a lie and be damned.” Poor Jacob was much frightened; as any one might be, to dream of God leaning on so long a ladder. What if it had broken, and the dreamer underneath it? Jacob’s fears were not so powerful but that his shrewdness and avarice had full scope in a sort of half-vow, halfcontract, made in the morning. Jacob said, “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I shall come again to my father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God.” The inference deducible from this conditional statement is, that if God failed to complete the items enumerated by Jacob, then the latter would have nothing to do with him. Jacob was a shrewd Jew, who would have laughed to scorn the preaching “Take no thought, saying, what shall we eat? or, what shall we drink? or, wherewithal shall we be clothed?” After this contract Jacob went on his journey, and reached the house of his mother’s brother, Laban, into whose service he entered. “Diamond cut diamond” would be an appropriate heading to the tale which gives the transactions between Jacob the Jew and Laban the son of Nahor. Laban had two daughters. Rachel, the youngest, was “beautiful and well-favored;” Leah, the elder, was “blear-eyed.” Jacob served for the pretty one; but on the wedding day Laban made a feast, and when evening came gave Jacob the ugly Leah instead of the pretty Rachel. Jacob being (according to Josephus) both in drink and in the dark, it was morning ere he discovered his error. After this Jacob served for Rachel also, and then the remainder of the chapter of Jacob’s servitude to Laban is but the recital of a series of frauds and trickeries. Jacob embezzled Laban’s property, and Laban misappropriated and changed Jacob’s wages. In fact, if Jacob had not possessed the advantage of divine aid, he would probably have failed in the endeavor to cheat his master, but God, who says “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s,” encouraged Jacob in his career of covetous criminalty. At last Jacob, having amassed a large quantity of property, determined to abscond from his employment, and taking advantage of his uncle’s absence at sheepshearing “he stole away unawares,” taking with him his wives, his children, flocks, herds, and goods. To crown the whole, Rachel, worthy wife of a husband so fraudulent, stole her father’s gods.