So now there are wonders here. The Son of God stoops down and gives these inquirers victory; drunkards are converted, and publicans and harlots are coming into the kingdom of God.

Now hundreds and thousands are convinced, but they are holding on to some darling sin. A man could not decide to give his heart to Christ the other day because he had a bet. Now, suppose that man dies, what will become of his soul?

O why not come out now? Why not come out tonight? Just ask yourselves: "What stands in the way?"

"O," you say, "I can't stand those jeers." But can't you set your face like a flint against Satan and decide tonight? You cannot find a man who has decided for Christ who ever regretted it. I have stood at the bedside of many who were dying, and I never saw one that regretted that he had decided for Christ.

O decide now. "Now is the accepted time." The last night I preached in the second Farwell Hall I made the greatest mistake of my life. I told the people to take this text home with them and pray over it. But as we went out the fire-bells were ringing, and I never saw that audience again. The fire had come. The city was in ashes; and perhaps some of those very people were burned up in it. There is no other time to be saved but Now.

JACOB.

AT one of his Bible readings in Farwell Hall Mr. Moody delivered a lecture on the “Life and Character of Jacob.”

The freedom with which he points out the faults in Bible characters may be somewhat surprising to those who have been accustomed to think that all the men and women whose history God narrates in his book must necessarily be good men and women. Mr. Moody said that this was formerly his view of the Bible characters, but that he afterward discovered his error. The men and women of the Bible were just such men and women as were to be found outside of it. Their virtues were of the same kind, and their faults of the same kind, as characterize persons we find in the Church to-day, and there was as much use, in the way of warning, to be made of such characters as Jacob, as there was in the way of emulation in the study of the character of Joseph. On this occasion Mr. Moody read, by way of introduction, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, recorded in the twentieth chapter of the Gospel by Matthew. He then spoke as follows:

HE key to all Jacob's difficulties may be found in

THE

this story of the laborers in the vineyard. In the second verse we are told that the first man who was hired made an agreement to work for a penny a day, while the men who came afterward made no bargain, but accepted the word of the lord of the vineyard that he would pay them what was right. When the lord of the vineyard came to pay the laborers for their day's work he gave them all a penny, though some had worked only half a day, or a quarter of a day, and one had worked only an hour. When those who had been hired first came to get their money they thought they should have received more; but

they only got a penny, according to their bargain. They received only their legal wages. I can see them scowling when they receive the penny.

"Is that all you are going to give me?" says one. "There is that man over there who only worked an hour, and you have paid him as much as you have us who have borne the burden and heat of the day."

'That is true," says the lord of the vineyard; “I am paying that man according to my views of the case, and I am paying you according to the bargain you made."

You see, my friends, it doesn't pay to make bargains with the Lord.

Jacob is a twin brother to the most of us. You will find a hundred Jacobs where you will find one Joseph or one Daniel. Joseph was willing to trust every thing to God, but Jacob wasn't willing to trust him any further than he could see him.

There is always trouble in a family where there are any favorites. Petting one child and finding fault with another is sure to bring out the old Adam. It looks as if Esau was the favorite son of his father, while Jacob was the favorite of his mother. By nature Esau was the better man of the two; and if such a mean, contemptible person as Jacob can be saved, then there is hope for all of us. Sometimes when a man has a marked peculiarity we say he got it from his father or his mother. I think Jacob took after his mother. She wasn't willing to wait on the Lord, but wanted to arrange every thing connected with her children's future herself, and in this she was like a good many parents in these days. You remember that Rebecca formed a plan to get Jacob into the good

graces of his father, and to obtain for him the birthright of his brother; but you will notice that it got him into great trouble. Jacob had to leave home, and the mother died before he returned. Rebecca tried to get something for Jacob by fraud, and he acted out the lie.

Up to the time of Jacob's departure from home there was little that was lovely in his character. He had a mean, miserable nature, but God gave him grace to subdue it. The Lord, from the top of the ladder which he saw reaching up to heaven, promised him what he should have, and then Jacob gets up and begins to make a bargain with God, and says, " "If you will do so and so with me if you will be with me, and keep me, and clothe me—then you shall be my God." What a contemptible speech! God had promised him all from Dan to Beersheba, but he is not satisfied without making some special terms of his own. That is just the way with a great many of us. If God will

bless us in our basket and our store we will have him for our God; but the minute we fail to get something we want, we begin to find fault with him.

Now look at Jacob down there in Haran. He is driving bargains all the time, and always gets the worst of it. He works seven years for his wife, and then gets another woman in her place. He had started out wrong with a lie on his lips, and now he gets paid back in his own coin. But we do not hear that he made any confession. One would have thought that when God met him at Bethel he would have confessed his sins, but he did not.

Some people seem to think, that because God chose Jacob instead of Esau Jacob must have been a very good man and Esau a very bad one; but we must not forget

that some of God's promises are conditional and others unconditional. The promise which he made to Jacob was of the latter class. God was dealing in sovereign grace with him, for God is a sovereign and has the right to do what he pleases. The Bible says that Jacob was chosen before he was born. That was the election in his case, but it doesn't say that his soul was saved or that Esau's soul was lost. It was a question of an entirely different kind.

After Jacob has been in Haran for some years God says to him, "I am the God of Bethel, arise and dwell there." And now we find him stealing away from Haran like a thief, pursued by his father-in-law and uncle.

Then, again, when he hears that Esau is coming to meet him he makes another cowardly exhibition of himself. I suppose he had got out of communion with God. A man out of communion with God is always a coward.

In the midst of his trouble, while he is trembling with fear at the thought of meeting his brother whom he has wronged, he meets an angel, who wrestles with him until the break of day, and who at length touches his thigh and puts it out of joint. By this miracle Jacob understands that this is the angel of the Lord. I suppose it was the Jesus Christ of the Old Testament.

There is this to be noticed, that as long as Jacob was able to wrestle in his own strength he did not prevail; but when his thigh was out of joint, and all he could do was to hold on to the Lord, he got the blessing. It is the man who is lowest down that God is most willing to lift up. The man that has the greatest humility is the one to be most exalted.