His brother enraged at the deception practiced upon Isaac, threatened to kill Jacob. Jacob was warned by his mother and fled. Induced by Rebekah, Isaac charged Jacob to marry one of Laban's daughters. On the way to Haran, where Laban dwell, Jacob rested and slept. While sleeping he dreamed; ordinarily dreams have little significance, but in the bible they are more important. Some of the most weighty and vital facts (?) of the bible are communicated in dreams, and rightly so; if the men had been wide awake, they would have probably rejected the revelation as absurd. So much does that prince of darkness, the devil, influence mankind against the bible in the daytime, that it is when all is dark, and our eyes are closed, and the senses dormant, that God's mysteries are most clearly seen and understood. Jacob "saw in his sleep a ladder standing upon the earth, and the top thereof touching heaven; the angels of God ascending and descending by it, and _the Lord leaning upon the ladder_." In the ancient temples of India, and in the mysteries of Mithra, the seven-stepped ladder by which the spirits ascended to heaven is a prominent feature, and one of probably far higher antiquity than the age of Jacob. Did paganism furnish the groundwork for the patriarch's dream? "No man hath seen God at any time." God is "invisible." Yet Jacob saw the invisible God, whom no man hath seen or can see, either standing above a ladder or leaning upon it. True, it was all a dream. Yet God spoke to Jacob; but perhaps that was a delusion too. We find by scripture that God threatens to send to some "strong delusions, that they might believe a lie and be damned." Poor Jacob was much frightened, as any one might be, to dream of God leaning on so long a ladder. What if it had broken and the dreamer underneath it? Jacob's fears were not so powerful but that his shrewdness and avarice had full scope in a sort of half-vow, half-contract, made in the morning. Jacob said, "If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I shall come again to my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God." The inference deducible from this conditional statement is, that if God failed to complete the items enumerated by Jacob, then the latter would have nothing to do with him. Jacob was a shrewd Jew, who would have laughed to scorn the preaching, "Take no thought, saying, what shall we eat? or, what shall we drink? or, wherewithal shall we be clothed?"