CHAPTER XI.

AND JACOB VOWED A VOW.

A bargain maker.-Gen. 28:20.

He called that place Bethel, the house of God, and he was frightened and well may he be frightened. What a record he had left behind him, and fleeing from his sins he meets with the unexpected. Many a man has come into a meeting and God has flashed the truth on him until frightened he has wanted to run. But listen to the heel-grasper, trying to drive a ninety-nine cent bargain with the Lord.

If God will be with me and keep me in this way that I go and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on so that I come again to my father's house

in

peace, then (after all the above has taken place and I get back) "then shall" (future tense) "the Lord be my God-and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee." (Gen. 28:20-22).

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If ever there was drawn a picture of a bargain-making Jew you have it in this. See him, looking out for his own skin, wanting proof that he will have plenty to eat and plenty to wear, be taken care of in his present Journey (running for his life) and allowed to go back to his father's house in peace (conscious that Esau is back there and has threatened to kill him after the father is dead.) If God will do all this thenafter he has been clothed and fed and allowed to return safely-then he will serve the Lord. Not one word about his parcel of lies, not one word about his deception, not a line about his dragging the name of God down in his miserable conduct with his father; not a hint of it, but thinking only of his present safety and temporal welfare he undertakes to drive a bargain. Not a sign of repentance, and sir, this has been held up over this land as Jacob's conversion. We say it has and as Jacob's conversion thus, a type of regeneration. Is it to be wondered at that the unsaved sneer at religion? Brother, is this the kind of conversion you had? Does God save by Ifs? If God will give me all I can eat and prosper me and keep those I have wronged

from disturbing my peace-then I will serve him. Is that the way you preach to sinners? Is that the kind of a standard you hold up for the unsaved to go by? If such preaching as that is not enough to cause a jubilee among devils I don't know what would. Five times a liar, a cheat, a deceiver, and not one sign of an admission; but a selfish proposition from end to end. Esau certainly spake the truth when he said, "is he not rightly named, Jacob?" (Heel-grasper). Had there been a confession of his wrong doing, or a confession of his own condition we might have some ground on which to build, but there is not a word as to that. Do you mean to tell me that man can go to the depth that Jacob had gone and then without as much as an admission of his wrong-doing find salvation? Had he faced about and settled up with his brother or even offered to make some sort of restitution we would then have some grounds for holding this transaction up as the place of his conversion or a type of that wonderful experience which we could point to as his justification, but not an act or a word, but on the contrary more bargaining and schemeing. In an early chapter we said

we had heard sermons on Jacob but never one that to our mind seemed right. They, one and all had this as Jacob's conversion. Some of those sermons were preached by men who were preaching before we were converted to God.

Is it to be wondered at that when the first work of Grace is so belittled and the standard so let down by the preaching of such examples, as a type of that wonderful change that takes place in a human heart, a work that takes men out of all worldliness and makes them walk and talk like the Master, that the unsaved sneer and scoff? I think every holiness preacher in the land will agree that the disciples had been converted when Jesus was praying for their sanctification for he told the Father that:

"They were not of the world even as

he was not of the world."

Compare that standard and those men who had left their all, to this lying runaway, bargainmaking, heel-grasper. Is it to be wondered that, in many of the camp-meetings in the land where the theory of a second work of grace is taught, a good sound Bible sermon on repentance will bring a lot of people to the altar who have been

testifying even to being sanctified wholly? We pray God to burn this truth down deep into the hearts of all who may read these lines. When the Holy Spirit flashed this truth upon us we trembled to proclaim it. We said, "Why Lord, this will be a flat contradiction of the preaching of men who were preaching before we were converted; of men whose desires and intentions and consecrations to thee we have never for one moment doubted; men whose lives we admire and whom we love and whose opportunities have far exceeded ours, and how can we take such a decided stand against their explanations of this transaction? But sir, as God has planned out our field of labor until, on both sides of the Atlantic we have found such great numbers who, under the plain preaching of the Bible standard of repentance and regeneration have come tumbling down at the altar, under the deepest kind of conviction for sins, bad, black and soul-damning, that had never been fixed up or even an attempt been made to do so and yet professing to have been converted under Brother So-and-so's preaching and now confession that these things had never troubled them, and they