And, lastly, such as these, thus blessed of the Lord, will be invited at the last day to come unto that table that never shall be ended; to come into that home, in whose roof-tree joys shall nestle continually, and into the presence of Him at whose right hand are pleasures for evermore.

Are you thus blessed? Are you thus forgiven? Are you thus renewed by the Holy Spirit of God? If so, it matters little, comparatively, what church you prefer, what form of worship you adopt; you have the main thing; you can be easily forgiven the circumstantial and the accidental; for whom God pronounces a Christian, is one indeed; whereas he who is proclaimed so by sects, and systems, and parties, may have indeed a baptism which is outward in the flesh, but may nevertheless be destitute of the inner and true baptism, which the Holy Spirit of God alone can bestow, without which we cannot see the kingdom of heaven.

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CHAPTER XXV.

ABRAHAM'S MARRIAGE -HIS DEATH-NONE PERFECT — JACOB'S SINS ESAU'S APOSTASY.

You will just remember the connection between the chapter I have read and the previous chapters which we have read on successive Sabbath mornings.

We find Abraham, in this, drawing near to the close of his life, and about to enter the house appointed to all living. Some have supposed that this Keturah was the secondary wife of Abraham, for such was the relationship that Hagar sustained. Some have even thought that she was actually Hagar; but, if not Hagar, that she was at least a secondary wife in Sarah's days, and was not married to Abraham at the time indicated here, as it would appear from our translation, but long prior to this period. In fact, the translation might justly be, "Abraham had taken a wife," or "had a wife, and her name was Keturah.”

We then have the children that sprung from her, on the one hand; from Ishmael the son of the bondwoman, Hagar, upon the other; and we have the generation of Isaac, the son of Sarah, and the heir of the promises, on the other hand.

All these were the commencements of great nations; and to no book can you go, but to the word of God, in order to find the springs of races, the secrets of their diversities of character, and the reason of the success of one, the degradation of another, and often the extinction of a third.

It is not true that every portion of the Bible is equally

edifying to every person. Every portion of the Bible has its own definite use, value and importance; but because a chapter may not be edifying to me as an individual, it does not follow that it does not play a very important and momentous part in the economy of God, and cast a light where all else had been shadow, and give a solution where all besides had been perplexity and misapprehension. We must ever regard God's book as a picture of all mankind as they are by nature and by grace; a picture of what God is in himself, and what he feels towards us; and we must see in it, not what man would often prefer to see, but what is fact, what is truth, and what conduces on the largest scale at once to the glory of God and to the good of those to whom it is brought home.

In this passage we have the explanation of the history of the origin of great nations. We have the first divergence of two remarkable septs or sections of the human family, namely, the descendants of Esau, or Edom, as he was called; and the descendants of Isaac, of whom sprung the Lord Jesus Christ, according to the flesh,

Every character whose biography is given in Scripture,— Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,- have all sins, often grievous sins. They are impartially written by the Spirit of God. And the reason of this is, that the Bible is not a mere profile of any character, but a portrait of the whole face, aspect, and character of man. If I had been a Jew, anxious simply to make my nation look great, and had it in my power to do so, I should have painted Abraham a perfect character; but the very fact, that Abraham's sins are as distinctly specified as Abraham's virtues, is evidence that no partial Jew, full of national conceit, sketched that character, but that he was sketched by Him who describes man as he is, and yet tells man what he should be. And, hence, when we read here of Isaac having a preference for Esau, the least beautiful and interesting of his sons, for very mean reasons, while Rebekah

had a preference to Jacob; and when we read again of Jacob getting the birthright, not by fair play, but in some way by deception, let us recollect that these things are not recorded for us to imitate, but rather for us to avoid. There are lights at harbors to guide the ship safely into the haven; and there are beacons at sea to warn the ship off the shoals and rocks on which she may be wrecked. Now, there are in God's book beacons as well as guides; precedents that we are to imitate, as well as recorded perils, sins and errors, that we are carefully to avoid. We must judge of duty, not by character illustrating or violating it, but we must judge of duty by what God says. His holy law is the standard; the man who comes short of that, we are not to imitate, in as far as he comes short of it; but rather to deplore his error, and to strive by grace to avoid the rock on which he made shipwreck.

We thus see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, portrayed just as they were, their sins and their excellences, their faults and their perfections; we have also laid down the great law of imitation of them, which is, just as far as they followed Christ. We e are neither to imitate their sins, nor to worship them for their excellences, but to follow them in their good doings, as far as they were good, and to avoid their errors and their sins, as far as they were so; and to thank God that we know more clearly and more fully, by life and immortality being brought to light in the gospel, than they did, the things that belong to our peace, and beautify and ennoble the character of man.

We behold in Esau the founder of one great tribe, and in Jacob the founder of another. In Jacob we see sins as well as in Esau; but we find a great sin in Esau, for which he is reprehended by the apostle- he sold his birthright. What was his birthright? It was, that he was the eldest son of the family, that he was entitled to the largest share of the inheritance; that it was the highest honor and dignity. He

came home from hunting hungry, and, in the recklessness of his character, he sold that which he could sell, that which was his highest honor and his greatest excellence, for a little food that was given him by Jacob.

My dear friends, let us never sell that which we believe to be true for anything upon earth. Our birthright, blessed be God, is an open Bible, — let us never part with it; freedom to worship God as in our consciences we believe to be right, — let us never surrender it. If we give up an open Bible, freedom of worship, our social, our national, our Christian privileges and prerogatives, you may write upon our altars, and upon our real greatness, "Ichabod, Ichabod, the glory is departed." Let us hold fast what we know to be true; let us give up any prejudice, or anything that we prefer that would please and propitiate a brother; but let us never surrender on any terms, or for any prospect, these great truths, that God's word alone is the light to our feet, the lamp to our path; that Jesus alone is our sacrifice and our Saviour; and that there is to us a way to heaven without obstruction, without let or hinderance, through the shed blood and the finished righteousness of Christ the Saviour.

Other mothers than Rebekah give birth to sons of very contrary and conflicting characters. Sin has disarranged and disordered nature; but grace can turn Esau into Jacob, and both into the likeness of Christ.

Esau's great and irrecoverable loss lay in his exchanging a great and precious spiritual privilege for an earthly and merely sensual gratification. Are there no Esaus

among ourselves? Are there not men in every age ready to surrender precious truths, and solemn obligations, and vital interests, to mere party, to political expediency, to worldly preferment? I fear there are political Esaus, and literary Esaus, and ecclesiastical Esaus, in the nineteenth