n are born to higher and lower positions
of privilege and opportunity. They are born Jacobs or Esaus, in
respect of moral, intellectual, religious, or physical endowment--with
ten talents, or five, or two, or one; and God does not often give us so
{28} much as a glimpse of the reason why. All He does make clear to us
is that the determination of human vocations, higher or lower, is in
wiser hands than ours.

It is of course evident, as has already been said, that what St. Paul
is speaking about is the election of men, and specially races or
nations of men, to a position of _spiritual privilege in this world_.
We know now, better than the Jews of the Old Covenant could know it,
that behind all the apparent injustices and inequalities of this world
lies the rectifying equity of God. St. Peter had come to believe that
the divine mercy had rectified in the world beyond death the apparently
rough and heavy handed judgement upon the rejected mass of mankind in
the time of the Flood. That physical catastrophe at least was an
instrument of mercy in disguise[23]. St. Paul believed the same about
all God's rejections, as well as elections, in this world. They served
one universal purpose: 'That he might have mercy upon all[24].' But
{29} all the same here and now in this world God does work by means of
enormous inequalities. There are Jacobs whom He plainly loves, upon
whom He showers all His richest blessings, and Esaus whom, to judge
from present evidence, we should say He hates--whom He sets to live in
hardest and most cramping surroundings. And no man can determine which
lot he shall enjoy. That lies in the inscrutable selectiveness of God.

That there is no question at all about the eternal welfare of the
individual Esau's soul--that the question is simply of the comparative
status of Israel and Edom in this world--appears plainly in the passage
of Malachi, which St. Paul quotes. And we must notice how unexpected
an application St. Paul gives to this passage in a direction most
unfamiliar to Jewish thought. For Edom was to the Jew the very type of
all that was most hateful. He anticipated for the Edomites God's worst
vengeance, as for Israel God's best blessings. But St. Paul forces him
to think--Why should he assume that he will be better off than Edom?
Edom was once physically on Israel's level, or his superior in claim,
when their first fathers were but just born infants. But God chose one
{30} and not the