"THE Doctor told us my little child was dying. I felt

like a stone. In a moment I seemed to give up my hold on her. She appeared no longer mine but God's. It is always so in such great emergencies. Then my will, that struggles so about trifles, makes no effort."

MRS. PRENTISS.-Life, 144.

"Fight on, thou brave, true heart, and falter not, through dark future, and through bright. The cause thou fightest for, so far as it is true, no further, yet precisely so far, is very sure of victory. The falsehood alone of it will be conquered, will be abolished, as it ought to be; but the truth of it is part of Nature's own laws; co-operate with the world's eternal tendencies; and cannot be conquered." CARLYLE.

"I know Thee, Saviour, Who Thou art,
Jesus, the feeble sinner's Friend:
Nor wilt Thou with the night depart,
But stay and love me to the end;

Thy mercies never shall remove;
Thy Nature and Thy Name is Love."

C. WESLEY.

"In itself-Israel-God's warrior, was indisputably the higher name, befitting a hero, who strengthened by God, had endured the hardest conflicts, and achieved god-like EWALD.-History of Israel, i., 344.

victories."

Jacob's Baptism of Fire.

... •

"THEN JACOB WAS GREATLY AFRAID AND DISTRESSED." "AND JACOB SAID, DELIVER ME, I PRAY THEE, FROM THE HAND OF MY BROTHER, FROM THE HAND OF ESAU, FOR I FEAR HIM, LEST HE WILL COME AND SMITE ME, AND THE MOTHER WITH THE CHILDREN.".

...

"AND JACOB WAS LEFT ALONE, AND THERE WRESTLED A MAN WITH HIM UNTIL THE BREAKING OF THE DAY.".. “THY NAME SHALL BE CALLED NO MORE JACOB, BUT ISRAEL."-Genesis xxxii. 7, 11, 24, 28.

Does this familiar, but deeply mysterious, episode in the life of Jacob, afford us any aid in the solution of the chief problem of life, the full acquisition and perfect use of DAILY STRENGTH FOR DAILY LIVING?

I know it is an old-world story, and in its strange Oriental setting appears as remote from our modes of thinking and vital aspirations as the dress of an Arab, or the war-tactics of the Mahdi, froin the habits and practices of English life to-day. Still, you know enough of the

practical spirit which reigns in this building, to be sure that if I take you into the Old Testament I shall never lose sight of home, or get beyond call of the real life we are now living, the difficulties we face, and the work we have to do. For I hold that saying of our poet-novelist, George Macdonald, to be as true as it is terse, "Life and Religion are one, or neither is anything." If then we travel into Hebrew times, and hold fellowship with Hebrew heroes, it is solely because Hebrew teaching and Hebrew biography are, in their essence and uses, actually nearer to our inward life, in its struggle and hope, its repeated failure and renewed yearning, than all the gossip of yesterday's newspaper, the battles of the newest books, the "cases" settled in law courts and the business done in our marts of trade. With God and with principles "a thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years." Souls grasp hands over the intervening centuries. Abraham sees Christ's day and is glad in it. We see Abraham's day and are stronger for its faith, and more daring for its victory. Thousands of years and thousands of miles do not part the man who comes here to-day, bending his whole strength to realize an often-dropped ideal, from that son of Isaac, who, nearly drowned in the storm-swept seas of his own craft and cunning, at length emerged a new man, and stood forth a prince of the Most High God, and one of the most powerful of all witnesses to the gladdening fact that our Father in heaven strenuously and wrestlingly works to cleanse us from the sins that have dyed us through and through, and sends His fires to burn the inveterate spell of the bad habits of a long life. Jacob is every man's brother, though some of us see the resemblance to ourselves more

A PRESENT-DAY BOOK.

41

vividly than others. He was, in many points, tempted like as we are, and he felt as we do; but though a man advanced in years, and hardened in selfish cunning, he was, by the persisting and unwearied grace of God, made anew, re-constituted, born from above after the image of Him who created him for righteousness and true holiness.

Now that result, wherever and however secured, is religion. For religion is not an answer to the questions of the curious brain; it is making men; men of a certain quality, strong men who will trample under foot a false and corrupt ideal of living, and sieze, cling to, and pursue an ideal of ever-heightening and ever-advancing goodness and loveliness. And in all ages and climes that work is substantially the same - for Jacob at the ford of Jabbok, aud Job in the whirlwind, out of which he hears the voice of God; for Isaiah, prostrated by the vision of the Unseen Holy in the Temple, and blinded Saul in the street called Straight; for Augustine in the cathedral of Milan, and Bernard in the monastery of Clairvaux; for Luther in the Castle of the Wartburg, and for any and all of us this very day.

It is this touch of divinity that makes all living human biographies akin, gives them a perpetuity of being, and constitutes them a perennial inspiration for all earnest souls. Take out of the noblest life the presence of God, faith in the Eternal Father, aspiration for the true and the best, the battle for the weak and the oppressed, the powers of faith and the pleasures of duty, and it is as barren as a desert, and as unattractive as a bog. Leave God in any life, give His free Spirit some play, and however vehement in its blind partialities, exaggerated in its naked egotism,

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THE TOUCH OF DIVINITY

intense in its antipathies, and even loaded with repulsiveness, yet the world will not willingly let it die; nay, it will actually resent the un-Christian and un-Divine effort to drag into the glare of public day the weaknesses and follies and vices of the soul that has struggled hard to maintain its faith in the Eternal, stared into the Unseen till it is nearly blind, and fallen back in old age on the mother-taught prayer of childhood, "Our Father who art in Heaven."* This divineness is the peerless fascination and unequalled power for service of all Biblical biography. The view-point is God; always God. Had not Enoch walked with Him, and stood in the elect line of God's revelations, his name would have been forgotten, like that of any one of the million infants whose life is a cry "in the night, and nothing but a cry." Noah's fame as a preacher of righteousness springs, not from his eloquence, but from his theme and spirit. Abraham takes his place as God's "friend," and if our Jacob had not submitted to the cleansing fires of God's love, he would have been washed by the swift waters of time into the sea of oblivion, and scarcely a sign left of his appearing. Jacob, the crafty supplanter, would not have survived if he had not become Israel, a prince who had power with God and men; for "the name of the wicked shall rot, but the memory of the righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance." God does not write a Bible to exhibit how unutterably bad, men can make themselves, but how good they may become through His redeeming and re-making love.

Forget this in reading your old Scripture, and you will

* Cf. The discussions on the biography of Thomas Carlyle.