d
flocks were scattered widely over the hills, Simeon sent out messengers
and called his brothers together for a conference. In that hour he
said: "Wist ye not how our father, being a younger son, supplanted his
elder brother, Esau? And behold his craft will now make his younger
child, Joseph, to supplant his elder brothers! Do ye not remember how
our father, Jacob, took a kid and made his hands like unto the hands of
Esau? Let us now take a kid and make its blood represent the blood and
death of Joseph. What Jacob did for his father, Isaac, let his sons do
to their father, Jacob." Thus, with subtle irony, nature made the
man's sins to come back to him. A boy, Jacob deceived his father, now,
grown gray and old, his boys brought their father an armful of deceits.
In that hour when Reuben and Simeon held up the coat of many colors,
all red with blood, great nature might have whispered to Jacob: "It is
the blood of the kid that you slew for deceiving your father returning
to enable your sons to deceive you." For, having sowed deceit, deceit
also and stratagem Jacob reaped. Himself a son, he thrust a dart into
his father's heart. Become a father, his ten sons became archers,
skilled with darts that filled their father's heart with agony. For
nature loves justice; her rule is law, sometimes her rod is iron.

The principle that every deed is a seed that contains the germ of its
own reward or punishment has received full interpretation by the poets
and dramatists. In his "Paradise Lost," Milton has made a detailed
study of the principles of the spiritual harvests. The poet represents
Satan as an angel, fallen indeed, and sadly battered by his fall, yet
still an archangel glorious for strength and beauty. Having visited
Paradise and accomplished the destruction of Eve's innocence and Adam's
happiness, Satan returns home, passing over a bridge of more prodigious
length than now arches the gulf between earth and hell. When the
prince arrived at Pandemonium, the capital of Lucifer's realm, he found
that the leaders of the fallen host had arranged a reception in the
great banquet-hall of the palace. In the presence of the applauding
throng, the prince told the story of how he had succeeded in opening
the earth as a place to which these exiled angels might retreat from
the prison in which they had been so long confined, and pointed to the
great bridge spanning the abyss 'twixt earth and hell. When the loud
cheerings