And worship and ministry, in those infant days, were in their simplest forms. I may say, _nature_ suggested that the father or head of the house should be the prophet, priest, and king, there. In after times, when the condition of things spread out, and when, with enlargement and age, corruption came in, _the holiness of God_ demanded a separated or circumcised people; and, connected with such, a separated or anointed priesthood. Now, in our day, in the day of the kingdom of God, which is, as we know, "not in word, but in power," it is required that ministry should be something more than nature would suggest, or than holiness would demand; there must be _power_, such as the Spirit Himself prepares and imparts. But in the early days of Genesis, those _family_ days--those infant, earliest days--the voice of _nature_ was listened to, and duly and seasonably so; and accordingly, the head of the family was the minister of God to the family, and both the dignities and the services of prophets, priests, and kings, within the range of the homestead, or in the family temple, centred in the father. The blessing of the children seems to flow from this. It was an act performed in the combined virtues of a prophet and a priest, which, as we see, the fathers of the families carried in their own persons. They received a communication of the divine mind, and then uttered it, as "oracles of God;" and, being separated or priestly representatives of God to their children, they pronounced His blessing, God’s blessing, upon them. They seem to sustain this character through the Book of Genesis. In our Isaac it is sad indeed to see how this character was exercised, or rather abused--as such like high endowments have constantly been, the priestly dignity, for instance, in the person of Eli (godly old man as he was), and the kingly authority, in one tremendous instance, even by such an one as the deeply-loved and honoured son of Jesse. So Isaac would have made his office serve, not only his private partialities, but his very appetites. And this, too, in the face of solemn, divine warning. The word had gone before, upon Isaac’s children (Esau the elder and Jacob the younger), "the elder shall serve the younger." But Isaac’s fleshly favouritism and appetites had made him careless and forgetful of this, and he would fain have made the elder, Esau, the heir of the promise.