Living for the Best

by James G. K. McClure

Every writer who has described what we call opportunity has insisted upon the necessity of seizing opportunity as it flies. We are told that there is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at its proper moment leads us on to fortune. It is also asserted that once at least there comes into every one's life a special hour which used aright has much to do with assuring his permanent welfare.

Universal experience bears witness to the truthfulness and force of these sayings. Every human being who has studied the history of the race is aware that now and then decisive hours come to his fellows, and according as those hours are used to advantage or to disadvantage, is the success or failure of his fellows. We know this fact applies also to ourselves. All our hours are not the same hours, either in their nature or in their possibility. Some hours are special hours when, for one reason or another, crises are present; if we meet these hours aright we advance, if we fail to meet them aright we fall back.

Such hours are the supreme opportunities of our entire existence: the hours when duty appears more clear than is its wont, or hours when the heart is strangely moved toward the good, or hours when a new and very uplifting sense of God's presence is felt. It is not asserted that such hours are equally bright and glorious to every one. They may not be bright at all. They may be dull and heavy. But they bring us a conviction of what is right, a sense of obligation to do the right, and an assurance that God's way is the way our feet should tread. Given any such hour, whether it be on the mountain or in the valley, and a man has his best hour. All other hours, as we plod or play, may be good, but the hour when a soul is brought face to face with duty and with God is the best hour in that particular period of our life.

It was simply and only because Jacob used aright his best hours that he rescued his name from disgrace and crowned it with glory. If ever a man started in life handicapped by unfortunate characteristics and unfortunate environments Jacob was such a man. One of the modern sculptors, George Grey Barnard, has a life-sized marble, showing what he names "Our Two Natures," two men, one the good and one the evil, coming out of the same block of stone, and struggling, each to see which shall gain the ascendancy over the other. Such two natures are in every one; but they appear with special prominence in Jacob. The question of his life was, Which is to conquer, the good or the evil? The struggle of the good for ascendancy was prolonged and severe. It was a struggle in which there were disgraceful defeats, but in which there was also a persistency of purpose and a reassertion of effort whereby the good finally triumphed. And this triumph, it may safely be asserted, was secured through the use Jacob made of a few supreme hours in his life.

When we first begin to notice Jacob, we see him participating in the deception of his aged and almost blinded father, Isaac. We do well, in studying that deception, to bear in mind that the mother, before Jacob's birth, had been told that Jacob should inherit his father's blessing. So she had probably taught Jacob that this blessing belonged to him, and that she and he were justified in securing it in any way they could. And we do well also to bear in mind that the mother recognized a certain undeveloped but capable fitness in Jacob for this blessing, a fitness that Esau lacked. Esau was a lusty, out-of-doors, happy-going man who would not control his appetites, and who, however pleasant he might be to have around when merry-making and sport were in the air, was not prudent enough and judicious enough to be the head of a great people. Rebekah, and Jacob, too, may have felt that it would be the height of family folly to leave the family blessing with Esau, who probably in a short time would squander it; it ought, therefore, to be diverted from him. Besides, the age was one in which fine distinctions between right and wrong, as we to-day see these distinctions, were not clear. We thus can understand some of the reasoning which lay back of the fraud practiced on Isaac when Jacob made believe that he was Esau bringing the desired venison, and so secured the blessing.

But we do not mean to justify the deception. It carried—as every sin carries—fearful consequences, and those consequences affected all of Jacob's future life. As he had deceived his father, again and again his children deceived their father. Even immediately upon its perpetration Jacob's life became endangered. He was obliged to flee from enraged and threatening Esau. Then it was that Jacob, at nightfall, coming alone to rocky Bethel, and lying down to sleep—a wrong-doer, a fugitive, homeless, friendless, and in peril—had his dream. He saw heaven opened over him, with angels ascending as it were by a ladder to God and then descending by that ladder from God to his resting-place. The dream bore in upon his mind certain thoughts. One was, that God had not forsaken him, but was with him. Another was, that God was ready to forgive him for his sin and bless him. And still a third was, that God would take even his life and so use it, if he should be consecrated to Him, that he, Jacob, should some day come back to Bethel as its owner and be the head of that people through whom the whole world should be blessed. And a fourth thought was, that however long the delay in fulfilling the promises, God certainly would fulfil them, and He would watch over Jacob until they were fulfilled.

As Jacob awaked from his dream those four thoughts were in his mind: of God's presence, of God's forgiveness, of God's call, and of God's protection. Up to this time the hour of this awakening was the best hour of his life. Thoughts stirred in his heart different in degree and different in quality than any he had ever had. There came a new sense of the wonderful love of God. What had he done to deserve it? Nothing. Why should not the heavens be closed, and be dark and forbidding to a defrauder like himself? That certainly was what one like himself might expect. Did not the cherubim drive sinful Adam and Eve out of the garden, and stand with flaming sword forbidding their return? But here was God appearing in mercy, assuring of His readiness to pardon transgression, and calling upon the wrong-doer to repent, to be earnest, and to make his life a benediction rather than a curse. Here, too, was God pledging His unfailing aid to Jacob if Jacob would struggle toward success!

What should Jacob do with these thoughts? He might have brushed them away from his heart as he brushed away the morning dew from his eyes, and thus immediately have banished them. He might have pondered the thoughts for a day or two, being softened and comforted by them, and then let them pass out of his mind forever. Many men have acted in such ways. A wicked man opened a letter from his mother, and with the sight of her penmanship there came to him the memory of all her interest in his purity, integrity, and godliness. He crushed the letter in his hand and threw it into the fire burning on the hearth. But another man, many another man, though moved by good impulses, and even touched to the quick by them after a while has let such impulses glide away from his heart and carry with them their helpfulness. That is what Darwin says that he did. The thought of God came to him now and then in special hours of his earlier life, but he did not hold fast to it, he let it escape, and the thought of a personal God who watches over and blesses never became the cheering possession of his soul.

But it was not so with Jacob; and because it was not so, hope of betterment dawned upon his character. He valued the thoughts that had come to him. He was awed. Awe, or reverence, is the originating spring of worthy character. His was not a simple mind easily affected. Jacob was a cool, calculating, careful, worldly-wise man, almost the last type of man that finds it easy to be awed. But to him—with whom money and sheep and slaves and retinue were now and were long afterward to be very prominent objects of ambition—there was a feeling that, after all, God and God's blessings are the supreme things of life. So he did not let the awe of the hour pass unimproved. He acted on that awe. He then and there as best he could confessed God and his faith in Him, raising a pillar of stone in God's name and anointing it with oil in significance that the spot upon which it stood was consecrated to God. Thus he erected the first of all those tabernacles, temples, synagogues, churches, cathedrals, chapels, that have been a testimony to faith in God all over the earth. And then, as though an outward thing was not enough, but some inner thing of character was now required, he vowed a vow—the best vow probably that he, with his idea of God and of money, knew how to vow. He vowed that if God who had thus shown him his opportunity and duty would be true to His promises and would take care of him as covenanted, he, Jacob, would uphold the worship of God and would give a tenth of all he might ever obtain unto God.

That vow laid hold on Jacob's life. It began to work a change that only many, many years advanced toward completion. But it began the change. When a soul, in a best moment of life, seeing duty clearly, or beholding a new revelation of God, crystallizes the emotions thus aroused by a vow that consecrates its dearest treasures to God, then the soul has taken its first step toward strong and beautiful character. Here it was that Esau failed. He seems to have had more traits that men would name attractive than had Jacob. An open-hearted, open-handed, out-spoken man, rough but kind and generous and ready, he at life's beginning appeared to have more in his favor than this grasping, secretive brother. When Esau's best hours came—hours when the sense of his own misdeeds rankled in his heart and when he was aware that repentance and reformation and a new application to duty should be his—he felt his situation deeply; he even, as a man of his temperament could do, shed tears of grief over his mistakes and losses. But he did not realize with awe the gravity of his situation, nor did he turn to God and to duty with a softened, chastened spirit, and vow his life in devotion to God. Jacob's right use of his best hours set Jacob's face towards God and character. Esau's wrong use of his best hours set Esau's face away from God and character.