or as a great whole, I thought the character of Jacob formed a valuable and interesting study.

In the case of such "Great Hearts of the olden time" as Abraham and Moses, we have lofty ideals of "patriarchal saintliness,”—lives which contain passages of rare and exceptional excellence. If I may be allowed the simile, they resemble Alpine peaks with their virgin snow, towering far above their compeers, inaccessible and discouraging from their very loftiness. In Jacob, on the other hand, we have an average type of frail, fallen humanity: or, to follow out the figure, we have one of the lowlier eminences of a commonplace world:-one, also, with its scars and fissures only too faithfully revealed to the eye of the spectator. We trace in his half-dramatic, half-tragic history, God's dealings with one of Nature's least lovable products; a man who originally had comparatively few elements of worth to recommend or redeem him; who, had he been left to himself, uncontrolled by any higher impulses, might have become a confirmed dissembler, if not a wrecked and abandoned castaway. Did we seek indeed from Old Testament history, in the era in which he lived, a more winning portraiture, we do not require to travel beyond the tent-home of Isaac. In the person of Esau, even if we take him as he is often regarded, the representative

man of the world, we have more engaging native excellencies. Our sympathies are all with the bold, brave hunter,-his noble mien and manly ways and filial devotion, rather than with the artful equivocating brother, who has tricked him out of his patrimonial rights, and drawn down thereby a very righteous vengeance. Add to this, there is nothing either brilliant or heroic about Jacob. Absent are those mental gifts and those valorous exploits which throw a halo of interest over the lives of some even subordinate characters in Bible story. Though we may admire a tenacity of purpose and unflinching determination, which go far to redeem baser and less amiable qualities,—a certain worldly adroitness, energy of will, fertility of resource, and perhaps, more than all, patient endurance; yet he is neither philosopher, nor minstrel, nor warrior. His name is the key-note to his inner nature, “the crafty "—having a shrewd eye to business, and to self. His prosaic calling and ways are brought out in the sacred narrative, when he is briefly described as " a plain man dwelling in tents " (Gen. xxv. 27).

Yet there are lessons, more ample and more varied far, lessons alike encouraging and humbling, to be gathered from the less attractive and more commonplace personage, which the chivalrous

yet reckless companion of his youth fails to furnish. Not to speak of the higher spiritual beauties to be found in the story of the heir of the Covenant, is there no special heart-cheer, for what, after all, must ever form the the great majority-baffled, tempted, struggling humanity? Is there no "courage to take heart again," when we see this "forlorn and shipwrecked brother," sentinelled by angels, followed, tended, loved, restored, by a better than earthly Father, till his name "the Supplanter" was changed into "the Hero of God," and he passed away at last triumphantly to the better Canaan ? Is there no word of comfort and strength to those conscious of strong, inborn, demon-passions, which may have even developed themselves into meaner deeds, in the Divine whisper-"Jacob have I loved"? (Rom. ix. 13): the Being who had fed him all his life long, purging out of his soul the alloy; making him a monument of His grace; that grace triumphing over whatever was unlovely and unloving, till, after a series of strange vicissitudes, it brought him at the last to rejoice in the God of his salvation (Gen. xlix. 18)?

We restrict ourselves in what follows, to one solitary scene in the varied drama of the Patriarch's life; so far as we are aware (and we marvel at it), the only monograph on this sublime episode, which

for sacred interest and Gospel lessons has no parallel in Old Testament Story.*

The writer cannot fail to remember the words of a long deceased and aged relative, from whose exalted piety and consistent walk, more than one have derived their earliest impulses for good,that of all passages in the Bible he most loved. that night-dream at Bethel.' I can now vividly recal, how, with gleaming eye, he contrasted the monarchs of earth sleeping on their couches of down in royal chambers, with the far truer nobility and glory, which, all unconscious to them, gathered round that lonely wanderer and his pillow of stones. The great German scholar (Ewald) speaks of it as "that passage of rare grandeur placed at the beginning of Jacob's history." +

Be it ours, with profound reverence, to approach

*The dedication of this Book will reveal one purpose, at all events, which I have kept before me, alike as falling in naturally with the theme and furnishing a volume never unseasonable. While containing truths suitable and momentous for all, and in some cases, indeed, more suited for age than youth, I have had peculiarly in view those just going into "the Battle of Life;" with principles, it may be, requiring strength, encouragement, confirmation. Jacob, it is true, was at this period of his history, seventy years of age. But, nevertheless, with his journey to Bethel, his spiritual life-battle and life-lessons may be said to have begun Am I not warranted in adding, that the more we advance in years, the more do we feel that such lessons, addressed to those in early stages of the pilgrimage, may be extended with profit and advantage to every period of human existence?

+ Ewald's "History of Israel," vol. i. p. 353.

this Holy Ground whose very name has become hallowed. "THE GOD OF BETHEL" is a title no less loved on Christian than on Jewish lips. The incidents of the Sleeper, the Angel-ladder, and the Heavenly Voice, have, with endless diversity, been cast and re-cast in sacred poetry and song. In Scottish Churches, as we can testify, the well-known lines of Doddridge inserted at the close of this preface, have led and stimulated, with their simple strains, the devotions of worshippers more than perhaps any other scriptural Paraphrase.' How often have they stirred the pulse of congregations on the Sabbath eve of a Communion, or in the waning light of the closing Sunday of the year! Nor can the writer forget the last memorable occasion on which they were heard by him. It was when they rang their plaintive cadences through the aisles of Westminster Abbey over the grave of DAVID LIVINGSTONE. Words, familiar to the illustrious traveller from earliest boyhood, and which had doubtless oft cheered him amid the scorching suns and sands of Africa, were appropriately selected for the concluding solemn rite: when the desert dust' of the "weary Pilgrim," "all his wanderings ceased," was laid in the great Minster of Britain's consecrated dead: