as talking. After
he left, one of them said:

"Do you know, Mr. Moody, that man's own brother was a drunkard and
committed suicide a few weeks ago and left a widow with seven
children; they are under his roof now! He was a terrible drunkard
himself until the shock of his brother's suicide cured him."

I don't know how you can account for it unless he thought his
brother wasn't a relative. Perhaps he was a sort of a Cainite,
saying, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

When I was a pastor of a church in Chicago we were trying to get
hold of the working-men. They used to say:

"Come down to the factory at dinner-time and we will give you a
chance to speak."

I would ask them, "Why won't you come to the church?"

"Oh," they would say, "you have it all your own way there, and we
can't answer back; but come to the factory and we will put a few
questions to you."

So I went down, and they made it pretty hot for me sometimes. One of
the favorite characters that they brought up was Jacob. Many a time
I have had men say, "You think Jacob was a saint, don't you? He was
a big rascal." Many have said they thought Jacob wasn't as good as
Esau. Notice this fact. You read in the Bible, "I will punish Jacob
according to his doings." This law of retribution runs through his
Life; although he was a friend of God, a kinsman of Abraham, and was
third in the line of the covenant, yet God made Jacob reap the same
kind of seed he sowed. Some one has said that "Jacob's misfortunes
were uniformly calculated to bring back to his recollection the
picture as well as the punishment of his faults."

When Isaac in his old age wanted some venison, and sent Esau out to
get it, Jacob slipped out and took a kid from his father's flock,
and Rebekah, his mother, cooked it; he brought it to his old blind
father and said he was Esau. The old man recognized his voice, but
he had very cunningly put the skin of the kid on his hands and neck;
so that the old man felt him and said;

"The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau."

By this lie he got his brother's birthright blessing, but he paid
ten thousand times more for it than it was worth. "Who steals my
purse steals trash." A man who steals my pocketbook is the chief
sufferer, not I. When Jacob had grown to be an old man, he lived in
continual suspicion that his sons were deceiving him. The sin of
deceiving his own father bore fruit.

Jacob was the great loser in this transaction.