God selected Jacob and rejected Esau. “Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated.” But how did God love Jacob? He loved him by giving him opportunity. And why? Not because he was better than Esau, but because he was different. Jacob was selected to be father of the chosen people because he had the qualities required for his work. Esau was wild, reckless, martial. Jacob was industrious, money-making, fond of small trade; pastoral, rather than warlike; tenacious of his ideas even to obstinacy. These were the qualities required in a people who were so few that if they had been warlike they would have been swept from the earth. They never fought for the pleasure of fighting, but only when they could not help it, or when a political necessity compelled it. Though surrounded by nations much more powerful than themselves,—the Assyrians on the north-east at Nineveh, the Egyptians on the south-west, the Babylonians on the east, the Tyrians on the west, and the Greeks on the north-west,—they saw the fall of all these great nations and empires, but they continued. Many waves of war swept over their Syrian hills, and left them still there, peaceful, industrious, worshipping Jehovah in their sacred city, offering no motive for conquest, too poor to tempt invasion, too far from the sea to grow rich by commerce, like the Phœnicians. Their obscurity, poverty, and unheroic qualities were their salvation, and these they derived apparently from Jacob, their ancestor. Thus we see that the Jews were a chosen people, and we see what they were chosen for, and also that they were chosen not because of superior virtue, but for superior capacity. § 6. How other Nations were elected and called. Other nations were chosen, too, for other purposes. The Greeks also were a chosen people—chosen to develop the idea of beauty, as the Jews that of religion. Their mission was beauty in art and in literature. It was no accident that they came as they did from confluent races, flowing together from India and Phœnicia, and settling in that sweet climate and romantic land, where the lovely Ægean, tossing its soft blue waters on the resounding shore, tempted them to navigation, and awakened their intellect by the sight of many lands. There they did their work. They made their calling and election sure. Greek architecture—one birth of beauty after another—was born. Athens was crowned with marvellous temples, whose exquisite proportions amaze and charm us to-day—inimitable creations of beauty. Homer came, and then epic poetry was born. Æschylus and tragedy came; Pindar and the lyric song; Theophrastus and pastoral music; Anacreon and the strain which bears his special name. And so Phidias and his companions created sculpture, Herodotus history, Demosthenes oratory, Plato and Aristotle philosophy, Zeuxis painting, and Pericles statesmanship. This was their election, and they made it sure.