Strewed with the wrecks of grandeur, mouldering fanes, And regal cities now the serpent's own: Earth has more awful ruins-one lost mind, Whose star is quenched, hath lessons for mankind -Hemans. "It is one of the peculiar beauties of Scriptural narrative, that no veil is ever drawn across the frailties or the sins of those whom it describes: there is no flattery and there is no detraction. In the case of Jacob, we have the whole man placed faithfully before us: his piety and virtues distinctly pourtrayed, that they may be imitated; his infirmities and errors as candidly avowed, that they may be shunned." -Blunt. "Keep innocency and take heed unto the thing that is right: for that shall bring a man peace at the last."-Ps. 37, 38 (Prayer Book Version). "And Jacob went out from Beersheba.”—Gen. xxviii. 10. HOME MEMORIES AND THEIR LESSONS. IF, in following the footsteps of the fugitive from the Beersheba home to the Bethel dreamland, the first lesson suggested have reference to parental duty and obligation, the next is surely that of filial responsibility - the bliss and happiness of early piety, the shame and degradation of early sin. Had it not been for Jacob's connivance at a nefarious unnatural plot, he might have left his father's tent on his northern pilgrimage with light heart and elastic step. Sin compels him to steal away a coward and outcast. With all Canaan for his patrimony he is not to be envied. He speaks of it in long subsequent years as "the day of his distress " (Gen. xxxv. 3). The iron had entered into his soul. He was filled with fear; the inward shame of guilt and self-accusation; the consciousness that he had brought this swift exile on himself by a tissue of falsehoods; all the time knowing the right and doing the wrong. How the flagrant dishonour, involved in the attempt to cheat and out-manœuvre his blind, unsuspicious father;—the unblushing lie, C told with unscrupulous effrontery, "I am Esau thy firstborn; "the loud and pathetic wail of injury, and the glance of stifled resentment which rose from the lip and flashed from the eye of the defrauded brother;-how would one and all of these memories rise up before him, as with trembling step he now pursued his way! Like Cain he had gone forth with a curse-mark upon him. All the more terrible must have sounded in his ear that despairing cry of the outwitted elder-born, when the latter asserted (xxvii. 41) that it was only the pang which fratricide would inflict on a father's heart, which prevented him obeying the impulse of instantaneous revenge. Would even that purpose of repression be kept? Might it not ere the morrow be cancelled? The thought the dread at least-of so righteous a penalty of his baseness would haunt the fugitive! "They stand aloof, the scars remaining Like cliffs which have been rent asunder A dreary sea now flows between ; But neither heat, nor frost nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been." Young reader-still it may be within the curtains of the modern tent, or perchance on the eve of setting out from it-let Jacob tell you by the reverse in his own miserable experience, the blessedness of the spirit of him "in whom there is no guile" (Ps. xxxii. 2). The night-winds of Bethel sighing around him, the shock of a life of isolation and solitude succeeding that of home endearment, would have been nothing had his been the inner sunshine of a pure heart and stainless soul. But a defiled conscience, far more than an injured brother, was the Nemesis that was tracking his steps. He might moreover have had good reason to dread that, with the forfeiture of human friendships, he had surrendered all claim to a Better guardianship. If, in anticipation of coming night-dreams, he had thought of visitants from the spirit-land, it might only have been of avenging angels,—those flaming cherubim with burning swords, of which in boyhood he had heard as having guarded the entrance to a forfeited Paradise. He doubtless afterwards came to be, what might be called, a prosperous man.' He lived to see one of his sons the ruler of a great kingdom; but at the same time, in righteous resurrection, these very acts of early craft and wrongdoing seemed ever and anon to be disentombed, and to reappear in the guilt and punishment of others of his family. It is certainly noteworthy, that his heaviest cares and sorrows arose from the repetition of his own early crimes, especially in the two points which stand out in most painful prominence in his history-unscrupulous deceit, and the violation of the sacredness of human relationships. The bold subtlety and cunning artifice of the Beersheba tent, had its counterpart and revenge in the web of falsehood and overreaching woven by the grasping, hardhearted Laban; in the life of drudgery to which the predestined heir of Canaan was subjected, toiling as a bondsman under fretting exactions more cruel than the tyrant's lash. He tells us that his weary frame was well-nigh prostrated with the burning sun by day, and the chilly frost by night-sleep was banished from his pillow. His breach of filial honour and devotion, on the other hand, had its righteous recompense in the long story of family sorrow, the living trial of a dishonoured only daughter; the early grave of a beloved wife; the cruel dissimulation by which jealous brothers led him to believe that his dearest son had been devoured by wild beasts. The hairy mantle with which he himself duped his own half-blind father, having its mimicked retribution in the coat of many colours;—the sight of which threatened to bring down his grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. "God," says Bishop Hall in his " Contemplations on this passage, "comes oftentimes home to us in our own kind: and even by the sin of others pays us our own when we look not for it." Even when the end of all was nigh; when life's vesper chimes rang in the Patriarch's ear, there seemed to mingle solemn remembrances, like the tolling of a funeral bell, from that distant past. In the proudest hour |