6 magnificent and the cruel; Herod Antipas, who 'heard John 'gladly' and slew him; Herod Agrippa, 'almost a Christian'— half Jew and half heathen. A turbulent and unruly race,' so Josephus describes the Idumæans of his day: always hovering on the verge of revolution, always rejoicing in changes, roused to arms by the slightest motion of flattery, rushing to battle as if they were going to a feast.'1 But we cannot mistake the type of the Israelites in him whom, beyond even Abraham and Isaac, they recognised as their father Israel.2 His doubtful qualities exactly recall to us the meanness of character, which, even to a proverb, we call in Jacob, of scorn 'Jewish.' By his peculiar discipline of exile the Jews. and suffering, a true counterpart is produced of the special faults and special gifts, known to us chiefly through his persecuted descendants in the Middle Ages. Professor Blunt has with much ingenuity pointed out how Jacob seems to have learned like maltreated animals to have the fear of 3 man habitually before his eyes.' In Jacob we see the same timid, cautious watchfulness that we know so well, though under darker colours, through our great masters of fiction, in Shylock of Venice and Isaac of York. But no less, in the nobler side of his career do we trace the germs of the unbroken endurance, the undying resolution, which keeps the nation alive still even in its present outcast condition, and which was the basis, in its brighter days, of the heroic -zeal, long-suffering, and hope of Moses, of David, of Jeremiah, of the Maccabees, of the first apostles and martyrs, and of the persecuted Jews alike in the second and the twelfth centuries. We cannot, however, narrow the lessons of Jacob's history to the limits of the Israelite Church. All Ecclesiastical History is the gainer by the sight of such a character so delineated. It is a character not all black nor all white, but chequered with 'Josephus, B. J., iv. 4. 1. " Hos. xii. 3, 4, 5, 12. Once only Jacob is mentioned in Pagan records; 'Post 'Damascum Azelus, mox Adores, et Abraham, et Israhel reges fuere. Sed 'Israhelem felix decem filiorum proventus majoribus suis clariorem fecit.'-Justin, xxxvi. 2. 3 Veracity of the Books of Moses, ch. vi. Examples of mixed characters. the mixed colours which make up so vast a proportion of the double phases of the leaders of the Church and world in every age. The neutrality (so to speak) of the Scripture narrative may be seen by its contrast with the dark hues in which Esau is painted by the Rabbinical authors. He is hindered in his chase by Satan; Hell opens as he goes in to his father; he gives his father dogs' flesh instead of venison; he tries to bite Jacob on his return; he commits five sins in one day. This is the difference between mere national animosity and the high impartial judgment of the Sacred story, evenly balanced and steadily held, yet not regardless of the complicated and necessary variations of human thought and action. For students of theology, for future pastors, for young men in the opening of life, what a series of lessons, were this the place to enlarge upon it, is opened in the history of those two youths, issuing from their father's tent in Beersheba! The free, easy, frank good-nature of the profane Esau is not overlooked: the craft, duplicity, timidity of the religious Jacob is duly recorded. Yet, on the one hand, fickleness, unsteadiness, weakness, want of faith and want of principle, ruin and render useless the noble qualities of the first; and, on the other hand, steadfast purpose, resolute sacrifice of present to future, fixed principle, purify, elevate, turn to lasting good even the baser qualities of the second. And, yet again, whether in the two brothers or their descendants, we see how in each the good and evil strove together and worked their results almost to the end. Esau and his race cling still to the outskirts of the Chosen People. 'Meddle not,' it was said in after times, ' with your brethren the children of Esau, for I will not give 'you of their land, because I have given Mount Seir 2 to Esau 'for a possession.' Israel, on the other hand, is outcast, thwarted, deceived, disappointed, bereaved—'all these things are against me ;' in him, and in his progeny also, the curse of Ebal is always blended with the blessings of Gerizim. Remember these mingled warnings as we become entangled in the web of the history of the whole Church. How hardly Esau 1 Otho, Lex. Rabb. 207. 6 2 Deut. ii. 5. was condemned, how hardly Jacob was saved! We are kept in long and just suspense; the prodigal may, as far as human eye can see, be on his way home; the blameless son, who 'has 'been in his father's house always,' may be shutting himself out. Yet the final issue, to which on the whole this primitive history calls our attention, is the same which is borne out by the history of the Church even in these later days of complex civilisation. There is, after all, a weakness in selfish worldliness, for which no occasional impulse can furnish any adequate compensation, even though it be the generosity of an Arabian chief, or 'the 'inimitable good-nature' of an English king. There is a nobleness in principle and in faith which cannot be wholly destroyed, even though it be marred by the hardness or the duplicity of the Jew, or the Jesuit, or the Puritan. II. Let us now follow the Patriarch through the successive scenes of his life; again, as in the case of Abraham, dwelling upon those special points which admit of geographical or historical elucidation, or general application of ecclesiastical and spiritual truth. I. 'And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward 'Haran.' It is, if one may so say, the first retrograde movement in the history of the Church. Was the migra Jacob at tion of Abraham to be reversed? Was the westward tide of events to roll back upon itself? Was the Chosen Race to sink back into the life of the Mesopotamian deserts? The first halt of the wanderer revealed his future destinies. 'The 'sun went down ;' the night gathered round; he was on the central thoroughfare, on the hard backbone of the mountains of Palestine; the ground was strewn with wide sheets of bare rock; here and there stood up isolated fragments like ancient Druidical monuments. On the hard ground he lay down for rest, and in the visions of the night the rough stones formed themselves into a vast staircase, reaching into the depth of the wide and open sky, which, without any interruption of tent or tree, was stretched over the sleeper's head. On that staircase were seen ascending and descending the messengers of God; and 1 See Sinai and Palestine, 220. from above there came the Divine Voice which told the houseless wanderer that, little as he thought it, he had a Protector there and everywhere; that even in this bare and open thoroughfare, in no consecrated grove or cave, 'the Lord was in this 'place, though he knew it not.' 'This was BETH-EL, the House ' of God; and this was the gate of Heaven.' The monument, whatever it was, that was still in after ages ascribed to the erection of Jacob, must have been, like so many described or seen in other times and countries, a rude copy of the natural features of the place, as at Carnac in Brittany, the cromlechs of Wales and Cornwall, or the walls of Tiryns, where the play of nature and the simplicity of art are almost indistinguishable. In all ages of primitive history, such monuments are, if we may so call them, the earliest ecclesiastical edifices. In Greece there were rude stones at Delphi, still visible in the second century, anterior to any temple, and, like the rock of Bethel, anointed with oil by the pilgrims who came thither. In northern Africa, Arnobius, after his conversion, describes the kind of fascination which had drawn him towards one of those aged stones, streaming and shining with the sacred oil which had been poured upon it.2 The black stone of the Arabian Caaba reaches back to the remotest antiquity of which history or tradition can speak. In all these rough anticipations of a fixed structure or building, we trace the beginnings of what in the case of Jacob is first distinctly called 'Beth-el,' the house of God, the place of 'worship'—the 'Beit-allah' of Mecca, the 'Bætulia' of the early Phoenician worship. When we see the rude remains of Abury in our own country, there is a strange interest in the thought that they form the first architectural witness of English religion. Even so the pillar or cairn or cromlech of Bethel must have been looked upon by the Israelites, and may still be looked upon in thought by us, as the precursor of every 'House of 'God' that has since arisen in the Jewish and Christian worldthe temple, the cathedral, the church, the chapel; nay, more, 2 1 Paus. vii. 22; X. 24. Arnobius, adv. Gent. i. 39. He speaks also (vi. 11) of the special worship of 'informes lapides' by the Arabs. of those secret places of worship that are marked by no natural beauty and seen by no human eye-the closet, the catacomb, the thoroughfare, of the true worshipper. There was neither in the aspect nor in the ground of Bethel any 'Religio loci,' but the place was no less 'dreadful,' 'full of awe.' The stone of Bethel remained as the memorial that an all-encompassing Providence watches over its chosen instruments, however unconscious at the time of what and where they are. 'The Shep'herd of the stone of Israel' was one of the earliest names by which 'the God of Jacob' was known.2 The vision of the way reaching from heaven to earth received its highest application in a Divine manifestation, yet more universal and unexpected.3 Not in the Temple or on the High Priest, but on the despised Nazarene, the Son of man, was Nathanael to see the fulfilment of Jacob's vision, 'the angels of God ascending' into the open heaven, and 'descending' on the common earth. 2. The chief interest of the story of Jacob's twenty years' service with Laban lies in its reopening of the relations between the settlers in Palestine and the original tribe of Jacob in Mesopo- Mesopotamia, which appeared on Abraham's migratamia. tion to have been closed. These chapters are an instance of the compensation which is constantly going on in the losses and gains of theological study. If a shade of uncertainty is thrown here and there over the meaning and nature of the narrative, which a hundred or a thousand years ago would not have occurred, yet, on the other hand, with how far deeper a pleasure than in any preceding age do we enter into the beauty of those primitive scenes! We are more than interested; we are refreshed; we are edified; we become again like little children, as that pastoral life rises before our own worn-out time. Like the aged Patriarch, 'whose eyes were dim that he 'could not see,' and who 'longed for the savoury meat that he 'loved, that he might eat it before he died,' we too, in the haze of many centuries which surrounds our vision, 'smell the smell Gen. xlix. 24. Ewald, Geschichte, i. The worship of meteoric stones (Tac. Hist. ii. 2; Herod. v. 3; Gesenius, Mon. Phan. 387), refers rather to their being thought the habitations of the Deity. 523, note. |