3. The consecration of the Church is maintained by watchfulness[352] against every tendency to alienation from the grace of God, to bitterness against God and the brethren, to sensuality and profane worldliness. All must watch over themselves and over all the brethren. The danger, too, increases if it is neglected. It begins in withdrawing from[353] the Church assemblies, where the influences of grace are manifested. It grows into the poisonous plant of a bitter spirit, which, “like a root that beareth gall and wormwood,” spreads through “a family or tribe,”[354] and turns away their heart from the Lord to go and serve the gods of the nations. “The many are defiled.” The Church as a whole becomes infected. But bitterness of spirit is not the only fruit of selfishness. On the same tree sensuality grows, which God will punish when the Church cannot detect its presence.[355] From the stem of selfishness, which will not brook the restraints of Church communion, springs, last and most dangerous of all, the profane, worldly spirit, which denies and mocks the very idea of consecration. It is the spirit of Esau, who bartered the right of the first-born to the promise of the covenant for one mess of pottage. The author calls attention to the incident, as it displays Esau’s contempt of the promise made to Abraham and his own father Isaac. His thoughts never rose above the earth. “What profit shall this birthright do to me?”[356] We must distinguish between the birthright and the blessing. The former carried with it the great promise given to Abraham with an oath on Moriah: “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”[357] Possession of it did not depend on Isaac’s fond blessing. It belonged to Esau by right of birth till he sold it to Jacob. But Isaac’s blessing, which he intended for Esau because he loved him, meant more especially lordship over his brethren. Esau plainly distinguishes the two things: “Is not he rightly named Jacob? For he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright, and behold, now he hath taken away my blessing.”[358] When he found that Jacob had supplanted him a second time, he cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, and sought diligently, not the birthright, which was of a religious nature, but the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine, and the homage of his mother’s sons. But he had sold the greater good and, by doing so, forfeited the lesser. The Apostle recognises, beyond the subtilty of Jacob and behind the blessing of Isaac, the Divine retribution. His selling the birthright was not the merely rash act of a sorely tempted youth. He continued to despise the covenant. When he was forty years old, he took wives of the daughters of the Canaanites. Abraham had made his servant swear that he would go to the city of Nahor to take a wife unto Isaac; and Rebekah, true to the instinct of faith, was weary of her life because of the daughters of Heth.