LECTURE II.

GENESIS XXVIII. 5.

"And Isaac sent away Jacob."

"Be sure your sin will find you out," is one of those real truths of revelation which experience has fully justified, and which the life of Jacob will most abundantly exemplify. We have beheld him regardless of truth, of affection, of duty, determined upon obtaining, by sinister means, the blessing which the God of his father had already promised and insured to him; we are now to trace the consequences.

Think you that the Almighty will deny Jacob the blessing which he so justly forfeited? No! The purposes of God were neither to be traversed by Jacob's duplicity, nor by Isaac's opposition. The one would, if possible, have frustrated the intentions of the Most High by his disobedience, the other would accelerate them by his craftiness; shall then the omniscient Jehovah, to punish the waywardness of his creatures, alter his own determinations? Poor erring mortals like ourselves

might indeed, have found it necessary to have acted thus; but "God is not a man that he should lie, neither the son of man that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?" Yes; God has blessed the favoured Jacob, and he shall be blessed; but crooked were the paths through which he sought the blessing, and sad and evil shall the days of the years of his pilgrimage be, and deep and bitter his repentance, before he beholds the faintest dawn of that sunshine, whose beams he fondly hoped would now play unceasingly upon his path.

We behold Jacob, at the opening of the present Lecture, the successful rival of his wordly-minded brother, the especially beloved son of Rebekah, and the blessed of his father-to the transient observer, a prosperous and a happy man. When shall we learn not to calculate happiness by external circumstances? When will the poor, the afflicted, and the destitute, be taught to believe that the gifts of our heavenly Father are far more equally dispensed than they imagine; that the rich are not necessarily happy, or the idle necessarily peaceful; that the heart alone knoweth its own sorrow, and that in many an envied lot some root

of bitterness has been planted, felt only by its possessor, which rankles within the bosom, and fixes its inextricable thorn, while all without is blossoming?

My poorer brethren, there is but one possession which does not disappoint, which you cannot too earnestly covet, which, in every state and under every circumstance, can insure happiness; and this a possession which, blessed be God, as riches cannot secure, so neither can poverty deny-a heart reconciled to God by Jesus Christ our Lord; and as the sure and certain fruits of it, a conscience at peace with God, with itself, and with all the world. Obtain this and you have obtained happiness, enduring happiness, which will not fly at the sight of poverty, or wither at the approach of death! Where are the joys of this world, of riches, pleasures, rank, of which their votaries can truly predicate the same?

It was the declaration of the wise king of Israel: "when a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." That the way by which Jacob obtained the blessing could not please the God of truth, we may fearlessly assert. That his enemies were not at peace with him, the narrative before us sufficiently testifies.

In vain did every external circumstance shine upon Jacob, a cruel and an irreconcilable brother had resolved upon his death; and, in the midst of prosperity, his very life became a burden to him, and he knew not how to avoid the blow which might, at any unguarded moment of domestic intercourse be inflicted by the hand of so near a relative. At the suggestion, therefore, of Rebekah, and with the full consent of Isaac, Jacob resolves to forsake those tents in which he had so long resided, and where every treasured recollection spoke of a father's piety and a mother's love. A happy, because a holy home, had long been his; but he was now to leave it. He was to enter upon a world of which, by experience, he knew but little and to whose inhabitants his high and hallowed expectations, aye, even the God whom he served, and the heaven to which he aspired, were strangers; from whom therefore he could hope for little, either of sympathy or regard.

You, who know by experience the bitter feeling of leaving for the first time, the roof under which you have long been partakers of every blessing, where kindnesses have been bestowed abundantly, and, at that season when kindness makes the deepest and most durable impression, where your first lisp

ing petitions were offered at the throne of grace and your earliest impressions of good received, will not think lightly of the sacrifice for which Jacob was now called upon.

This was the first-fruits of the act of faithlessness in which he had borne so distressing a part. His" sin had already found him out," and, as its obvious and immediate consequences, he was sent forth a wanderer and an alien from that very country, his anxiety to obtain which had formed one motive for his late duplicity,

It must have been a bitter hour for Jacob when he thus quitted the tents of Isaac ; his destination, by the desire of his parents, was Haran, the residence of Laban, his mother's brother, at a distance of more than four hundred miles; a long and wearisome journey at any time and under the happiest circumstances, but to to Jacob, friendless and companionless, a penitent and solitary pilgrim, it must have been an undertaking of no common difficulty and no ordinay danger.

Fearful as it was however, Jacob, confiding in the promised blessing of his God, hesitates not to undertake it; and as he himself informs us, (in a subsequent part of his history,) with only his staff in his hand, he sets forth upon his solitary journey. It