Esau and Jacob, both in their personal character and their relations with each other, are representative men, and foreshow in brief the essential character of large phases and long periods of human development. They place before us, as we read the record of their personal history, the great twin brethren, the Gentile and the Jewish, perhaps even more widely the Christian and the heathen, sections of mankind. The earlier records of the book of God are full of such typical characters and lives. In truth, in the earliest time life was typical; men lived in large and free intercourse with Nature and with their fellow-men. The conventional swathing-bands with which modern society has bound itself were unknown. Men lived boldly from within, and what they said and did had broad human significance, and forecast naturally what men would say and do under the same conditions to the end of time. Hence, we imagine, the exceeding fulness of the book of Genesis in its painting of character and life. Nowhere have we anything like such large and graphic portraiture as here. The reason is surely that in those ages life was richly doctrinal, and that the God who caused all Holy Scripture to be written for our learning saw that the history of such lives as those of Abraham, Isaac, Esau, Jacob, and Joseph, would be the most precious legacy which could be handed down from the age of the patriarchs to all time. The contrast of these two men is peculiarly rich and instructive. Esau is the lusty, genial, jovial pagan; impulsive, impetuous, frank, and generous, but sensual and self-willed. A man keenly alive to the claims and experiences of the moment; slow to believe in unseen realities and the harvest which could only be reaped beyond long years of patience and pain. Jacob, on the other hand, led from the first a meditative and interior life. What may be meant by the description, “a plain man, dwelling in tents,” is not very apparent. It certainly does not simply describe a fact in his history, but rather a feature of his character. He loved the home life; while the burly Esau was abroad in the field, he loved to sit at home, meditating on many things, and amongst them the highest—a plain man, sound, pure, pious, as some commentators have it. The meaning of the word is certainly moral; “_integer vitæ_,” may perhaps express it. The pilgrim Abraham was reproduced in Jacob in some of the main features of his character. He could understand, at any rate, what Esau apparently could never understand—the sacredness of a Divine vocation, the value of a birthright which carried with it a Divine benediction, and which was freighted with the Divine promise to the world. The grand distinction between the two men from the first was, that Jacob had faith, while Esau had none. Jacob had the heart of a pilgrim, Esau the heart of a “prince of this world.” Jacob saw something behind the veil, which filled his soul with awe and made his life a