, to dwell as a stranger in his promised land, and to die in
exile at last. The world was fuller to him of sorrows and toils than of
benedictions, and the crown which the Prince of God at last was able to
bind around his brow was set with many a thorn. But he won the power to
follow the Angel, the Angel which redeemed him from all evil; his life,
halting as was his step, was a noble spiritual progress from strength to
strength, from victory to victory, till he passed up to receive the
prize of his conflict in a world and from a hand which Esau "despised."

Looked at in the light of this world's interests then, some of the
darkest difficulties vanish as we read the record of this birthright
lost and won. But then there is Esau himself, the man who despised his
birthright, who counted himself unworthy of the honour to which God had
ordained him, incapable of the glorious toil and patience to which God
had called him, and careless of the prize which God had placed within
reach of his hand. The life of this man, from the higher point of view,
was as sad, wretched, and faithless, as was the pilgrim Jacob's from the
lower. He won his wealth and his princedom by his energy of hand and
will in all things that pertained to this life; but he let all the
interests and hopes of the higher life fade out of the horizon, and the
crown of his spiritual manhood slip from the grasp of his careless hand.
He touched it, but he could not hold it. What good shall this birthright
do to me, he moaned when the mess of pottage steamed before his hungry
senses; and the crown rolled in the dust. There is the man Esau, under
all his possession and princedom, in the sight of God a very wretched
and poverty-stricken outcast of the kingdom whose citizens believe in
truth, duty, spiritual effort, conflict, prayer, self-sacrifice, heaven,
and God. About the case of Esau personally there are many heavy
difficulties. His course seems to have been in a measure marked out from
his birth: "_The elder shall serve the younger_" was said of the twin
brethren while they were yet in the womb: and some such relation of the
two seems to be involved in the destiny which a higher Will had from the
first decreed. And this opens the vision of an abyss of mystery, into
the depths of which no finite intellect can search--the relation of
connate constitution and temperament to character, and the measure in
which this bears on the supreme fact of man's being, responsibility.