent neither of death nor of burial. It conveys
dimly and veiledly that Abraham was buried, and yet that was not all
that happened to him. He was buried, but also 'he was gathered to his
people.' Why! his own 'people' were buried in Mesopotamia, and his
grave was far away from theirs. What is the meaning of the expression?
Who were the people he was gathered to? In death or in burial, 'the
dust returns to the earth as it was.' What was it that was gathered to
his people?

Dimly, vaguely, veiledly, but unmistakably, as it seems to me, is here
expressed at least a premonition and feeling after the thought of an
immortal self in Abraham that was not there in what 'his sons Isaac and
Ishmael laid in the cave at Machpelah,' but was somewhere else and was
for ever. That is the first thing hinted at here--the continuance of
the personal being after death.

Is there anything more? I think there is. Now, remember, Abraham's
whole life was shaped by that commandment, 'Get thee out from thy
father's house, and from thy kindred, and from thy country.' He never
dwelt with his kindred; all his days he was a pilgrim and a sojourner,
a stranger in a strange land. And though he was living in the midst of
a civilisation which possessed great cities whose walls reached to
heaven, he pitched his tent beneath the terebinth tree at Mamre, and
would have nothing to do with the order of things around him, but
remained an exotic, a waif, an outcast in the midst of Canaan all his
life. Why? Because he 'looked for the city which hath the foundations,
whose builder and maker is God.' And now he has gone to it, he is
gathered to his people. The life of isolation is over, the true social
life is begun. He is no longer separated from those around him, or
flung amidst those that are uncongenial to him. 'He is gathered to his
people'; he dwells with his own tribe; he is at home; he is in the city.

And so, brethren, life for every Christian man must be lonely. After
all communion we dwell as upon islands dotted over a great archipelago,
each upon his little rock, with the sea dashing between us; but the
time comes when, if our hearts are set upon that great Lord, whose
presence makes us one, there shall be no more sea, and all the isolated
rocks shall be parts of a great continent. Death sets the solitary in
families. We are here like travellers plodding lonely through the night
and the storm, but soon to cross the threshold into the lighted hall,
full of friends.

If we cultivate that sense of detachment from the present, and of
having our true affinities in the unseen, if we dwell here as strangers
because our citizenship is in heaven, then death will not drag us away
from our associates, nor hunt us into a lonely land, but will bring us
where closer bonds shall knit the 'sweet societies' together, and the
sheep shall couch close by one another, because all are gathered round
the one shepherd. Then many a broken tie shall be rewoven, and the
solitary wanderer meet again the dear ones whom he had 'loved long
since, and lost awhile.'

Further, the expressions suggest that in the future men shall be
associated according to affinity and character. 'He was gathered to his
people,' whom he was like and who were like him; the people with whom
he had sympathy, the people whose lives were shaped after the fashion
of his own.

Men will be sorted there. Gravitation will come into play undisturbed;
and the pebbles will be ranged according to their weights on the great
shore where the sea has cast them up, as they are upon Chesil beach,
down there in the English Channel, and many another coast besides; all
the big ones together and sized off to the smaller ones, regularly and
steadily laid out. Like draws to like. Our spiritual affinities, our
religious and moral character, will settle where we shall be, and who
our companions will be when we get yonder. Some of us would not
altogether like to live with the people that are like ourselves, and
some of us would not find the result of this sorting to be very
delightful. Men in the Dantesque circles were only made more miserable
because all around them were of the same sort as, and some of them
worse than, themselves. And an ordered hell, with no company for the
liar but liars, and none for the thief but thieves, and none for impure
men but the impure, and none for the godless but the godless, would be
a hell indeed.

'He was gathered to his people,' and you and I will be gathered
likewise. What is the conclusion of the whole matter? Let us follow
with our thoughts, and in our lives, those who have gone into the
light, and cultivate in heart and character those graces and
excellences which are congruous with the inheritance of the saints in
light. Above all, let us give our hearts to Christ, by simple faith in
Him, to be shaped and sanctified by Him. Then our country will be where
He is, and our people will be the people in whom His love abides, and
the tribe to which we belong will be the tribe of which He is
Chieftain. So when our turn comes, we may rise thankfully from the
table in the wilderness, which He has spread for us, having eaten as
much as we desired, and quietly follow the dark-robed messenger whom
His love sends to bring us to the happy multitudes that throng the
streets of the city. There we shall find our true home, our kindred,
our King. 'So shall _we_ ever be with the Lord.'

A BAD BARGAIN

    'And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a
    man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling
    in tents. And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of
    his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob. And Jacob sod
    pottage: and Esau came from the field, and he was faint:
    And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that
    same red pottage; for I am faint: therefore was his name
    called Edom. And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy
    birthright. And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to
    die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?
    And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he sware unto
    him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob. Then Jacob
    gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat
    and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau
    despised his birthright.'
    GENESIS xxv. 27-34.

Isaac's small household represented a great variety of types of
character. He himself lacked energy, and seems in later life to have
been very much of a tool in the hands of others. Rebekah had the
stronger nature, was persistent, energetic, and managed her husband to
her heart's content. The twin brothers were strongly opposed in
character; and, naturally enough, each parent loved best the child that
was most unlike him or her: Isaac rejoicing in the very wildness of the
adventurous, dashing Esau; and Rebekah finding an outlet for her
womanly tenderness in an undue partiality for the quiet lad that was
always at hand to help her and be petted by her.

One's sympathy goes out to Esau. He was 'a man of the field,'--by which
is meant, not cultivated ground, but open country, which we might call
prairie. He was a 'backwoodsman,'--liked the wild hunter's life better
than sticking at home looking after sheep. He had the attractive
characteristics of that kind of men, as well as their faults. He was
frank, impulsive, generous, incapable of persevering work or of looking
ahead, passionate. His descendants prefer cattle-ranching and
gold-prospecting to keeping shops or sitting with their lungs squeezed
against a desk.

Jacob had neither the high spirits nor the animal courage of his
brother. He was 'a plain man.' The word is literally 'perfect,' but
cannot be used in its deepest sense; for Jacob was very far indeed from
being that, but seems to have a lower sense, which might perhaps be
represented by 'steady-going,' or 'respectable,' in modern phraseology.
He went quietly about his ordinary work, in contrast with his daring
brother's escapades and unsettledness.

The two types are intensified by civilisation, and the antagonism
between them increased. City life tends to produce Jacobs, and its
Esaus escape from it as soon as they can. But Jacob had the vices as
well as the virtues of his qualities. He was orderly and domestic, but
he was tricky, and keenly alive to his own interest. He was persevering
and almost dogged in his tenacity of purpose, but he was not above
taking mean advantages and getting at his ends by miry roads. He had
little love for his brother, in whom he saw an obstacle to his
ambition. He had the virtues and vices of the commercial spirit.

But we judge the two men wrongly if we let ourselves be fascinated, as
Isaac was, by Esau, and forget that the superficial attractions of his
character cover a core worthy of disapprobation. They are crude judges
of character who prefer the type of man who spurns the restraints of
patient industry and order; and popular authors, who make their heroes
out of such, err in taste no less than in morals. There is a very
unwholesome kind of literature, which is devoted to glorifying the
Esaus as fine fellows, with spirit, generosity, and noble carelessness,
whereas at bottom they are governed by animal impulses, and incapable
of estimating any good which does not appeal to sense, and that at once.

The great lesson of this story lies on its surface. It is the folly and
sin of buying present gratification of appetite or sense at the price
of giving up far greater future good. The details are picturesquely
told. Esau's eagerness, stimulated by the smell of the mess of lentils,
is strikingly expressed in the Hebrew: 'Let me devour, I pray thee, of
that red, that red there.' It is no sin to be hungry, but to let
appetite speak so clamorously indicates feeble self-control. Jacob's
coolness is an unpleasant foil to Esau's impatience, and his cautious
bargaining, before he will sell what a brother would have given, shows
a mean soul, without generous love to his own flesh and blood. Esau
lets one ravenous desire hide everything else from him. He wants the
pottage which smokes there, and that one poor dish is for the moment
more to him than birthright and any future good. Jacob knows the
changeableness of Esau's character, and is well aware that a hungry man
will promise anything, and, when fed, will break his promise as easily
as he made it. So he makes Esau swear; and Esau will do that, or
anything asked. He gets his meal. The story graphically describes the
greedy relish with which he ate, the short duration of his enjoyment,
and the dark meaning of the seemingly insignificant event, by that
accumulation of verbs, 'He did eat and drink, and rose up and went his
way: so Esau despised his birthright.'

Now we may learn, first, how profound an influence small temptations,
yielded to, may exert on a life.

Many scoffs have been directed against this story, as if it were
unworthy of credence that eating a dish of lentils should have shaped
the life of a man and of his descendants. But is it not always the case
that trifles turn out to be determining points? Hinges are very small,
compared with the doors which move on them. Most lives are moulded by
insignificant events. No temptation is small, for no sin is small; and
if the occasion of yielding to sense and the present is insignificant,
the yielding is not so.

But the main lesson is, as already noted, the madness of flinging away
greater future good for present gratifications of sense. One cannot
suppose that the spiritual side of 'the birthright' was in the thoughts
of either brother. Esau and Jacob alike regarded it only as giving the
headship of the family. It was merely the right of succession, with
certain material accompanying advantages, which Jacob coveted and Esau
parted with. But even in regard to merely worldly objects, the man who
lives for only the present moment is distinctly beneath him who lives
for a future good, however material it may be. Whoever subordinates the
present, and is able steadily to set before himself a remote object,
for which he is strong enough to subdue the desire of immediate
gratifications of any sort, is, in so far, better than the man who,
like a savage or an animal, lives only for the instant.

The highest form of that nobility is when time is clearly seen to be
the 'lackey to eternity,' and life's aims are determined with supreme
reference to the future beyond the grave. But how many of us are every
day doing exactly as Esau did--flinging away a great future for a small
present! A man who lives only for such ends as may be attained on this
side of the grave is as 'profane' a person as Esau, and despises his
birthright as truly. He knew that he was hungry, and that lentil
porridge was good, 'What good shall the birthright do me?' He failed to
make the effort of mind and imagination needed in order to realise how
much of the kind of 'good' that he could appreciate it would do to him.
The smell of the smoking food was more to him than far greater good
which he could only appreciate by an effort. A sixpence held close to
the eye can shut out the sun. Resolute effort is needed to prevent the
small, intrusive present from blotting out the transcendent greatness
of the final future. And for lack of such effort men by the thousand
fling themselves away.

To sell a birthright for a bowl of lentils was plain folly. But is it
wiser to sell the blessedness and peace of communion with God here and
of heaven hereafter for anything that earth can yield to sense or to
soul? How many shrewd 'men of the highest commercial standing' are
making as bad a bargain as Esau's! The 'pottage' is hot and comforting,
but it is soon eaten; and when the bowl is empty, and the sense of
hunger comes back in an hour or two, the transaction does not look
quite as advantageous as it did. Esau had many a minute of rueful
meditation on his bad bargain before he in vain besought his father's
blessing. And suspicions of the folly of their choice are apt to haunt
men who prefer the present to the future, even before the future
becomes the present, and the folly is manifest. 'What doth it profit a
man, to gain the whole world, and forfeit his life?'

So a character like Esau's, though it has many fine possibilities about
it, and attracts liking, is really of a low type, and may very easily
slide into depths of degrading sensualism, and be dead to all
nobleness. Enterprise, love of stirring life, impatience of dull
plodding, are natural to young lives. Unregulated, impulsive
characters, who live for the moment, and are very sensitive to all
material delights, have often an air of generosity and joviality which
hides their essential baseness; for it _is_ base to live for flesh,
either in more refined or more frankly coarse forms. It is base to be
incapable of seeing an inch beyond the present. It is base to despise
any good that cannot minister to fleeting lusts or fleshly pleasures,
and to say of high thought, of ideal aims of any sort, and most of all
to say of religion, 'What good will it do me?' To estimate such
precious things by the standard of gross utility is like weighing
diamonds in grocers' scales. They will do very well for sugar, but not
for precious stones. The sacred things of life are not those which do
what the Esaus recognise as 'good.' They have another purpose, and are
valuable for other ends. Let us take heed, then, that we estimate
things according to their true relative worth; that we live, not for
to-day, but for eternity; and that we suppress all greedy cravings. If
we do not, we shall be 'profane' persons like Esau, 'who for one morsel
of meat sold his birthright.'

POTTAGE VERSUS BIRTHRIGHT

    'Esau despised his birthright'--GENESIS xxv. 34.

Broad lessons unmistakable, but points strange and difficult to throw
oneself back to so different a set of ideas. So

I. Deal with the narrative.

Not to tell it over again, but bring out the following points:--

(_a_) Birthright.--What?

None of them any notion of sacred, spiritual aspect of it.

To all, merely material advantages: headship of the clan. All the
loftier aspects gone from Isaac, who thought he could give it for
venison, from Esau, and from the scheming Rebekah and the crafty Jacob.

(_b_) The Bargain.

It is not clear whether the transaction was seriously meant, or whether
it only shows Jacob's wish to possess the birthright and Esau's
indifference to it.

At any rate, the barter was not supposed to complete Jacob's title, as
is shown by a subsequent piece of trickery.

Isaac's blessing was conceived to confer it; that blessing, if once
given, could not be revoked, even if procured by fraud and given in
error.

The belief would fulfil itself, as far as the chieftainship was
concerned.

It is significant of the purely 'secular' tone of all the parties
concerned that only temporal blessings are included in Isaac's words.

(_c_) The Scripture judgment on all parties concerned.

Great mistakes are made by forgetting that the Bible is a passionless
narrator of its heroes' acts, and seldom pauses to censure or
praise--so people have thought that Scripture gave its vote for Jacob
as against Esau.

The character of the two men.

Esau--frank, impulsive, generous, chivalrous, careless, and sensuous.

Jacob--meditative, reflective, pastoral, timid, crafty, selfish. Each
has the defects of his qualities.

But the subsequent history of Jacob shows what heaven thought of him.

This dirty transaction marred his life, sent him a terrified exile from
Isaac's tent, and shook his soul long years after with guilty
apprehensions when he had to meet Esau.

All subsequent career to beat his crafty selfishness out of him and to
lift him to higher level.

II. Broad General Lessons.

1. The Choice.--Birthright _versus_ Pottage.

(_a_) The Present _versus_ The Future.

Suppose it true that to both brothers the birthright seemed to secure
merely material advantage, yet even so the better part would have been
to sacrifice material present for material future. Even on plane of
worldly things, to live for to-morrow ennobles a man, and he is the
higher style of man who 'spurns delights and lives laborious days' for
some issue to be realised in the far future.

The very same principle extended leads to the conviction that the
highest wisdom is his who lives for the furthest, which is also the
most certain, Future.

(_b_) The Seen _versus_ The Unseen.

However material the advantages of the birthright were supposed to be,
they _then_ appealed to imagination, not sense. _There_ was the pottage
in the pan: 'I can see that and smell it. This birthright, can I eat
_it_? Let me get the solid realities, and let who will have the
imaginary.'

So the unseen good things, such as intellectual culture, fair
reputation, and the like, are better than the gross satisfactions that
can be handled, or tasted, or seen.

And, on the very same principle, high above the seeker after these--as
high as he is above the drunkard--is the Christian, whose life is
shaped by the loftiest Unseen, even 'Him who is invisible.'

2. The grim absurdity of the choice.

The story seems to have a certain undertone of sarcasm, and a keen
perception of the immense stupidity of the man.

Pottage and a full belly to-day--that was all he got for such a
sacrifice.

'This their way is their folly.'

3. How well the bargain worked at first, and what came of it at last.

No doubt Esau had his meal, and, no doubt, when a man sells his soul to
the devil (the mediaeval form of the story), he generally gets the
price for which he bargained, more or less, and oftentimes with a dash
of vinegar in the porridge, which makes it less palatable.

What comes of it at last. Put side by side the pictures of Esau's
animal contentment at the moment when he had eaten up his mess, and of
his despair when he wailed, 'Hast thou not one blessing?'

He finds out his mistake. A sense of the preciousness of the despised
thing wakes in him.

And it is too late. There _are_ irrevocable consequences of every false
choice. Youth is gone: cannot alter that. Opportunities gone: cannot
alter that. Strength gone: cannot alter that. Habits formed,
associations, reputation, position, character, are all determined.

But there is a blessed _contrast_ between Esau's experience and what
may be ours. The desire to have the birthright is sure to bring it to
us. No matter how late the desire is of springing, nor how long and
insultingly we have suppressed it, we never go to our Father in vain
with the cry, 'Bless me, even me also.'

'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own
soul?'

THE FIRST APOSTLE OF PEACE AT ANY PRICE

    'Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same
    year an hundredfold, and the Lord blessed him. And the
    man waxed great, and went forward, and grew until he
    became very great: For he had possession of flocks, and
    possession of herds, and great store of servants: and
    the Philistines envied him. For all the wells which his
    father's servants had digged in the days of Abraham his
    father, the Philistines had stopped them, and filled them
    with earth. And Abimelech said unto Isaac, Go from us;
    for thou art much mightier than we. And Isaac departed
    thence, and pitched his tent in the valley of Gerar, and
    dwelt there. And Isaac digged again the wells of water,
    which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father;
    for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of
    Abraham: and he called their names after the names by
    which his father had called them. And Isaac's servants
    digged in the valley, and found there a well of springing
    water. And the herdmen of Gerar did strive with Isaac's
    herdmen, saying, The water is ours: and he called the
    name of the well Esek; because they strove with him. And
    they digged another well, and strove for that also: and
    he called the name of it Sitnah. And he removed from
    thence, and digged another well; and for that they strove
    not: and he called the name of it Rehoboth; and he said,
    For now the Lord hath made room for us, and we shall be
    fruitful in the land. And he went up from thence to
    Beer-sheba. And the Lord appeared unto him the same
    night, and said, I am the God of Abraham thy father:
    fear not, for I am with thee, and will bless thee, and
    multiply thy seed for my servant Abraham's sake. And he
    builded an altar there, and called upon the name of the
    Lord, and pitched his tent there: and there Isaac's
    servants digged a well.'--GENESIS xxvi. 12-25.

The salient feature of Isaac's life is that it has no salient features.
He lived out his hundred and eighty years in quiet, with little to make
history. Few details of his story are given, and some of these are not
very creditable. He seems never to have wandered far from the
neighbourhood of Beersheba. These quiet, rolling stretches of thinly
peopled land contented him, and gave pasture for his flocks, as well as
fields for his cultivation. Like many of the tribes of that district
still, he had passed from the purely nomad and pastoral life, such as
Abraham led, and had begun to 'sow in that land.' That marks a stage in
progress. His father's life had been like a midsummer day, with bursts
of splendour and heavy thunder-clouds; his was liker a calm day in
autumn, windless and unchanging from morning till serene evening. The
world thinks little of such lives, but they are fruitful.

Our text begins with a sweet little picture of peaceful industry,
blessed by God, and therefore prospering. Travellers tell us that the
land where Isaac dwelt is still marvellously fertile, even to rude
farming. But to be merely a successful farmer and sheep-owner might
have seemed poor work to the heir of such glowing promises, and the
prospect of a high destiny often disgusts its possessor with lowly
duties. 'But if we hope for that which we see not, then do we with
patience wait for it,' and the best way to fit ourselves for great
things in the future is to bend our backs and wills to humble toil in
the present. Peter expected every day to see the risen Lord, when he
said, 'I go a-fishing.'

The Philistines' envy was very natural, since Isaac was an alien, and,
in some sense, an intruder. Their stopping of the wells was a common
act of hostility, and an effectual one in that land, where everything
lives where water comes, and dies if it is cut off. Abimelech's reason
for 'extraditing' Isaac might have provoked a more pugnacious person to
stay and defy the Philistines to expel him. 'Thou art much mightier
than we,' and so he could have said, 'Try to put me out, then,' and the
result might have been that Abimelech and his Philistines would have
been the ones to go. But the same spirit was in the man as had been in
the lad, when he let his father bind him and lay him on the altar
without a struggle or a word, and he quietly went, leaving his fields
and pastures. 'Very poor-spirited,' says the world; what does Christ
say?

Isaac was not 'original.' He cleaned out the wells which his father had
digged, and with filial piety gave them again the old names 'which his
father had called them.' Some of us nowadays get credit for being
'advanced and liberal thinkers,' because we regard our fathers' wells
as much too choked with rubbish to be worth clearing out, and the last
thing we should dream of would be to revive the old names. But the old
wells were not enough for the new time, and so fresh ones were added.
Isaac and his servants did not say, 'We will have no water but what is
drawn from Abraham's wells. What was enough for him is enough for us.'
So, like all wise men, they were conservatively progressive and
progressively conservative. The Gerar shepherds were sharp lawyers.
They took strong ground in saying, 'The _water_ is ours; you have dug
wells, but we are ground-owners, and what is below the surface, as well
as what is on it, is our property.' Again Isaac fielded, moved on a
little way, and tried again. A second well was claimed, and given up,
and all that Isaac did was to name the two 'Contention' and 'Enmity,'
as a gentle rebuke and memorial. Then, as is generally the result,
gentleness wearied violence out, and the Philistines tired of annoying
before Isaac tired of yielding. So he came into a quiet harbour at
last, and traced his repose to God, naming his last well 'Broad
Places,' because the Lord had made room for him.

Such a quiet spirit, strong in non-resistance, and ready to yield
rather than quarrel, was strangely out of place in these wild days and
lands. He obeyed the Sermon on the Mount millenniums before it was
spoken. Whether from temperament or from faith, he is the first
instance of the Christian type of excellence in the Old Testament. For
there ought to be no question that the spirit of meekness, which will
not meet violence by violence, is the Christian spirit. Christian
morals alter the perspective of moral excellences, and exalt meekness
above the 'heroic virtues' admired by the world. The violets and lilies
in Christ's garden outshine voluptuous roses and flaunting sunflowers.
In this day, when there is a recrudescence of militarism, and we are
tempted to canonise the soldier, we need more than ever to insist that
the highest type is 'the Lamb of God,' who was 'as a sheep before her
shearers.' To fight for my rights is not the Christian ideal, nor is it
the best way to secure them. Isaac will generally weary out the
Philistines, and get his well at last, and will have escaped much
friction and many evil passions.

  'Tis safer being meek than fierce.'

Isaac won the friendship of his opponents by his patience, as the
verses after the text tell. Their consciences and hearts were touched,
and they 'saw plainly that the Lord was with him,' and sued him for
alliance. It is better to turn enemies into friends than to beat them
and have them as enemies still. 'I'll knock you down unless you love
me' does not sound a very hopeful way of cementing peaceful relations.
But 'when a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to
be at peace with him.' But Isaac won more than the Philistines' favour
by his meek peacefulness, for 'the Lord appeared unto him,' and assured
him that, undefended and unresisting as he was, he had a strong
defence, and need not be afraid: 'Fear not, for I am with thee.' The
ornament of a meek and quiet spirit is, in the sight of God, of great
price, and that not only for 'a woman'; and it brings visions of God,
and assurances of tranquil safety to him who cherishes it. The Spirit
of God comes down in the likeness of a dove, and that bird of peace
sits 'brooding "only" on the charmed wave' of a heart stilled from
strife and wrath, like a quiet summer's sea.

Isaac's new home at Beersheba, having been thus hallowed by the
appearance of the Lord, was consecrated by the building of an altar. We
should hallow by grateful remembrance the spots where God has made
Himself known to us. The best beginning of a new undertaking is to rear
an altar. It is well when new settlers begin their work by calling on
the name of the Lord. Beersheba and Plymouth Rock are a pair. First
comes the altar, then the tent can be trustfully pitched, but 'except
the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.' And if
the house is built in faith, a well will not be lacking; for they who
'seek first the kingdom of God' will have all needful 'things added
unto them.'

THE HEAVENLY PATHWAY AND THE EARTHLY HEART

    'And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward
    Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried
    there all night, because the sun was set; and he took
    of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows,
     and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and
    behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it
    reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending
    and descending on it. And, behold, the Lord stood above
    it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father,
    and the God of Isaac; the land whereon thou liest, to
    thee will I give it, and to thy seed; And thy seed shall
    be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad
    to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to
    the south; and in thee and in thy seed shall all the
    families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with
    thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou
    goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I
    will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have
    spoken to thee of. And Jacob awaked out of his sleep,
    and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I
    knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful
    is this place! this is none other but the house of God,
    and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early
    in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for
    his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil
    upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place
    Beth-el: but the name of that city was called Luz at the
    first. 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; And this stone, which I have set for a pillar,
    shall be God's house; and of all that Thou shalt give me I
    will surely give the tenth unto Thee.'--GENESIS xxviii. 10-22.

From Abraham to Jacob is a great descent. The former embodies the
nobler side of the Jewish character,--its capacity for religious ideas;
its elevation above, and separation from, the nations; its
consciousness of, and peaceful satisfaction in, a divine Friend; its
consequent vocation in the world. These all were deep in the founder of
the race, and flowed to it from him. Jacob, on the other hand, has in
him the more ignoble qualities, which Christian treatment of the Jew
has fostered, and which have become indissolubly attached to the name
in popular usage. He is a crafty schemer, selfish, over-reaching, with
a keen eye to the main chance. Whoever deals with him has to look
sharply after his own interests. Self-advantage in its most earthly
form is uppermost in him; and, like all timid, selfish men, shifty ways
and evasions are his natural weapons. The great interest of his history
lies in the slow process by which the patient God purified him, and out
of this 'stone raised up a worthy child to Abraham.' We see in this
context the first step in his education, and the very imperfect degree
in which he profited by it.

1. Consider the vision and its accompanying promise. Jacob has fled
from home on account of his nobler brother's fierce wrath at the trick
which their scheming mother and he had contrived. It was an ugly,
heartless fraud, a crime against a doting father, as against Esau.
Rebekah gets alarmed for her favourite; and her fertile brain hits upon
another device to blind Isaac and get Jacob out of harm's way, in the
excuse that she cannot bear his marriage with a Hittite woman. Her
exaggerated expressions of passionate dislike to 'the daughters of
Heth' have no religious basis. They are partly feigned and partly
petulance. So the poor old blind father is beguiled once more, and
sends his son away. Starting under such auspices, and coming from such
an atmosphere, and journeying back to Haran, the hole of the pit whence
Abraham had been digged, and turning his back on the land where God had
been with his house, the wanderer was not likely to be cherishing any
lofty thoughts. His life was in danger; he was alone, a dim future was
before him, perhaps his conscience was not very comfortable. These
things would be in his mind as he lay down and gazed into the violet
sky so far above him, burning with all its stars. Weary, and with a
head full of sordid cares, plans, and possibly fears, he slept; and
then there flamed on 'that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude'
to the pure, and its terror to the evil, this vision, which speaks
indeed to his then need, as he discerned it, but reveals to him and to
us the truth which ennobles all life, burns up the dross of
earthward-turned aims, and selfish, crafty ways.

We are to conceive of the form of the vision as a broad stair or
sloping ascent, rather than a ladder, reaching right from the sleeper's
side to the far-off heaven, its pathway peopled with messengers, and
its summit touching the place where a glory shone that paled even the
lustrous constellations of that pure sky. Jacob had thought himself
alone; the vision peoples the wilderness. He had felt himself
defenceless; the vision musters armies for his safety. He had been
grovelling on earth, with no thoughts beyond its fleeting goods; the
vision lifts his eyes from the low level on which they had been gazing.
He had been conscious of but little connection with heaven; the vision
shows him a path from his very side right into its depths. He had
probably thought that he was leaving the presence of his father's God
when he left his father's tent; the vision burns into his astonished
heart the consciousness of God as there, in the solitude and the night.

The divine promise is the best commentary on the meaning of the vision.
The familiar ancestral promise is repeated to him, and the blessing and
the birthright thus confirmed. In addition, special assurances, the
translation of the vision into word and adapted to his then wants, are
given,--God's presence in his wanderings, his protection, Jacob's
return to the land, and the promise of God's persistent presence,
working through all paradoxes of providence and sins of His servant,
and incapable of staying its operations, or satisfying God's heart, or
vindicating His faithfulness, at any point short of complete
accomplishment of His plighted word.

We pass from the lone desert and the mysterious twilight of Genesis to
the beaten ways between Galilee and Jordan, and to the clear historic
daylight of the gospel, and we hear Christ renewing the promise to the
crafty Jacob, to one whom He called a son of Jacob in his after better
days, 'an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.' The very heart of
Christ's work was unveiled in the terms of this vision: From henceforth
'ye shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and
descending upon the Son of man.' So, then, the fleeting vision was a
transient revelation of a permanent reality, and a faint foreshadowing
of the true communication between heaven and earth. Jesus Christ is the
ladder between God and man. On Him all divine gifts descend; by Him all
the angels of human devotion, consecration, and aspiration go up. This
flat earth is not so far from the topmost heaven as sense thinks. The
despairing question of Jewish wisdom, 'Who hath ascended up into
heaven, or descended? ... What is his name, and what is his son's name,
if thou canst tell?'--which has likewise been the question of every age
that has not been altogether sunk in sensual delights--is answered once
for all in the incarnate and crucified and ascended Lord, by and in
whom all heaven has stooped to earth, that earth might be lifted to
heaven. Every child of man, though lonely and earthly, has the
ladder-foot by his side,--like the sunbeam, which comes straight into
the eyes of every gazer, wherever he stands. It becomes increasingly
evident, in the controversies of these days, that there will remain for
modern thought only the alternative,--either Jesus Christ is the means
of communication between God and man, or there is no communication.
Deism and theism are compromises, and cannot live. The cultivated world
in both hemispheres is being more and more shut up to either accepting
Christ as revealer, by whom alone we know, and as medium by whom alone
we love and approach, God; or sinking into abysses of negations where
choke-damp will stifle enthusiasm and poetry, as well as devotion and
immortal hope.

Jacob's vision was meant to teach him, and is meant to teach us, the
nearness of God, and the swift directness of communication, whereby His
help comes to us and our desires rise to Him. These and their kindred
truths were to be to him, and should be to us, the parents of much
nobleness. Here is the secret of elevation of aim and thought above the
mean things of sense. We all, and especially the young, in whose veins
the blood dances, and to whom life is in all its glory and freshness,
are tempted to think of it as all. It does us good to have this vision
of the eternal realities blazing in upon us, even if it seems to glare
at us, rather than to shine with lambent light. The seen is but a thin
veil of the unseen. Earth, which we are too apt to make a workshop, or
a mere garden of pleasure, is a Bethel,--a house of God. Everywhere the
ladder stands; everywhere the angels go up and down; everywhere the
Face looks from the top. Nothing will save life from becoming, sooner
or later, trivial, monotonous, and infinitely wearisome, but the
continual vision of the present God, and the continual experience of
the swift ascent and descent of our aspirations and His blessings.

It is the secret of purity too. How could Jacob indulge in his craft,
and foul his conscience with sin, as long as he carried the memory of
what he had seen in the solitary night on the uplands of Bethel? The
direct result of the vision is the same command as Abraham received,
'Walk before Me, and be thou perfect.' Realise My presence, and let
that kill the motions of sin, and quicken to service.

It is also the secret of peace. Hopes and fears, and dim uncertainty of
the future, no doubt agitated the sleeper's mind as he laid him down.
His independent life was beginning. He had just left his father's tents
for the first time; and, though not a youth in years, he was in the
position which youth holds with us. So to him, and to all young
persons, here is shown the charm which will keep the heart calm, and
preserve us from being 'over exquisite to cast the fashion of uncertain
evils,' or too eagerly longing for possible good. 'I am with thee'
should be enough to steady our souls; and the confidence that God will
not leave us till He has accomplished His own purpose for us, should
make us willing to let Him do as He will with ours.

2. Notice the imperfect reception of the divine teaching. Jacob's
startled exclamation on awakening from his dream indicates a very low
level both of religious knowledge and feeling. Nor is there any reason
for taking the words in any but their most natural sense; for it is a
mistake to ascribe to him the knowledge of God due to later revelation,
or, at this stage of his life, any depth of religious emotion. He is
alarmed at the thought that God is near. Probably he had been
accustomed to think of God's presence as in some special way associated
with his father's encampment, and had not risen to the belief of His
omnipresence. There seems no joyous leaping up of his heart at the
thought that God is here. Dread, not unmingled with the superstitious
fear that he had profaned a holy place by laying himself down in it, is
his prevailing feeling, and he pleads ignorance as the excuse for his
sacrilege. He does not draw the conclusion from the vision that all the
earth is hallowed by a near God, but only that he has unwittingly
stumbled on His house; and he does not learn that from every place
there is an open door for the loving heart into the calm depths where
God is throned, but only that _here_ he unwittingly stands at the gate
of heaven. So he misses the very inner purpose of the vision, and
rather shrinks from it than welcomes it. Was that spasm of fear all
that passed through his mind that night? Did he sleep again when the
glory died out of the heaven? So the story would appear to suggest.
But, in any case, we see here the effect of the sudden blazing in upon
a heart not yet familiar with the Divine Friend, of the conviction that
He is really near. Gracious as God's promise was, it did not dissipate
the creeping awe at His presence. It is an eloquent testimony of man's
consciousness of sin, that whensoever a present God becomes a reality
to a worldly man, he trembles. 'This place' would not be 'dreadful,'
but blessed, if it were not for the sense of discord between God and me.

The morning light brought other thoughts, when it filled the silent
heavens, and where the ladder had stretched, there was but empty blue.
The lesson is sinking into his mind. He lifts the rude stone and pours
oil on it, as a symbol of consecration, as nameless races have done all
over the world. His vow shows that he had but begun to learn in God's
school. He hedges about his promise with a punctilious repetition of
God's undertaking, as if resolved that there should be no mistake.
Clause by clause he goes over it all, and puts an 'if' to it. God's
word should have kindled something liker faith than that. What a fall
from 'Abram believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for
righteousness'! Jacob barely believed, and will wait to see whether all
will turn out as it has been promised. That is not the glad, swift
response of a loving, trusting heart. Nor is he contented with
repeating to God the terms of his engagement, but he adds a couple of
clauses which strike him as being important, and as having been
omitted. There was nothing about 'bread to eat, and raiment to put on,'
nor about coming back again 'in peace,' so he adds these. A true
'Jew,'--great at a bargain, and determined to get all he can, and to
have no mistake about what he must get before he gives anything! Was
Jesus thinking at all of the ancestor when He warned the descendants,
in words which sound curiously like an echo of Jacob's, not to be
anxious 'what ye shall eat,' nor 'what ye shall put on'? As the vow
stands in the Authorised Version, it is farther open to the charge of
suspending his worship of God upon the fulfilment of these conditions;
but it is better to adopt the marginal rendering of the Revised
Version, according to which the clause 'then shall the Lord be my God'
is a part of the conditions, not of the vow, and is to be read 'And
[if] the Lord will be ... then this stone ... shall be,' etc. If this
rendering be adopted, as I think it should be, the vow proper is simply
of outward service,--he will rear an altar, and he will tithe his
substance. Not a very munificent pledge! And where in it is the
surrender of the heart? Where is the outgoing of love and gratitude?
Where the clasping of the hand of his heavenly Friend with calm rapture
of thankful self-yielding, and steadfastness of implicit trust? God did
not want Jacob's altar, nor his tenths; He wanted Jacob. But many a
weary year and many a sore sorrow have to leave their marks on him
before the evil strain is pressed out of his blood; and by the
unwearied long-suffering of his patient Friend and Teacher in heaven,
the crafty, earthly-minded Jacob 'the supplanter' is turned into
'Israel, the prince with God, in whom is no guile.' The slower the
scholar, the more wonderful the forbearance of the Teacher; and the
more may we, who are slow scholars too, take heart to believe that He
will not be soon angry with us, nor leave us until He has done that
which He has spoken to us of.

MAHANAIM: THE TWO CAMPS

    'And Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met
    him. And when Jacob saw them, he said, This is God's
    host: and he called the name of that place Mahanaim'
    (_i.e._ Two camps).--GENESIS xxxii. 1, 2.

This vision came at a crisis in Jacob's life. He has just left the
house of Laban, his father-in-law, where he had lived for many years,
and in company with a long caravan, consisting of wives, children,
servants, and all his wealth turned into cattle, is journeying back
again to Palestine. His road leads him close by the country of Esau.
Jacob was no soldier, and he is naturally terrified to meet his justly
incensed brother. And so, as he plods along with his defenceless
company trailing behind him, as you may see the Arab caravans streaming
over the same uplands to-day, all at once, in the middle of his march,
a bright-harnessed army of angels meets him. Whether visible to the eye
of sense, or, as would appear, only to the eye of faith, they _are_
visible to this troubled man; and, in a glow of confident joy, he calls
the name of that place 'Mahanaim,' two camps. One camp was the little
one of his down here, with the helpless women and children and his own
frightened and defenceless self, and the other was the great one up
there, or rather in shadowy but most real spiritual presence around
about him, as a bodyguard making an impregnable wall between him and
every foe. We may take some very plain and everlastingly true lessons
out of this story.

1. First, the angels of God meet us on the dusty road of common life.
'Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him.'

As he was tramping along there, over the lonely fields of Edom, with
many a thought on his mind and many a fear at his heart, but feeling
'There is the path that I have to walk on,' all at once the air was
filled with the soft rustle of angel wings, and the brightness from the
flashing armour of the heavenly hosts flamed across his unexpecting
eye. And so is it evermore. The true place for us to receive visions of
God is in the path of the homely, prosaic duties which He lays upon us.
The dusty road is far more likely to be trodden by angel feet than the
remote summits of the mountain, where we sometimes would fain go; and
many an hour consecrated to devotion has less of the manifest presence
of God than is granted to some weary heart in its commonplace struggle
with the little troubles and trials of daily life. These make the
doors, as it were, by which the visitants draw near to us.

It is the common duties, 'the narrow round, the daily task,' that not
only give us 'all we ought to ask,' but are the selected means and
channels by which, ever, God's visitants draw near to us. The man that
has never seen an angel standing beside him, and driving his loom for
him, or helping him at his counter and his desk, and the woman that has
never seen an angel, according to the bold realism and homely vision of
the old German picture, working with her in the kitchen and preparing
the meal for the household, have little chance of meeting such
visitants at any other point of their experience or event of their
lives.

If the week be empty of the angels, you will never catch sight of a
feather of their wings on the Sunday. And if we do not recognise their
presence in the midst of all the prose, and the commonplace, and the
vulgarity, and the triviality, and the monotony, the dust of the small
duties, we shall go up to the summit of Sinai itself and see nothing
there but cold grey stone and everlasting snows. 'Jacob went on his
way, and the angels of God met him.' The true field for religion is the
field of common life.

And then another side of the same thought is this, that it is in the