depravity may be
peculiar to some particular age or condition.

We know not how long Leah survived her sister. Her advancing years were
not exempt from affliction, and age brings its own trials; yet
prosperity rested upon Jacob--and in the decline of life she may have
known happiness desired, but not realized, in youth.

After the death of his beloved Rachel, the heart of Jacob may have
turned to Leah, and a peaceful friendship have succeeded the storm and
the conflicts of youthful passion. Sorrow may have knit hearts softened
by the mutual consciousness of error and by the tears of repentance, and
strengthened by the hopes of pardon, and drawn to each other by the
strong ties of parental love for their mutual offspring. When the
patriarch was called into Egypt, Leah went not with him. He had laid
her in the gathering-place of his sons, in the tent of his fathers. From
the touching expression of the dying patriarch--himself far from the
land of his fathers' sepulchres--"And there I buried Leah," we feel
that, in age and bereavement, the heart of Jacob turned to Leah. The
repudiated wife of his youth became the solace of his age, and her
memory awoke the last tender recollections in the dying patriarch. As we
have read the book of God, we have been taught that good, inordinately
coveted, or obtained by injustice and deceit, ever brings a curse. The
principal actors in the events recorded in these chapters of Genesis,
may have secured the object which they sought, yet the attainment did
not avert or mitigate the punishment of the treachery by which it was
secured.

Rebekah obtained the birth-right and the coveted blessing for her
favourite child, and by that act separated him from herself and doomed
him to a banishment from his father's house, and from that hour she saw
his face no more. Laban secured by his deceit the marriage of his
unattractive daughter and the establishment of the beautiful Rachel, but
he thus alienated the children he still seems to have loved, and that
wealth which he so coveted.

Leah, by her connivance at her father's deceit, married the man she
loved, but it was to lead a life of bitter, of heart-consuming sorrow.
Jacob, departing from the institution of marriage that he might yet
possess Rachel, entailed upon himself a career of strife, bitterness and
disappointment; and introduced into his family an example that became a
fruitful source of individual depravity and national corruption; whil