. This shows how thoroughly out of sympathy with the
spirit of the chosen race he was from the first, and remained through
life. All his sympathies and associations were with the pagans around
him. Jacob was the true heir of the promise, for he believed in it; Esau
its outcast, for he despised it, and had despised it from the first. His
every act had expressed his contempt of it, and the sale of the
birthright for a mess of pottage but completed the witness that he was a
profane person, a pagan at heart. These moments mark the crises for
which a long train of thought and habit has prepared. Many a secret sin,
born of luxury and nursed by royal power and splendour, broke out into
the daylight when David looked upon Bathsheba, and filled his life with
unutterable sorrow and shame. God takes no man in a hasty moment and
brands him reprobate. A thousand daily touches through long years have
shaped the image which there reveals itself, and on which is moulded
the everlasting destiny. The little sins of life are busily, hour by
hour, creating the great sins. The small habits and actions, which we
allow to pass unrebuked--they seem to be such trifles--soon pass away
beyond the power of memory to recall; but they leave their ineffaceable
trace on our constitution and character, and lay silently the train of
some great outburst of lust, passion, or wickedness, like Esau's or
David's. Then is written a record on our nature and destiny which one
day we shall agonize to blot out; but the inexorable eye looks coldly
down on the frenzied pleader, and the stony lips fashion themselves into
a voiceless "Too late!" Meet sin, meet all the devil's seductions and
enticements, sternly on the threshold, and the citadel remains for ever
sure.

2. The irrevocable is not the irreparable, through the abounding mercy
and grace of God.

_Things_ cannot be obliterated or abolished. They remain, and their
record remains, for ever. But, blessed be God, they may be transmuted,
and wear Divine forms of beauty and joy. And this is what redemption
means. Eden is closed for ever. To abolish the condition of man as a
sinner, otherwise than by one grand sentence of doom which would abolish
his existence as a creature, is beyond the power even of heaven. A
sinner's lot you inherit, a sinner's experience you must know, a
sinner's agony you must taste, a sinner's horror of darkness you must
pass through--to the pit, if the birthright never again seems to you