This transaction does not seem to have called for any special reproval from God. Joseph, who from early life was skilled in dreams, succeeded by interpreting the visions of Pharaoh in obtaining a sort of premiership in Egypt; while filling this office he managed to act like the Russells and the Greys of our own time. We are told that he "_placed_ his father and his brethren, and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land." Joseph made the parallel still stronger between himself and a more modern head of the Treasury Bench; he not only gave his own family the best place in the land, but he also, by a trick of statecraft, obtained the land for the king, made slaves of the people, and made it a law over the land of Egypt that the king should be entitled to one-fifth of the produce, always, of course, excepting and saving the rights of the priest. Judah, another brother, sought to have burned a woman by whom he had a child. A third, named Reuben, was guilty of the grossest vice, equaled only by that of Absalon the son of David; of Simeon and Levi, two more of Jacob's sons, it is said that "Instruments of cruelty were in their habitations;" their conduct, as detailed in the 34th chapter of Genesis, alike shocks by its treachery and its mercilessness. After Jacob had heard that his son Joseph was governor in Egypt, but before he had journeyed farther than Beer-sheba, God spake unto him in the visions of the night, and probably forgetting that he had given him a new name, or being more accustomed to the old one, said, "Jacob, Jacob," and then told him to go down into Egypt, where Jacob died after a residence of about seventeen years, when 147 years of age. Before Jacob died he blessed, first the sons of Joseph, and then his own children, and at the termination of his blessing to Ephraim and Manasseh we find the following speech addressed to Joseph: "Moreover, I have given to thee one portion above thy brethren, which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow." This speech implies warlike pursuit on the part of Jacob, of which the bible gives no record, and which seems incompatible with his recorded life. The sword of craft and the bow of cunning are the only weapons in the use of which he was skilled. When his sons murdered and robbed the Hivites, fear seems to have been Jacob's most prominent characteristic. It is not my duty, nor have I space here, to advocate any theory of interpretation, but it may be well to mention that many learned men contend that the whole history of Jacob is but an allegory. That the twelve patriarchs but typify the twelve signs of the zodiac, as do the twelve great gods of the Pagans, and twelve apostles of the gospels.