as fully as we know he obtained forgiveness and absolution from them.

Let us remember that sin committed by a Christian has in this life frequently its retribution, even if it may be forgiven; and that where God shows us character in its worst traits, he takes care in the sequel of the history of that character to show that man never stood stronger by sin, and that a Christian never lost anything by faithfulness to God and to duty.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

GOD'S PROPHECY- -MAN'S SINS-JACOB'S SELECTION OF A WIFEJACOB'S FLIGHT-THE DESERT HIS DREAM-THE TRUE BETHEL,

OR PILLAR OF THE TRUTH-JACOB'S vow.

In the previous chapter we have seen faithfully sketched the painful and humiliating picture of Jacob, when he bereaved, by stratagem and subtlety, Esau of that to which he was entitled as the first-born, the blessing and the birthright. We have also noticed that the blessing pronounced by blind and deceived Isaac on Jacob, upon the supposition that he was Esau, whom he personated, seems to have been irreversible, not in itself, perhaps, but because it was the promise of God from everlasting, and therefore an arrangement that could not be reversed.

I stated then the difficulty that one feels, on referring to ancient prophecies of things that will be, how it is possible to reconcile with justice and holiness, the equivocal, the objectionable, and the sinful means by which these prophecies are ultimately fulfilled. Throughout the word of God, we very often notice that God utters a prophecy, and that it is fulfilled by instruments in all respects objectionable and bad. No fault lies at the door of God; he is not the author of evil —all the sin is man's; the prophecy came from God, the fulfilment of it is sure to be, just because it is the prophecy of God; yet God does not approve all the means used in hastening its fulfilment. A bad man might say, I am instrumental in fulfilling a prophecy-does not this part vindicate my conduct as the person who so fulfils it? If the con

duct be good, it is so on this ground alone; if the conduct of that person be bad, no aid, designedly or otherwise given, makes it good. For instance; it was the ancient prophecy that Jesus should be crucified; but because Pontius Pilate and Herod and the Jews crucified the Lord of glory, they could not, and they will not, plead at the judgment-seat, Our hands are clean, and our souls are innocent, because we did what God predicted would and must be done. Our best reply is what we find in the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter, addressing the very Jews who crucified the Lord of glory, says, that it was God's fore-ordained purpose that Christ should die; but yet he adds, what proves their criminality, "Ye, by wicked hands, have taken and crucified him; thereby showing that the sin is not altered because that sin was predicted and is overruled to the fulfilment of a prophecy.

I endeavored to show an illustration of this, on a previous occasion, when I stated that in the Middle Ages it was the habit of the Romish authorities to persecute the poor Jews, to extract their teeth, and, in some cases, to burn them, and in various ways to visit them with penalties and judgments, on the miserable plea that that people were predicted to be so treated, and to be a scorn, a hissing, and a by-word, and to have no resting-place for the soles of their feet. Such defence is infamous. Our duty is to believe God's prophecies, and to be satisfied that they will be fulfilled exactly and fully, but always to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God, irrespective of any consideration but duty. It is our duty to obey plain precepts; it is God's prerogative to see to the fulfilment of his own prophecies. Let us not confound the two things; and if we do sin, in order professedly to accomplish what God has prophesied, our sin is still sin, and our success in accomplishing our object is no mitigation; it is sin the worse, that we do it amid the light that ought to teach us to know better than to act so.

We read that Isaac charged Jacob, on whom now the blessing had fallen, and from whom it could not now be taken away or alienated by Esau, to go and marry a Christian wife of a Christian family, as became him, just in the same way as Isaac himself was guided to marry a wife of a Christian family, according to the instructions and the directions of Abraham. This was necessary and dutiful, and is still obligatory on us in many respects, some of which I showed you in a previous exposition.

We then read that Jacob went forth on the errand indicated by his father, as well as in obedience to the advice of his mother, and partly by the necessity of his position, — to seek a good wife. He was persecuted by Esau, and obliged to be a refugee for life. Esau had resolved to slay him, and Jacob was conscious that he had bitterly offended against Esau, and had acted deceptively and fraudulently; and that Esau's persecution was well deserved by him, for he had treated him most cruelly and wickedly. Fleeing, therefore, from Esau, he goes out to "a certain place, and tarries there all night." The sun has set; he is far from the confines of civilization, or a city and its hospitalities; he takes the stones of the desert, and makes a pillow, and sleeps. . There, too, he dreamed, and that dream is a mirror and a revelation of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. God appeared to him at the top of the mystic ladder, the type of Christ's mediation, renewed the promise that he had made to Abraham and Isaac; and so, instead of visiting him for his sins, because God's ways are not our ways, he visited him by a promise of unexpected and undeserved mercy. To the meaning of this vision I will elsewhere refer.

"Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he Lord is in this place; and I knew it not."

said, Surely the

Very often it is so with us still. We are often in circumstances where God is, and our insensible hearts know it not. We are placed

often in afflictions, where we think only pain is, and we find out afterwards that God was. It needs the circumcised heart to feel, and the anointed eye to see God, and to realize his presence, and to feel that he is where the world neither sees, nor feels, nor knows, nor seeks him.

He rose up early, and took the stone, we are told, and set it up for a pillar, anointed it with oil,—that is, set it apart, or consecrated it, "and he called the name of that place Beth-el," which means literally, "house of God;" the former name having been "Luz," that is, "a place where almond-trees grew;" and thus, by his communion with God, from a natural he turns the place to a divine purpose and consecration.

I have thought there is here a useful parallel passage. Some persons have tried, I think with some force, to establish that a very remarkable passage in Timothy, namely, the third chapter of the first epistle, at the fifteenth verse, which has been very much misconstrued, has a direct allusion to this very passage; and, if it be so, it would completely do away with an interpretation that Romanists have put upon it for `sectarian purposes. Paul, writing to Timothy, in his First Epistle, 3: 15, says, "That thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth." You are aware that that passage has been pleaded by certain divines as a proof that the church is the ground and pillar of the truth; that is, that we are to seek first the church, and the truth in her afterwards, and that we cannot reach truth except by the church, and that to find the right church is the very first pursuit that we should go after; and having found Rome, we must take her teaching as infallible. Now, in the first place, I might give the ordinary answer, that this church was the Church of Ephesus, of which Timothy was the minister; and because that individual church was the pillar and ground of the truth, surely that would not imply that it never